I get the feeling that I’m supposed to be cock-a-hoop that the editor of Vogue has berated fashion designers for demanding ever-scrawnier models and thus putting the “size 0” debate back on the agenda. “Thank heavens the worm is turning!” I think we are meant to be chorusing. “These walking bone-bags are glamorising eating disorders and damaging our lovely daughters.”

Well, I can’t pretend to care much. Worrying about skinny models is energy wasted. If daft girls, who think that the zenith of female achievement is trip-trapping down a catwalk on legs spindlier than a newborn foal’s, want to eat wet paper towels to stay under 7 stone, then let them. They don’t have guns to their heads; it’s their career choices and they’re free to try different ones, just like nurses and oil-rig workers. I can think of more deserving causes to wring my hands over than a few well-paid clothes horses.

What is interesting though is the suggestion that this fetishising of skinniness, this obsession with the skeletal body template, is somehow all the evil fashion houses’ fault and nothing to do with us. Ha. Have you listened in to a typical young woman’s conversation lately? Here are some sisterly sentiments to which I have been privy in the past week: Davina’s legs looked fat in that black dress she wore to present Big Brother on Friday; Jordan is on the “cage fighter” diet and eats three single almonds as a treat but, hell, she still looks rough; Michelle Obama needs to lose at least half a stone because she’s heading for middle-age spread.

We don’t need Chanel and Dior to drive our body fascism — we do that ourselves without attending a single Paris fashion show. This is demonstrated by the soaraway success of celebrity magazines that specialise in policing the female shape, including Celeb Diet Now, which is exclusively dedicated to the art and whose front page this week teases “What Celebs REALLY weigh”.

When the ludicrously slender Girls Aloud singer Cheryl Cole recently bought a £36,000 fat-busting, wind-tunnel exercise bike allegedly because “she wants to ensure she is thinner than fellow judge Dannii Minogue for the new series of The X Factor” we didn’t, as would have been sensible, fall about laughing and remark that if Cole loses any more weight she’ll just be an X-ray with big hair. No, we hit the phones to make enquiries about these machines for ourselves. Within two days, the internet produced 98,000 search results on the subject.

I’ve never met anyone who genuinely lies awake worrying about the unhappiness of scraggy models and emaciated celebrities, but if you do, don’t bother, save your breath. These people do it because it benefits them and their career trajectory, not because they want to die. No one will ever convince me that these pinched specimens make other young girls anorexic: anorexia nervosa is a complex mental illness, not something you can “catch” like nits. True anorexics starve themselves because they want to be invisible, unnoticed. Celebrities do it because they want the exact opposite. The thinner that they get, the more attention they receive and the more paparazzi pictures get taken of them in their itsy-bitsy bikinis.

Like competitive under-eaters who make a show of never being seen eating carbs, celebrities tend not to fast in solitary secretness. Many like to be seen not to be eating, to advertise their supreme self-control. This month’s Look at Me Not Eating award goes to Nadine Coyle, another super-slim singer with Girls Aloud, who was recently at The Ivy. Diners reportedly watched as Coyle asked the waiter to bring her a portion of steamed fish with no vegetables or sauce. She then reached into her handbag and produced a set of digital scales on which she proceeded to weigh her dinner like a midwife weighing a baby. She cut the fish serving in half and gave the unwanted portion back to the waiter. This anecdote doesn’t usurp my long-time favourite involving Victoria Beckham asking a waiter for a Caesar salad “without croutons or Parmesan cheese”, leaving her with a nourishing plate of romaine lettuce, but I thank Nadine anyway for widening the genre.

Thinness as a symbol of wealth is a monster that we have helped to create via our voracious consumerism. Thanks to affordable luxury brands and clever fakes, we can copy rich people’s material possessions; cheap flights mean that we can even ape versions of their lifestyles. The one thing that the famous have left to lord over us is their leanness. Like Samson’s hair it affords them strength and superiority, the xylophone ribcage being the most elite of accessories.

But many of the women who tut disapprovingly over a model’s knock knees will think nothing of bitching about Fern Britten’s gastric band or titter that Davina’s legs look like “Hoover bags”, oblivious that it’s all part of the same vicious circle.

Much concern expressed is disguised voyeurism. At least a model’s thinness serves a purpose: clothes look better on bony frames and their job is to showcase those clothes with their skeleton as wire hangers. Celebrities don’t become better singers, actresses or reality TV stars when they’re famished; but they do get the spotlight. And that, of course, is the Holy Grail.

So here’s my strategy for ending the cult of thinness: ignore it. Real anorexics deserve our sympathy but the other sort, the ones who wear their concave stomachs like Hermès bags and would tattoo their pancreases if they were told it was “on trend” just pretend that they’re not there. Look away when you see X’s “before and after” photos promoting her weight loss DVD, make it your business not to know how quickly Y lost her baby weight.

The fact is that times are changing anyway. The new generation of celebrity role models — Lily Allen, Peaches Geldof, Daisy Lowe — are healthy sizes and apparently regard self-starvation as a passé hang-up of the middle-aged.

And don’t shed too many tears for thin models. If you want to show you care about the health of the exploited worker, hug a cockle-picker instead.

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