Skinny mannequins on their way out in Spain

Vanesa Lopez looked at the mannequin in the store window in Madridand burst out laughing. It was mostly leg, impossibly long and thin, with shorts hugging a tiny waist and a frilly top on delicate shoulders.

"That's out of my league," said Lopez, a 30-year-old interior decorator with a medium build. "You see it and say, 'Wow, I'd like to look like that.'"

Such skeletal fashion dummies, symbols of a culture of thinblamed for fuelling a preoccupation with weight, are on their way out of Spain under a groundbreaking accord between the Health Ministry and major retailers, such as Zara and Mango.

Also targeted for extinction is the way a size mightfit just right in one store but be too tight at another— just one more way women are made tofeel fat, critics say.

The program is aimed at changing the perception that super-skinny women are fashionable, an image some believe contributes to eating disorders.

Skinny models banned from runways

Madrid and Milan banned ultra-thin models from their fashion-week runways late last year, and this year, the Council of Fashion Designers of America announced guidelines designed to help models eat and live more healthily.

The offensive might seem odd coming from Spain, a country where, to the casual eye, peopletend to beneither fat nor thin, nor readily associated with anorexia, bulimia or obesity. The country prides itself on a Mediterranean diet rich in fruit, vegetables and heart-healthy foods such as olive oil and fish.

But just as Spain quickly caught up with its European neighbours economically and culturally in the generation since it shed a right-wing dictatorship in the late 1970s, so has it matched them in the more dangerous trappings of an affluent, go-go consumer society.

Today's Socialist government, vigorously assertive on a bevy of social issues ranging from gay marriage to gender violence, is now taking aim at the fashion world as a source of risky thought and behaviour.

"We are aiming for a model of healthy beauty," said Angeles Heras, director of consumer affairs at the Health Ministry. "There is a lot of pressure, not just from the fashion world but society in general, for women to seek models of beauty that are unreal and even unhealthy."

Designers to standardize clothing sizes

The two major changes, announced in January, are in the works: stores run by four big names will start replacing window display mannequins with larger forms, and designers will standardize women's apparel so a given size will fit the same way no matter who sells it.

To get a better idea of the shapes of Spanish women's bodies, the Health Ministry is using laser-fitted booths that can take 130 measurements in 30 seconds.

The program will study 8,500 women aged 12 to 70, and pass the data on to clothing designers who account for 80 per cent of production in the Spanish fashion industry. The manufacturers' garments will then reflect the dimensions of real women, not catwalk waifs, the government says.

The standardization is to be phased in after the study is completed this year.

Other designers have asked to join the program, and Italy sent a letter asking about it, Heras said.

"It seems we are pioneers."