With Fashion Week fever taking hold in London, New York, Paris and Milan, the eyes of the world are once again on the fashion industry.

Recent years have seen designers and fashion houses dogged by criticisms of promoting anorexia and setting unrealistic ideals of beauty for women; such hype reached a peak in 2006, with the highly-publicised deaths of no less than three catwalk models as a result of complications arising from malnutrition. As a result, Madrid Fashion Week immediately banned any models with a BMI of below 18 from participating, and London and Milan followed with similar statutes. The Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani responded by creating a shock campaign featuring the naked physique of the anorexic model Isabelle Caro under the tagline ‘No Anorexia’; in a stark warning to organisers in the run up to Fashion Week season, Caro died two months ago, aged 28, as a result of her illness.

However, despite the attempts at reformation, leading industry figures remain critical of the ethos behind the catwalk shows. Giles Deacon, British designer and creative director of Parisian fashion house Emmanuel Ungaro, maintains the view that women are being encouraged to pursue an unnatural level of beauty. “At a certain period in time, the fashion industry was portraying this image of a totally unrealistic woman, women who are not allowed to be themselves. It's just all a bit wrong,” he told the Sunday Telegraph, the telling change in tense revealing that little progress has been made. Fellow designers are to blame, he claims. "I think [designers] were probably scared, if truth be out, that if they put someone who wasn't 'right' on the runway or in an ad campaign, that it would be a failure, that women wouldn't want it. Which clearly isn't the case."

Health professionals have also voiced their concern. Professor Ulrike Schmidt, president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists Eating Disorder Department, stated: “The catwalks of international fashion events such as London Fashion Week can act as a showcase for underweight women. We are very concerned at the lack of medical checks for models at London Fashion Week." Even prominent model Erin O’Connor fell foul of the size-zero fixation, as she told the Observer. “I haven't [fitted sample sizes, with a waist measurement of the average seven-year-old girl] for some time. At one show I couldn't get into the trousers. The designer said ‘What happened to you?’ I replied: ‘Why don't you make your trousers bigger’.”

Any hope that this year’s London Fashion Week would show some hint of reformation was dashed by the label Erdem’s controversial choice of models. The Prime Minister’s wife Samantha Cameron, London Fashion Week’s ambassador, looked stony-faced as she witnessed the show from the front row. The model Chloe Memisevic, lauded as one of modelling’s new ‘bright young things’, presented an emaciated face and physique to the crowd, barely filling the floor-length dress she was wearing. Susan Ringwood, the chief executive of the eating disorder charity Beat, voiced her disappointment to The Mirror. “There’s a backward step here and it’s a shame. We had hoped the tide had turned, so this is a disappointing move. Young people are especially interested in fashion and they want to take the lead that it gives. And if we are now back to the old days of seeing one size on the catwalk, it is regrettable”.

The imagery presented by the fashion industry, as Ringwood pointed out, filters down to, and affects, the average young woman. Rebecca Ross, a Masters student here at the University of Edinburgh, had a strong opinion when asked whether she believed the fashion and media industries idolised thinness. “Both mass culture and the media continue to project a conflicting attitude to the Size Zero debate; whilst popular celebrity magazines such as ‘Heat’ and ‘Closer’ promote realistic dieting and fitness, they simultaneously revere painfully thin women as fashion idols. Indeed, just this week ‘Heat’ ran an article about Victoria Beckham’s refusal to gain weight during her current pregnancy. In this article there is no mention of the absolute absurdity of Posh’s continuing commitment to starvation at the expense of her unborn child’s health; rather, most of the article is spent gushing about how “baby Beckham is set to be the most stylish tot in the history of celebrity offspring” – and the youngest child to have an eating disorder, perhaps? What’s more, despite campaigns to highlight the dangers of Size Zero – Louise Redknapp amongst other celebrities documenting the experience of starving yourself skinny – clothing retailers continue to use stick-thin poster girls, with Topshop being a prime suspect. This in itself is worrying, as the store is inordinately popular with young women. It seems that the push for Size Zero has peaked and we’re moving into a more moderate area in terms of body image, yet I think it’s important to keep an eye on the more insiduous remnants of the Size Zero craze”.

The media, with its constant focus on celebrity culture, once solely idolised stars who conformed to the waif-like catwalk ideal. Despite maintaining a perverse admiration for those celebrities who remain extremely thin, with the arrival of curvaceous actresses such as Christina Hendricks on prime-time television the aesthetic appears to be gradually changing. The male-dominated media seems to be in approval of the aesthetic shift as well, with ‘Esquire’ magazine voting Hendricks the World’s Sexiest Woman. Equalities Minister Lynne Featherstone called the size-14 actress the “perfect role model” and called for health warnings to be put on airbrushed photos so that the public would not be duped into thinking that such images of perfection are easily attainable. With the fashion industry embracing previously alienated figures such as the transsexual model Lea T, it remains to be seen whether the female body in its most natural form will be accepted by that most stubborn area of popular culture too.