Ana Carolina’s mother warns: Size 0 killed my daughter!
Brazilian model Ana Carolina Reston died of complications caused by her eating disorder. The 21-year-old weighed just 6st. The outcry caused by her death has seen fashion designers from Milan to Madrid declare an end to using sick, stick-thin models. But last week the British Fashion Council announced it would not be banning size-zero models from London Fashion Week in a fortnight.
Here, Ana’s mum Miriam Reston Marcan tells the Mirror how, when her daughter arrived for her first foreign fashion shoot, the 8st model was warned she was too fat. And how, two years later and two stone lighter, she died in agony…
‘I’ve now lost my precious daughter, who started out like every other girl wanting to be someone in life, but died a victim of the fashion industry that tells girls that the thinner they are the better.
As the models parade along the catwalks during London Fashion Week, young girls around the world will be glued to the TV, dreaming of one day becoming just like them. I know because my gorgeous daughter Ana used to do the same. From as early as I can remember she was raiding my closet and parading around the house in my bras and high heels, asking people to take her photo.
Ana won her first contest at 13. Seeing her crowned beauty queen of our small town was one of the proudest moments of my life. Of course, we knew she would win - Ana was slim and elegant. All the other contestants were curvy. Soon after a fashion agent offered to introduce her to one of Brazil’s top modelling agencies, for a fee of $180.
Knowing just how much it meant to her we paid the money. From then on I would go everywhere with her and her modelling career quickly took off. Then she went on her first trip abroad. It was the first time she had travelled on her own. I was worried about her, but she was full of confidence and promised she would build a house for me when she returned. For her it was the start of her international career. She said she would come back a supermodel like Gisele Bundchen. It was there that her eating disorder started. On two occasions she was turned down for jobs because she wasn’t thin enough. One client even told her she was obese! Another said her arms were too fat and from that moment on she stopped using sleeveless tops.
Ana came home completely defeated. When I met her at the airport she just collapsed into my arms and said: “I failed, I’m finished.” Her confidence was completely destroyed. Ana had always been a slim girl but she had always eaten well. Now she hardly ate at all, she just drank fruit juice.
She was like a rag doll, there was no life left in her, no colour in her skin. Later she left Brazil again, this time to work in Mexico, and there things went from bad to worse. What angers me is everybody knew she was ill, the other girls, the agencies, everyone. At one point she told a fashion journalist she couldn’t eat any more, everything she tried to eat she vomited up again. But they were too interested in exploiting her, making money from her, to want to help her. From there she was sent to Japan by another agency, but on her first shoot she passed out. Other clients rejected her because she was too thin, and she came home three months later.
Five days before she died Ana did a shoot for the front cover of a popular Brazilian magazine. Despite being so obviously ill, she was still being portrayed as the face of fashion, a role model for other young, impressionable girls.
She died on November 14, 2006, of complications arising from anorexia. She had got a bladder infection, but her body was too weak for the medicine to have any effect.
Two days after she died, a teenage Brazilian girl who herself dreamed of being a cover girl also died from anorexia after refusing to eat so she could be as thin models like Ana and others she had since parading on the catwalk.
So my daughter’s death has possibly even led to others. It’s a vicious circle that keeps growing. It makes me so sad that London Fashion Week hasn’t banned size-zero girls from the catwalk. My girl’s death seems to have counted for nothing when it should have shocked the fashion world into changing for good.
How many more mothers will lose their daughters before designers start putting the girls’ lives before profit and image? It is too late for my family - our hearts are broken. But for other mothers there is still a chance.’
4 comments January 31st, 2007
