For the women of Ethiopia, there is heroine chic

Published on Saturday 23 September 2006 01:04

FASHION week - skeletal clothes horses with haunted looks and gazelle-like legs effortlessly gliding. The image is familiar. Leggy women with impeccable posture, cheek bones sharper than Gordon Ramsay's tongue, radiating elegant poise. Where had I seen it recently?

Bizarrely, it was on the road to Bahir Dhar in rural Ethiopia. As thousands of villagers strode the endless track (to call it a road is like calling Primark a Bond Street boutique), it brought to mind catwalk images. No-one in Ethiopia is ugly. No-one is fat. No-one has bad teeth. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have spotted the potential of the 14-year-old Kate Moss at JFK Airport, but any model scout worth their salt should try Bahir Dhar on market day. Men and women alike are all strikingly beautiful. It seemed somehow monstrously shallow to be thinking of runway shows where fashionistas fatuously air-kiss their way around the room, grabbing their goody bags full of luxury goods, while I was faced with poverty on an inhuman scale. But at the same time, the echoes rang loud.

The striking similarities are not just skin-deep. Take the diet of your average "fashion forward" celebrity. Fashionable western macrobiotic diets are predominately vegetarian and revolve around wholegrains. Your average Ethiopian Highlander exists on a very similar diet - a bean stew called wot. Single mother Tru Gedem has never in her life tasted meat. Like all Ethiopians, she is unsure of her age, but thinks she may be about 25. With no official records, no-one knows their birth year, let alone their birthday. Women who cast a veil over their ages in the West have a weaker excuse for their numerical dyslexia. Tru doesn't have the choice to wash down the wot with champagne or a cosmopolitan, but instead faces parasite-infected water from the nearest spring. The holy grail of the size-0 figure is easy to achieve if all you have is wot and a cast-iron stomach against E coli.

Accessorising with a bottle of designer water - think Madonna and the Kabbalah water, or supermodels washing their hair and spritzing their faces in business class with Evian - is de rigeur. It's the same for the Amharic women, who wouldn't be seen dead without their eclectic selection of containers: jugs, jars and petrol carriers.

Then there's a nip and a tuck, rumours of rib removal; going under the knife for beauty. It's culturally accepted that Ethiopian women go under the knife, too. If they are not circumcised as a baby, they are considered in adulthood to be unclean and to be promiscuous, and have the "operation" done as an adult. Bearing in mind there are few anaesthetics available for medical emergencies, circumcision - female genital mutilation (FGM) - takes place drug-free. Agnernesh wasn't circumcised as a baby. Married at eight, her husband divorced her at 12 when they first had sex and discovered this. Married off again weeks later, her second husband took more decisive action. A gang of his friends tied her to a tree in the village square and made sure there could be no doubt this time. Hauntingly beautiful and now, in what she thinks are her late twenties, with a total of ten husbands behind her, HIV-positive and a single mother to her one surviving child, she works to support others in similar situations thanks to a World Vision initiative. This isn't heroin chic, it's heroine chic.

According to fashion expert Richard Gray, of style magazine 10, homespun style was all over the catwalks at New York fashion week. "Many of the outfits have that rough-sewn thrifty quality." Good news for the women like Agnernesh then - she's very "fashion forward" in her single dress, much mended and poorly patched. In fact, the whole village of Gonj is very much on trend there. Khaki is the new black on this block. It seems as if the whole female population has committed a giant fashion faux pas and selected the same purple floral design on a khaki ground. They have no choice. Everyone owns just one outfit - complemented only by one colourful shawl. It's not unusual for there to be one "good frock" shared among the girls of the village.

Other than the water jug, accessory choice is simple. Women often have facial tattoos as jewellery replacements, and selecting shoes to go with your outfit is not too onerous a task when you don't own any. Manolos wouldn't cut it where the mud pavements can be 18in deep. Even if shoes were affordable, they are of little benefit.

Where western dress is adopted by women, for example at the reception desks of city hotels, it has a quaint retro feel. You are greeted by a uniform design-influenced by 1950s BOAC air hostesses and Britney's Toxic garb. But at least shoes are a perk of the job.

Fashion Week coincides this year with World Vision's drive to recruit 3,000 new child sponsors. As models glide down the runways, fashion editors run manicured talons through the look books and photographers congregate in their pit, I'll be taken back to the sights of Ethiopia. Instead of my 20 Top Shop fashion fix, just maybe I'll think about investing my money more wisely in some heroine chic.

• Sarah Coe is a member of the supporter recruitment team for World Vision. The World Vision 3000 sponsors appeal runs through September. Call 0800 501010 or see www.sponsor.org