KEY POINTS:
Allyson Ertel's collar bone and shoulder blade jut sharply as her eyes stare out from a head disproportionately large for such a slender frame. It is a shocking pose that will divide opinion. Is she the epitome of beauty or an evocation of the horrors of Bergen-Belsen?
To Elite Model Management, the United States-based agency that calls itself the world's most prestigious modelling network, she is the former: one of the latest young fillies in their "development" stable, possessed of the ultimate attributes and destined for the catwalk.
But to those outside the world of haute couture she is, surely, damning evidence that the fashion industry, for all its postulations and protestations, is no nearer to tackling the controversial issue of size zero. Stick-thin, it seems, is shamelessly back.
Ertel, whose age is unknown, has received star billing on Elite's New York website just two years after the deaths of two Latin American models from eating disorders - one after collapsing on the catwalk. The attendant bad publicity from the deaths of these girls, who were not Elite models, resulted in public pledges from agencies that the health of their young charges would come first. There were admissions of responsibility for the huge influence they wield over teenage girls battling with adolescent body image problems.
Initiatives such as Britain's Model Health Inquiry made common-sense recommendations which appeared to be eagerly embraced by an industry tarnished not just by the spectre of starvation deaths, but also by allegations of drug abuse.
But, ultimately, fashion seems intent on pursuing what powers it: human coat-hangers for creations that barely acknowledge the female form but, rather, generate excitement, acres of column inches and sales at the world's leading shows. Bodies are designed to fit clothes, rather than the other way round.
Even some fashion insiders admit they are horrified at the images of Ertel, and of another Elite "development" model, Abbie Gortsema.
"They are truly shocking. We would never book a model who appeared so obviously underweight," said Alison Edmond, Britain fashion director of the magazine Harper's Bazaar. "Of course, there are girls who are slim but completely healthy as that is their natural body shape and weight. However, if a girl turns up to a casting in an unhealthy state then we would not even think of booking her, but would recommend to her agency that some intervention was immediately necessary."
The problem is that, given their young age, girls such as Ertel - 180cm and 32-23-35 - are probably technically healthy for the moment. But that does not lessen their impact on teenagers scouring magazines and websites for their own identities and images of perfection.
"Everyone talks about pro-anorexic websites and the dangers they pose to young women. These pictures look no different to the ones you see on those websites," said Susan Ringwood, chief executive of Beat, the beating eating disorders campaign group. "The so-called 'Thinspiration' that people find, that encouragement for people to think that eating disorders are a lifestyle choice - well, you can get that from looking at these pictures.
"In particular, those awful shoulders. Your body does not look like that unless your muscles are completely wasted. That's one of the signs a doctor looks out for to diagnose emaciation, that skeletal look around the shoulders.
"It shows how far we still have to go to take this seriously. The industry has been too slow and too reluctant in addressing model health. And this, well, it shows a very retrograde step.
"There are aspects of the industry that are fantastic - aspiration, helping us feel good about ourselves. And there are aspects that are truly toxic. And they are not really doing anything about the toxic, I don't think."
The photographs drawing such criticism appear now to have been taken down from Elite's website but others of the girls remain and there have been similar striking examples of the industry reverting to size zero as the optimum.
Ali Michael, now 18, was the "model du jour" in Paris last year, but was turned away in February this year by all but one casting director after gaining 3kg. She has now turned whistleblower.
In interviews this month she describes how, after three years of modelling, her wake-up call happened on a plane from Paris to Texas, where she comes from. "I ran my fingers through my hair and when I took my hand away, there was a dry, brittle clump of hair," she said.
She had started her modelling career at 15 and weighing 58kg. But at each show she attended the message was the same: she needed to lose weight. Finally she starved herself down to 45kg and found that designers loved her.
"It didn't help matters that as I got tinier, my career took off. By the time I entered my second season of shows, all I was eating was oatmeal with water for breakfast, a banana and a few grapes for lunch and plain lettuce for dinner, maybe with a bit of fish," she tells Teen Vogue magazine. "I stopped getting my period, which should have been a red flag."
She confides how she was sitting with four other girls at a show in Paris last year when she mentioned she had not had a period for over a year, "and one by one, each of them said, 'me too"'. These were girls in their late teens, early twenties. Having been dragged to a doctor and nutritionist by her worried mother, she began eating healthily and her menstrual cycle returned to normal, but her catwalk career appears over. American casting director Douglas Perrett commented on his blog that Michael's fate was because "the fashion reality is that a new batch of girls are in town, younger and hungrier".
The irony is that they probably are hungrier - literally.
Eleni Renton, founder of Quintessentially Models in London, believes a sea change is needed. "I don't believe that any girls are that size naturally," she says of Ertel's photographs. "We have got to turn this thing back to beauty and health."
She maintains that hers is a new breed of ethical modelling agency that celebrates the natural woman and has healthy women such as Selena Breed of the Lancome campaign and Silvia Peretzki, the Oil Of Olay girl on their books.
"When you see images like this of young girls, this is the time when girls should be really taking care of themselves because they are building the bodies they will have for the rest of their lives. We don't present girls that are size zero because I just don't believe it is healthy," she said.
But she is unconvinced that the fashion industry was solely to blame. "It's also the celebrity culture, Hollywood and the media for publishing these images in the first place."
Among the recommendations made by the Model Health Inquiry were the banning of under-16s from the catwalk, the introduction of compulsory medical checks, and a union.
France is considering legislation that could see publishers of magazines and websites promoting pictures of ultra-thin models facing jail.
Renton believes that the industry could go further and that young women are still being pressured to fit the designer's ideal.
"Lots of designers design without women's shapes in mind. Possibly some of the designers have got away with it for a long time," she said. "But people have got to step forward and say we don't want to see this any more.
"I have had this discussion with so many people. It is only 15 years since we had the first supermodels, Christie Brinkley, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell. Those girls had cracking bodies, they weren't skinny, they had shoulders, they had hips. They were slim, but not tiny waif-like stick thin. They still had muscles on their bones, they ate well and went to the gym. And they were beautiful.
"If people get onside, trying to make things beautiful and healthy, then the fashion industry will have to come round to it. It has happened once before and it can happen again. It's got to," she said.
MODEL VIEW
Dunja Knezevic, 26, a London-based former catwalk model who today works mainly for magazine shoots and fashion campaigns.
"When I was 16 or 17 I used to try and keep my weight down as much as I possibly could. But, in the last five years, I have just been eating as healthily as I can.
"I would never strive to look like that. But then, I know that if I did want to reach the highest heights in the fashion world, work at the very top of the industry, I would not be able to do it with the weight I am at the moment. I am a UK size eight. And I would need to be a six, or even a four.
"A lot of the time I find I am a little bit shocked when I see how skinny models are these days.
"And I have also learned from experience that a lot of times photo-manipulation is used to actually make the girls look bigger - to look healthier - than they do in real life. If their bones stick out too much they use Photoshop to hide it. Quite often I see photographs of girls then I meet them and I know what they look like in reality. So that is worrying."
- OBSERVER
