Anorexic Model Isabelle Caro Dies At 28

Isabelle Caro, best known as the model who appeared in a 2007 anti-anorexia campaign in Italy following the death of an anorexic Brazilian model, died in November at the age of 28.

Caro appeared on Jessica Simpson’s Price of Beauty and told Simpson that a casting director who told her she had to lose 10 kilos (approximately 22 lbs.) if she wanted to be in the fashion world encouraged her to stop eating. {clip on Jezebel} Reportedly this happened when Caro was in her last year of high school, but she also acknowledged having been anorexic since the age of 13, due in part to a difficult childhood.

On Simpson’s show, Caro claims that no one at the modeling agencies she went to said anything about her weight or appearance.

While it’s a designer’s prerogative to only use models from the segment of society that stays beanpole thin even when eating normally, Caro highlighting the extremes some people go to to achieve similar looks (that aren’t possible for them without disordered eating) as a highly visible “face” of the disorder was a truly bold statement.

Fashion doesn’t cause anorexia – a disorder first diagnosed in the 1800s, long before anyone working in the industry was alive. {Wikipedia} It doesn’t help by creating a system where only the very thin (natural or otherwise) are candidates to be “the girl” brands highlight as beautiful/perfection though. Rather than offering samples in a variety of sizes clothes are pinned, protruding bones are smoothed with airbrushing (sometimes to freakish proportions that mimic skeletal bodies) and then it trickles down from high fashion to online models who are booked even when they are so thin that they can’t fit the smallest available size. So no, it’s not the cause; but when a girl can display such obvious signs of being deathly ill from not eating and not get one comment about it, it’s not helping either.

We hope that Isabelle has finally found peace, and we hope that her death sparks at least one conversation about changes in fashion that can discourage another woman from dying a similar death.

Image compilation via Jezebel






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