Why didn't the magazine just hire a model who wasn't deathly ill? If that's a photo of her with 15 stone added, I shudder to think what she looks like in real life.

I was a chubby child and am now a fairly skinny adult (I'm 25 and only just recently gained enough weight to make it to three digits on the scale), so I've been aware of how it feels to be both over and underweight and, although this might be an unpopular observation, it seems a lot of the discussion surrounding the extent to which the fashion and entertainment industries glorify thinness ends up villifying thin women – which is missing the point entirely.

To take something that is, essentially, anti-woman and make it anti- OTHER, specific women doesn't help impressionable young girls feel better about themselves at all and it simple exacerbates the core issue, which is that these industries espouse a standard of beauty that is limiting, unattainable and sexist and often racist. I think the fashion industry would do well to be TRULY avant-garde and feature all body types and skin tones – big, small, able-bodied, disabled (or “differently abled”), short, tall, freckled, tan, pale, pregnant, old, wrinkled, scarred, cellulite-strewn, etc, etc. “Beautiful” is often pretty boring, you know?

I'm not surprised by the photoshopping. I used to intern for a fashion magazine when I was in college and we did TONS of retouching. A lot of it was done to make runway models look “healthier” – not by adding weight per se, but by softening sharp elbows and ribs, reducing the appearance of veiny hands and lightening the shadows in the collarbone area if they looked too severe. So, contrary to what people may believe, photoshopping is not done just to make people look skinny. It's done to portray unattainable perfection – skinniness without pointy bones, curves without cellulite.

I agree with Alex – a lot of the anti-fashion industry backlash ends up “othering” skinny women. There seems to be a lot of bitterness and anger towards a certain body type, and I can see where the people are coming from… but while their hearts might be in the right place, the way they're going about it is anything but. Revolutionizing the ad/fashion industry portrayal of women shouldn't be about excluding skinny women or photoshopping them to look bigger; it should be about acknowledging and celebrating all body types in their infinite, flawed and totally awesome variety.

Re: pubic hair, funny you should mention it – it seems like everyone is talking about it these days (or is it just my friends? er. anyway). It's been sort of funny watching the shift from total bareness to a well maintained, manicured… bush being the preferred look. Seems that the porn star “plucked chicken breast” look is going out of style, and it's about time… not that one should change the appearance of their mons pubis based on the latest trend

I just meant that she's so thin, she looks deathly ill.