Street Artist

New beauty ideal

MADRID - When the Spanish capital Madrid decided to replace the thin beauty ideal with that of curvy "real" women, it was the kind of move that millions of women around the world appeared to have silently waited for.

Madrid's measures to ban very skinny fashion models and to promote healthy images of beauty and eating habits have sparked widespread international interest, a spokesman for the regional government says.

"Media from as far as South Korea, Australia, the United States and Argentina have contacted us," the spokesman told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

A decision by Madrid's top fashion show to exclude very thin models has been imitated by shows in Milan, London, New York and the Spanish cities of Barcelona and Valencia, though they have not adopted rules as strict as those in Madrid, he explained.

"We are pioneers" in what is evolving into an international movement, the spokesman says.

The first step was taken by the Pasarela Cibeles, Madrid's top fashion show, in September.

The show excluded five would-be models for being too thin, setting the minimum body mass index - calculated on a height-weight ratio - for models at 18.

A model measuring 1.75 metres, for instance, must thus weigh at least 56 kilogrammes. That corresponds to the minimum level set by the World Health Organisation (WHO) for a person to be considered healthy.