Even though she’s not a ”fashion model”, we think her death should be mentioned after all anorexia and diet discussions of the past few months…
Heiress-reality TV star Anna Nicole Smith, 39, was announced dead upon arrival Thursday at the Memorial Regional Hospital in Floriday. Smith been staying at the Hard Rock Cafe and Casino in Hollywood, Florida.
No cause for Smith’s death has been announced. CNN is reporting that despite earlier reports that Smith had been found unconscious in her room, she was in fact found already dead.
Smith had originally worked as a restaurant waitress before becoming a Playboy model, and then definitively jumping into the limelight when she married an elderly oil tycoon.
Smith’s death comes just one day after she and the diet company TrimSpa were named in a class-action lawsuit that alleged the diet company’s marketing was false or misleading. Smith was the spokeswoman for TrimSpa. The lawsuit had sought to stop TrimSpa - and Smith - from claiming that people could lose weight by using its product.
Relatedly, in January the US Federal Trade Commission said that TrimSpa would pay $1.5 million to settle claims that its diet products were unsubstantiated.
The TrimSpa case was just one of a series of events to hit Smith, including the death of her son Daniel last year in her Bahama’s hospital room where she had given birth to a daughter.
Following the death of her son, Smith had found herself involved in challenges regarding her daughter’s paternity. Smith had been ordered to submit her daughter for DNA testing by February 21 as part of the legal battle to determine who is the baby’s biological father, and that involved her ex-boyfriend Larry Birkhead.
On top of it all, Smith was still involved in a legal battle over the estate of the oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, II who she married when she was 26. Marshall was 89 and died a year after they were married. Smith initially won a $474 million judgment against the Marshall’s estate and his son Pierce, however that was later cut to $89 million and then once again reduced to nothing.
In May the US Supreme Court ruled that Smith could pursue her claims to inheritance in California courts.
February 8th, 2007
The leading US fashion industry body defended its decision not to issue minimum weight guidelines for models appearing at New York fashion week, despite growing calls for regulation.
The Council of Fashion Designers of America last month issued a series of recommendations on the issue, but stopped short of bringing in strict minimum weight-to-height ratios for models as some European authorities have done.
The council’s president, designer Diane von Furstenberg, said that while the industry had a responsibility to act, regulation was not the answer.
“Since we are in the business of fashion, we create aspirational images and it’s important that we project health as a part of beauty,” Von Furstenberg said at a discussion on the issue held during New York’s fashion week.
The council’s proposals include organizing seminars on eating disorders, banning models under 16 from the catwalk and helping those in the industry identify the early signs of conditions such as anorexia.
“There should be guidelines, and no enforcement,” Von Furstenberg told the forum of nutritionists, models and fashion industry insiders. The council said last month its guidelines were “about awareness and education, not policing.”
“We never wanted to have regulations or mandatory requirements,” Steven Kolb, director of the designers’ council said earlier this month. “Regulation is not the best way to go.”
The issue has been climbing up the agenda particularly since the death of an anorexic Brazilian model late last year.
Some Italian and Spanish authorities, by contrast, have banned models with a body mass index of less than 18 — with 18.5 on the scale being the World Health Organization’s standard of a minimum healthy height to weight ratio.
Joy Bauer, a nutritionist advising the designers’ council, said looking at only body mass index oversimplified the problem.
“This issue is much more than the BMI or weight,” she said. “There are other factors, genetics and age. Some women can have a low BMI and be healthy.
“I don’t think weighing the models is realistic. It can create even more anxiety and thus more problems,” she said.
Top model Natalia Vodianova, the face of the Calvin Klein campaigns, gave a personal account of bursting onto the international fashion scene.
“In 2002 I started to do shows, and I felt the pressure from the industry. At 19… I went to a point when my weight was 106 (pounds, 48 kilos). My hair was thinning, I was nervous and oversensitive. “Luckily I was confronted by a good friend, a doctor. I was not even aware I was not healthy,” she said, welcoming the first steps towards tackling the issue in the United States.
Designer Donna Karan said the modeling agencies bore a large responsibility in taking care of their charges. “It starts at the beginning: the family and the modeling agency,” she said. “The agency is the mother of the models.”
Another designer, Tory Burch, said that any rules would be hard to enforce in the United States.
Others disagree. Lynn Grefe, head of the National Eating Disorders Association, said she was disappointed by the current suggestions.
“I don’t understand why they are opposed to physical testing,” she said. Her group earlier described the council’s measures unveiled last month as “a band-aid on a much larger wound.”
“Our concern is, who is going to monitor this program? What are the next steps? Eating disorders kill. For the sake of the models themselves and the young women who look up to them, change is vital,” it said at the time.
“The fashion industry does not cause eating disorders, but to a young girl predisposed to an eating disorder, these images are like handing them a loaded gun.”
The designers’ council insists its recommendations are just a first step, but some have other plans.
One New York City council member, Gale Brewer, has already put forward proposals that would introduce rules on the minimum age and weight of models.
February 8th, 2007