AFC heads towards model guidelines
Scheduled for release later this year, the guidelines are the fruit of an inaugural forum held by the council on March 27; attended by representatives from Australian Fashion Week organiser IMG, the L?Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival, leading model agencies and designers, the Equal Opportunity Commission, the medical profession and eating disorder charity the Butterfly Foundation.
Describing the forum as "extremely positive", AFC general manager Zoe Edquist confirmed there was still a lot of work to be done in terms of constructing a set of workable guidelines that were relevant to the Australian fashion industry.
Contrary to trends in Europe where Body Mass Index (BMI) had been introduced as a measure of models? health - most notably pioneered at Madrid fashion week - the AFC guidelines were likely to take a more holistic approach, Edquist confirmed.
"BMI might form one part of a much wider matrix of guidelines further down the track. But BMI is an inexact science. It refers to the weight of the model in question, which is only one indicator of an eating disorder. There are other indicators such as general physical and mental health that should be considered."
The AFC document would very likely take guidelines developed by IMG for Australian Fashion Week (released in late March) as its starting point, but would be independent and unaffiliated to a particular fashion show or organisation.
A further forum designed to progress the guidelines would include wider representation from the modelling and fashion industries and has been tabled for mid-May.