Even if you don’t know your peplum from your godet, you will have gathered that this is London Fashion Week, if not from the newspaper photographs of the strange and beautiful garments on the catwalks, then certainly from the loud noise of self-flagellation and teeth-gnashing that has provided such a striking soundtrack to the event.

On Tuesday morning the Today programme got Professor Susie Orbach on to warn us about something she called “beauty terror”, a concept that seems to work like this: models are very slender young women. This is a state of affairs that is probably bad for them, and a terrible affront to the lardy rest of us. Observing their ethereal beauty, we wish that we, too, looked like a wood-nymph in PVC leggings. Realising that it will never be so and feeling discontented with our lot, we reach with a sigh for the chocolate biscuits. In extreme cases, we may sick up the biscuits we have just consumed, or eschew biscuits altogether, thus compounding our discontent with an eating disorder. Worrying, certainly – but terror? Really?

Lots of very important people besides Susie Orbach seem to think so. The Times ran a leading article reproving Hilary Riva, chief executive of the British Fashion Council, for failing to adopt the measures taken by Madrid Fashion Week, which insists that models must have a body mass index (BMI) of 18 or above, and this week stood down three girls for being too thin. Fashion is, the Times article remarked, “an industry just like any other, and it must not be allowed to jeopardise the health of workers and consumers in the name of profit”.

The point is, though, that fashion is precisely not an industry like any other. Baroness Kingsmill, who launched the Model Health Inquiry last year, made a comparison between modelling and construction work in the 1980s, as “an extremely dangerous industry with little regulation”. Plainly it is wrong for any industry to endanger its workers and consumers. But fashion, like other branches of the entertainment industry, is a confection of fantasy. Lucrative and important as the construction industry is, I don’t think its most passionate advocate would argue that much is expected of builders by way of fantasy. A better comparison for modelling, when it comes to health and safety implications, might be with rugby players or ballet dancers.

Let’s think about ballet for a moment. Anyone been down the Royal Ballet recently and tested the BMI of the petits rats? Would creativity be enhanced if there were a person in the wings with a set of scales, telling anyone with a BMI of less than 18 to take off her tutu and go home? Yes but, no but, I hear you say. Dancers are athletes. They can’t perform if they are weak with starvation or poisoned with drugs. Fashion is about impressionable young girls wafting down a runway with their little systems full of champagne and cocaine.

Let them eat cake, poor dears, at least until they have a BMI of 18, and then everyone – the models, the fatties at home and the Government – will feel ever so much better. Who could argue with that? Well, um, I can. If you look at the report of the three girls who were sent home for being too thin in Madrid, you will see that the doctor who weighed them was quoted as saying that they were “not necessarily in danger: their health might be OK, but their appearance is extremely thin”. In other words, it is possible that three healthy girls were prevented from working not because they were poorly, but because they failed to meet an arbitrary height-to-weight target. Which would, if it were the case, be outrageous. (I have just calculated my BMI on the NHS Direct website and it’s 17.49 – enough to get me banned from Madrid if I were a teenage model rather than a well-nourished, middle-aged journalist.)

The trouble with the great and the good getting in a tizzy about thin models is that they are, no doubt for the best of reasons, conflating two different things. The first is the regulation of the modelling industry – long overdue, I’m sure, but comparatively straightforward to achieve, with vigorously enforced regulation for agencies, a ban on very young girls and proper medical examinations, rather than the blunt instrument of BMI. The second, and much more intractable, problem is that of body image and eating disorders among the population at large. If the Government and the press, which reports the “beauty terror” debate with such gusto, really believed that models were responsible for the huge rise in eating disorders they could stop it at a stroke, by agreeing a ban of editorial and advertising images of emaciated girls. But although “blame it on the waif” makes a good soundbite, it is more complicated than that.

In a ferociously complicated tangle of causation, the guilty parties include the press that gloats over imagined flaws in this or that celebrity’s appearance. Then there are the voyeuristic TV makeover programmes whose raison d’être seems to be to make ordinary-looking people feel grotesque. Channel 4 specialises in these, with How to Look Good Naked, Ten Years Younger and the horrible Supersize vs Superskinny. Guiltiest of all is the vicious late 20th-century trend in food marketing that persuaded (mainly) women that they were “too busy” to cook. Delia Smith’s How To Cheat at Cookingis a perfect example of this wicked vogue. A reprise of her 1971 publication of the same title, aimed at people who “don’t want, or don’t have time, to cook”, the current volume recommends a variety of expensive, processed ingredients, and is already a bestseller.

So if we are really worried (and we should be) about our uneasy relationship with our bodies, the first step towards recovery would be for us as a society to stop blaming our collective disease on the fashion industry and admit that the problem lies not with a handful of unusually attenuated and beautiful young women, but with ourselves: our idle and stupid eating habits, and our idiotic self-delusion in believing that we could all look like models (if only models were a bit fatter and a bit uglier).

Instilling a love of art into childish hearts

There is a striking vignette in Julian Barnes’s new memoir, Nothing to be Frightened of, in which we find our hero in the Birmingham Art Museum & Art Gallery, inspecting a small painting by Petrus Christus of Christ displaying His wounds. Stepping away from the picture, Barnes becomes aware of “a tracksuited father and small son travelling towards me at a lively art-hating clip”. “Why’s that man holding his chest, Dad?” asks the little boy as the pair speed past the picture. “Dunno,” says Dad, not breaking stride. The terrible poignancy of that scene came to mind this week when I read reports of the Government’s proposal to offer all children five hours of culture a week. The scheme will run initially as pilots, but if it works (and if it’s properly funded), it could be extraordinary. We know from reality television series such as BBC Two’s The Choir and Channel 4’s Ballet Hoo! how engagement with high culture can transform the lives of children – not just those from chaotic backgrounds, but also those growing up in comfortable households from which culture is absent. And it’s high time the arts were given equal value with sport in the curriculum. My only worry would be that the project shouldn’t dwindle into an “accessible” mishmash of kid-friendly pabulum. What they need is some really austere aesthete in charge of quality control. Wonder what Brian Sewell’s up to these days.

A very French coup

“It was love at first sight,” says the new Mme Sarkozy of her first encounter with the President of France. “Between Nicolas and me, it wasn’t quick, it was immediate.” This is consoling news for those of us who are, like Mme Sarkozy, in our forties and still waiting for the President of Right to come along. Mind you, entranced as I am by the thought of Carla and Sarko 2geva 4eva, it has made me wonder if there is any age limit for coups de foudre. Still possible at 40 and 53, evidently. But 60? 70? 80? You tell me.

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