"Skinny model" row ends thin week for Aussie fashion

By Rob Taylor

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australian fashion's show week wound up on Friday amid a bitter row over stick-thin models, lacklustre reviews and claims leading local designers largely ignored the country's yearly international showpiece.

Festival organisers were accused of allowing super slim models onto catwalks despite a promise to avoid the half-starved look, which fell out of favour globally after the death from anorexia of Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston.

"We don't think the situation at this point requires rules in terms of regulating the appearance of models," Australian Fashion Week organiser Simon Lock told local media, promising to ban designers judged to have broken a promise to "self-regulate".

Newspaper photographs of ultra-skinny swimsuit models appeared through the week, despite agencies being asked not to choose models who "would be considered to be unnaturally or extraordinarily thin, or suspected of having an eating disorder".

Brazilian 17-year-old model Barbara Di Criddo said despite being sympathetic to Reston, who died weighing just 40 kg (88 lbs), she felt under attack in Sydney after being grouped with three other slim models on one cover picture.

"We were born like this and are naturally thin," Di Criddo told the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

IT'S IN THE GENES

Top Texan model import Erin Wasson said most models relied on genetics rather than starvation.