Oh no, not again! Can it really be true? How can so many designers remain so tone deaf to the condemnation of using preternaturally skinny models?

Data gathered and analysed by Vogue magazine’s respected business team – examining 9,038 looks and 198 shows and presentations – has found that 97 per cent of models on this season’s international catwalks were between a UK size 4-8.

A negligible 2 per cent were so-called mid-size (a UK 10-16). The average size for a woman in the UK is size 16. I was responsible for thousands of fashion images during my editorship of Vogue between 1992-2017.

And before anybody flings around accusations of poacher turned gamekeeper, I would like to say I was extremely involved in this issue throughout.

It’s why I am so appalled that we are still having this conversation. I was deeply embedded in the web of photographers, stylists, model agents and designers who create the fashions and images that inspire and influence us today.

I was a huge supporter of Kate Moss and the waif models in the early 1990s when they came on the scene because, although they were thin, they also looked like fresh, young girls with a reality about them, as opposed to the uber-glamour of the supermodels preceding them.

And I could see, up to a point, that photographers and designers thought clothes hung better and more attractively on thin girls, although I never subscribed to the extremes of the so-called ‘heroin chic’ look.

I understood then, as now, that we have to accept that we live in an age where slimness is admired, where – as evidenced by the increasingly widespread adoption of weight-loss medication – most people want flat stomachs, shapely abs, slim thighs and evident cheekbones.

So I was against the notion of legislating against skinny models – an idea suggested by some bonkers government quango around ten years ago – and appalled at the idea there should be weigh-ins for models before shows, as if they were heifers being sold on the meat market.

I knew that many of these girls were naturally slim, mainly because they were in their late teens (Vogue didn’t work with girls under 16), and I was also wary of demonising skinny any more than we demonise fat.

But there came a point in 2009 when I felt, as now, that the models on the catwalks were causing real problems when it came to the way women saw themselves.

Model agencies were scouting girls from Eastern Europe where, for whatever reason, there appeared to be an endless supply of pale, etiolated young girls – and fashion houses loved to use them in their shows. The clothes on the catwalks were fitted to these models’ minuscule size and would then be sent out as the sample sizes for magazines to use on the shoots.

Increasingly, they were so small that some models weren’t able to fit in them, let alone any actresses, or women in other professions, who we might want to photograph.

So I wrote to every designer asking them to reconsider this issue. Could they not, I suggested, be aware that they were out of sync with society in general, which was becoming increasingly concerned with the growth of eating disorders? Why were they so hell-bent on a celebration of emaciation?

Many of them replied politely to my letter. Most said the models they chose were perfectly healthy and they used the girls they felt best reflected their vision for their brand.

There was no change in attitude as a result of my plea – lots of talk, but no action.

Now, to be fair, this did not apply to every designer.

Many, although they used slim models, did not feature young girls with excessively wide thigh gaps and skeletal arms. But most of the biggest names of that time – Chanel, John Galliano, Prada, Calvin Klein, Balenciaga, Alexander McQueen – did.

So roll on 16 years and look where we are.

In the past few seasons, fashion writers have criticised the increased use of super-thin girls on the catwalks.

The effect of the much-lauded body-positivity movement, which made such an impact around 2018, has proved to be as lasting as fake tan.

If this issue of skinny models remained solely within the rarefied world of fashion shows, it might not be especially important. But it doesn’t.

What happens at the shows – the girls, the clothes, the hair, the make-up – influences fashion at all levels.

It infiltrates the shop windows, the mainstream collections, the catalogues that drop through our letterboxes, the online sites, our Instagram feeds.

That’s what made editing Vogue so interesting. What happens in fashion both reflects and radiates into other arenas.

No surprise, then, that in July Marks & Spencer was forced to remove an ad because the Advertising Standards Authority considered the model featured to be ‘unhealthily thin’. The same applied to an advertisement for Zara shortly after.

The Vogue report, published on Monday, states that fewer than 1 per cent of models on the catwalk this year were plus size (that is, bigger than a UK size 16).

I’m not surprised the plus-size models have gone, and I believe their presence isn’t any more helpful than the skinny models.

In fact, the whole issue of plus size is tokenistic and unhelpful.

At the height of its popularity, body positivity boiled down to designers and fashion editors using three or four beautiful models who were ‘plus size’, such as Paloma Elsesser, Ashley Graham, Jill Kortleve and Precious Lee. And then shops like Asos began to use girls who were frankly overweight … until they discovered that this look didn’t sell clothes in a world that aspires to be slim.

Including plus-size models may tick the diversity box, but the reality is that very few of us want to be plus size.

Look at the way proselytizers of the body-positivity movement, including Oprah Winfrey and Lizzo, are now delighting in their recent weight loss.

Most women probably want to be half a stone thinner than they are, to be in the size 10-12 range – a size which is currently invisible in fashion.

While few of us look at fashion images to see our exact selves mirrored back, we don’t want to see skeletons walking the catwalk.

We want to see somebody who, in our very wildest dreams, resembles us.

It’s why Gigi Hadid is so successful – she is slim but not bony.

Why so many designers cannot – or will not – understand that is incomprehensible.

In the recent collections there were more men than ever in the top creative-director jobs. Could this be one reason why there is even less representation of real women’s bodies?

If that’s the case, the good news is that the woman who once helmed Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri, has just been given the top job at Italian fashion house Fendi. She was the designer who put ‘We should all be feminists’ T-shirts on the Dior runway in 2016.

Perhaps she’ll buck the trend and be brave enough to show some normal-sized women on the catwalk – and, by doing so, add some real meaning to that T-shirt.