“You can’t be too rich or too thin”, quipped Wallis Simpson (the Duchess of Windsor), a long-time resident of France.

Something tells me she would not think too much of her adopted homeland now.

The “too rich” have long been under attack there, but now skinny folk are under fire too.

(Reuters) – France will ban excessively thin fashion models and expose modeling agents and the fashion houses that hire them to possible fines and even jail, under a new law passed on Friday.

The law would ban such models both from the runways and magazines.

Reuters:

The move by France, with its fashion and luxury industries worth tens of billions of euros, comes after a similar ban by Israel in 2013, while other countries, like Italy and Spain, rely on voluntary codes of conduct to protect models.
The measure is part of a campaign against anorexia by President Francois Hollande’s government. Lawmakers also made it illegal to condone anorexia and said any re-touched photo that alters the bodily appearance of a model for commercial purposes must carry a message stating it had been manipulated.
“The activity of model is banned for any person whose Body Mass Index (BMI) is lower than levels proposed by health authorities and decreed by the ministers of health and labor,” the legislation says.
The lawmaker behind the bill previously said models would have to present a medical certificate showing a BMI of at least 18, about 55 kg (121 lb) for a height of 1.75 meters (5.7 feet), before being hired for a job and for a few weeks afterwards.
The law, voted through the lower house of parliament by Hollande’s Socialist majority despite opposition by conservative parliamentarians, envisages imprisonment of up to six months and a fine of 75,000 euros ($82,000) for any agency contravening it.

‘Condoning’ anorexia is, of course, grotesque, and there have been cases of models, who were on any objective basis quite clearly anorexic, with sometimes horrific, even fatal, consequences.

Nevertheless, the methodology here is questionable and the underlying principle may be even worse.

Writing for Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown explains:

The rule relies on body mass index (BMI)—a number calculated using a person’s weight and height—to determine who is too skinny for the catwalk. Anyone with a BMI under 18 is banned. Health minister Marisol Touraine said the move is part of the country’s efforts to stop people from developing eating disorders.
Most of the media has been reporting on the law as a ban on “anorexic” or “ultra-thin” models. But that’s a bit of a stretch. While BMI can be useful as a broad guideline for healthy weight/height ratios, it’s far from a definitive indicator of fitness or health. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, describes BMI as “a fairly reliable indicator of body fatness for most people” (emphasis mine). Many perfectly fit and visually slim people complain that their BMI places them in the “obese” category, which tends to happen when people are more muscular. Anyone with a BMI of 30 or above is considered obese.
And anyone with a BMI under 18 is considered “underweight.” But like the obesity threshold, many people who fall in this “underweight” category both appear and are healthy. I’m one of them. At 5′6″, I tend to weigh between 110 and 115 pounds. At the high end, I am considered to have a healthy and “normal” BMI. Lose four pounds and I’d be banned from modeling in France. And I am hardly what anyone would consider worryingly thin.
This wouldn’t just be just a ban on “anorexic” models but a whole lot of healthy women, women who would have to be actively unhealthy to meet the government’s weight standard.

As Nolan notes:

French law now requires employers to discriminate based on body type.

This law is yet another demonstration of the fact that when it comes to freedom of expression, France, like much of the EU, simply doesn’t get it. So far as the French (and not just the French) political establishment was concerned, #JeSuisCharlie was never very sincere. #JeSuisTwiggy would never take off, or even, so to speak, make it to the runway.

As the ‘war against obesity’ also reminds us, there is very little about the individual that the members of today’s political class regards as something that should be left to the individual to decide.

What is it about “just go away” that they don’t understand?