MEDIA: Perfection? Fat chance

Fashion magazines and democracy were not made to match. The glossy tomes are the domain of a man-made elite elected for their ability to be taller, thinner and more beautiful than most. The plump and the plain can only watch from the sidelines.

Little wonder then that American Vogue’s decision to devote its forthcoming issue to "all the shapes of a woman’s body" has brought the relationship between magazines and the women who buy them under scrutiny again.

Anna Wintour, the British-born editor of the American fashion bible, has been accused of producing a magazine which is "tacky" and "populist" by Slate, the internet magazine.

The "Shape Issue" features women of all shapes and sizes, including the UK’s own Nigella Lawson, culinary queen and self-styled domestic goddess.

The voluptuous gourmande talks about her "sticky-out bottom and sticky-out bosoms" and reveals that her father, the former chancellor, Nigel Lawson, told her at age 11 that a "sticky-out" tummy was sexy in a woman.

Lawson is not the only "large" lady to find her place in April’s Vogue. Sophie Dahl, the "large" size-12 model, is also profiled along with pregnant model Angela Marie Wilkerson.

All very heartening, until you consider the stick-thin women who usually grace Vogue’s pages, and wonder if disingenuosness is at play.

If Vogue is guilty of just a little hypocrisy here, it can’t be accused of setting a trend. A swift glance at this month’s glossy magazines shows that mixed messages about body size are always in fashion.

The April edition of Cosmopolitan carries a feature on "Men who love curvy women", with partners of three larger ladies explaining that big is beautiful.

Very feel-good. Until you spot the coverline which flags up a "Special Section" on YOU+FOOD complete with the sub-heading: "Cosmo’s ‘eat what you want & don’t worry about it’ diet. First we give you great sex now we give you a great relationship with food!"

And New Woman offers a well-intended "how blue are you?" quiz to help readers establish whether they are one of the 20 per cent of women who are suffering from depression. Very likely after reading the preceding page, which warns that almost everything from smoking to boozing can cause breasts to droop. "Find out now before you’re tucking them into your waistband," screams the coverline.

The self-help section on depression asks: "Do you criticise yourself a lot?" Only since reading the article. It also suggests: "Lift your mood with food," even "go for that tub of double choc chip ice cream if you fancy it!" Not if you want to look like the trim and toned covergirl Denise van Outen, star of the musical Chicago, however.

Elle carries a feature on what constitutes beauty in the year 2002. Readers were no doubt delighted to read that it is possible to be beautiful even with a crooked nose, crooked teeth, a flat chest, or a body of average height. Until they realised that’s only so long as your name is Erin O’Connor, Kate Moss, Amber Valletta or Kate Moss again - the models who have these features respectively.

But never was the uneasy truth about magazines and women’s bodies so clear as when Liz Jones, the former editor of Marie Claire, announced that she was determined to eschew stick-thin models in favour of mannequins whose bodies more closely resembled those of women on the street.

She reached her decision after meeting Gisle, the Brazilian supermodel credited with bringing "curves" to the cat-walk, and discovering she was a svelte size 8.

Jones published two covers for the same edition, one featuring "large" model Sophie Dahl, who was size 12, the other featuring the pneumatic Pamela Anderson, a size 6. She then asked readers to choose which cover they wanted - and Dahl won by an overwhelming majority.

The initiative attracted global press and television coverage, which was broadly positive, and Jones was asked to talk at the Body Image Summit, set up in June 2000 by Tessa Jowell, the Minister for Women, to debate the influence of media images on rising levels of eating disorders in women. She was then asked to gather editors, designers and others into a self-regulatory group which would set guidelines on minimum sizes of models, and monitor the way the magazine industry portrayed woman.

Not only did editors refuse to follow Jones’s lead - they pilloried her for her stance. According to Jones, Jo Elvin, the then-editor of New Woman, accused Marie Claire of "discriminating against thin women"; Fiona McIntosh, the editor of Elle, published a cover picture of Calista Flockhart (the actress who plays Ally McBeal) with the caption, "I’m thin, so what?" and accused Jones of "betraying the editors’ code". Some model agencies blacklisted the magazine, including Storm, which represented Sophie Dahl.

The day after the summit Jones was upset to receive a fax signed by several women’s magazine editors and some model agencies, stating that they would not be following any initiative to expand the types of women they used.

Jones resigned as editor of Marie Claire the year after her campaign began, sickened by what she described as the "sheer terrorism of the fashion industry".

She said: "I realised that far from being the influential trend-setters I had thought, magazine editors are more often ruled by fear and advertisers. They are happy to settle instead for free handbags and relentless glamour.

"I reached the point where I had simply had enough of working in an industry that pretends to support women while it bombards them with impossible images of perfection day after day, undermining their self-confidence, their health and hard-earned cash."