Increasingly often, top models are very young tiny women from poor backgrounds, often far from home...

Emily Nussbaum has an interesting feature in the latest issue of New York Magazine about the ever-shrinking runway models at Fashion Week. Svelte but healthy supermodels are being replaced by a large and interchangeable cast of teenagers, often from poor countries:

Raise the issue of eating disorders during Fashion Week, and someone will inevitably bring up that lost, glorious era of the supermodel: Christy, Naomi, Cindy, Linda, the four-headed stompy-legged beast with big shiny hair, the one that wouldn’t get up for less than $10,000. Those were the days when models took up space. They were stars. They made demands. And their faces were everywhere. To paraphrase from Sunset Boulevard, sometimes it feels like it’s not the clothes that have gotten small, it’s the models. (Although, of course, the clothes have shrunk, too, sample sizes dwindling from a 6 to a 4 to a 2 and below.)

These days, fashion people do not talk about models with awe. Instead, they speak of them with condescending affection, as if they were lovable circus folk. Again and again, I hear that they are beautiful freaks, genetic anomalies, those girls born to be bone-thin, with giraffelike necks and the wide, pretty doll faces that are the latest visual sensation. But there is also pity for the models, who are, many people pointed out to me, basically high-school dropouts, teenagers from poor countries, whose careers last a very short time. They are infinitely replaceable. Although top girls can make up to $100,000 in a week of shows, the vast majority get nowhere near that; some of the more prominent designers pay the girls only in clothes.

Increasingly, top models are very young women from poor backgrounds, often far from home:

The models she had met on her way to the top, [model Natalia Vodianova] told the audience, were more malleable. "They were very young, a lot of them were very lonely, far from home and their loved ones. Most came from poor backgrounds and were helping their families. They left their childhood behind with dreams of a better life, and for most of them, there was nothing they wouldn’t do to live those dreams."

The prevailing aesthetic in high fashion is one that even naturally svelte models struggle to maintain as they move from early adolescence to adulthood:

Both Rieder and Hunter have known models who are naturally skinny. But many of these girls are exceptionally young: A model who is effortlessly flat-chested and hipless at 14 will start to struggle as she hits her late teens. If she’s already rising in the industry, she may find that she needs to take more- extreme measures to continue to fit the bony aesthetic. And that goes double for the new breed of models, many of whom come, like Vodianova, from the poorest regions of Eastern Europe. For these girls, pressures to stay thin may be a small price to pay for escaping the small towns they came from.

"One of the interesting things about these models today is that they get used and spit out so quickly," says Magali Amadei, a model who has been open about her recovery from bulimia. "The era of the supermodel is over, so girls working today don't have the earning power. These girls come into the business young, and they are disposable. On top of that, people often talk about your appearance in front of you, as if you can't hear them."

Perhaps the most shocking implication of the article is that designers are seeking out girls from postcommunist countries precisely because they have a malnourished physique you seldom see on naturally skinny girls in developed countries.

"It's a far more complex issue than people realize," Suzy Menkes, the fashion writer for the International Herald Tribune, told. "You know, many of these girls were brought up in the postcommunist years on an extremely bad diet. From childhood, they've not been properly nourished. That may make them very appealing to designers, but they don't start off with a healthy body. And nothing is simple. I think it must be incredibly difficult to come from a vegetable stall in the Ukraine and find yourself in Paris amongst Ladure macaroons. People have to accept that it's a much bigger picture than terrible fashion folk starving to get into frocks.

I don't have much to add, except to say that Nussbaum's article is the best  discussion of the shrinking model phenomenon that I've read so far. She gets beyond the ephemeral cultural hand waving and examines the economic and physiological factors that are driving this trend.