Caro appeared on Jessica Simpson’s Price of Beauty and told Simpson that a casting director who told her she had to lose 10 kilos (approximately 22 lbs.) if she wanted to be in the fashion world encouraged her to stop eating. {clip on Jezebel} Reportedly this happened when Caro was in her last year of high school, but she also acknowledged having been anorexic since the age of 13, due in part to a difficult childhood.

On Simpson’s show, Caro claims that no one at the modeling agencies she went to said anything about her weight or appearance.

While it’s a designer’s prerogative to only use models from the segment of society that stays beanpole thin even when eating normally, Caro highlighting the extremes some people go to to achieve similar looks (that aren’t possible for them without disordered eating) as a highly visible “face” of the disorder was a truly bold statement.

Fashion doesn’t cause anorexia – a disorder first diagnosed in the 1800s, long before anyone working in the industry was alive. {Wikipedia} It doesn’t help by creating a system where only the very thin (natural or otherwise) are candidates to be “the girl” brands highlight as beautiful/perfection though. Rather than offering samples in a variety of sizes clothes are pinned, protruding bones are smoothed with airbrushing (sometimes to freakish proportions that mimic skeletal bodies) and then it trickles down from high fashion to online models who are booked even when they are so thin that they can’t fit the smallest available size. So no, it’s not the cause; but when a girl can display such obvious signs of being deathly ill from not eating and not get one comment about it, it’s not helping either.

We hope that Isabelle has finally found peace, and we hope that her death sparks at least one conversation about changes in fashion that can discourage another woman from dying a similar death.

Image compilation via Jezebel

The new 27" waist "Homme Nouveau" mannequins

This new size mannequin, which comes complete with a 35-in chest and not an ounce of discernible fat, along with metrosexuality could be causing some men to hold themselves to the kind of unrealistic body ideals women are subject to, and some men may be attempting to wither down to proportions capable of looking as good in trendy, super-tight clothing as the “Homme Nouveau” does.

Rootstein describes its new mannequin as, “the young and restless redresses the balance of the prevailing male beefcake figure by carving out a far more streamlined sinuous silhouette to match the edgier attitude of a new generation.” {NPR}

If by “edgier attitude” they mean tendency to develop eating disorders, statistics are beginning to show they may be right.

A look from Dior Homme during Hedi Slimanes tenure, where extra slim silhouettes were favored

GQ Style Editor Adam Rapaport says it is naïve to think men are all of a sudden more concerned with their appearance based on the “Saturday Night Fever,” hair sculpting, skinny pant-wearing days of the past (or Hedi Slimane’s slim Dior Homme silhouettes more recently), but evidence shows anorexia in men (read: manorexia) is on the rise, leading to the question of whether the skinny jeans for men trend may be at the root of it.

Today, 25 percent of eating disorder sufferers are men, up from 10 percent in 1990, and 40 percent of binge eaters are men. {New York Magazine}

Some experts cite the renewed pressure men are under to fit into slim clothes. American Apparel has a line of denim pants with a maximum waist size at 33 inches, though the average waist size for an American man in 2006 was 39.7 inches. In addition Rootsteinâ€s mannequins have gradually shrunk in waist size over the years, beginning at 33 inches in 1967, down to 31 inches in 1983 and 28 inches in 1994.{New York Magazine}

“The body is on display more in menâ€s clothing today,” Radford University psychologist Dr. Tracy Cohn says. “The cuts arenâ€t as blousy and there is not as much fabric. Clothes cling to the body. The cuts are called close-fit or tailor-cut. And they taper into the body.”

Rapaport says it is not just jeans but everything in menswear that is skinnier these days including slim suits and skinny ties.

“Now itâ€s all skinny skinny skinny, whether you are or not,” he says, adding that the new generation is not smaller, they are just wearing clothes that are, moving away from the baggy, below-the-butt sagging pants that New York politicians abhor.

“Typically in fashion the pendulum swings,” Rapaport says. “If everyoneâ€s wearing big baggy jeans, then the cool kids want to be wearing skinny tight jeans. Once everyone does something, the elite want to do the opposite.”

If you are a man uninterested in whittling down to 14-year-old boy proportions to fit into these clothes, Rapaport sees no need to be concerned. He admits most women probably do not like to see a man in something that super skinny. He also advises men to look at this trend as an extreme by which to be inspired – rather than which to aspire to – to wear clothes that simply fit better and are more tailored than what we are used to seeing men wear.

It’s interesting that this trend emerges just as attention is finally being focused on the inclusion of curvier women in modeling and a movement away from the scrawny female runway look. That being said, we definitely agree with Rapaport. Women do not necessarily want to see super skinny men in super tight clothing, but clothes that fit well are a huge step up from baggy, sagging looks that do nothing to flatter a man’s body.