If Eleni Renton has her way, London Fashion Week’s days of public funding are over. Her reasoning is simple: the British Fashion Council’s inability to solve the size zero model problem in during their fashion week means that the public’s funding of fashion week should end. Renton has a stake in London Fashion week as she is the founder of Quintessentially Models, the first “ethical” modeling agency in London. She’s asking that the London Development withdraw the nearly £4.5 million public funding for the event. Renton feels that the British Fashion Council has done a poor job getting all designers to participate in this initiative and is quoted as saying: I am sorely disappointed by the decision, it was very weak of the BFC,” said Miss Renton.

“I think the LDA should pull its funding for London Fashion Week. It is totally wrong that public money is funding something that is clearly unhealthy and I have written to the LDA to tell them this.

“Introducing those health checks would have helped in tackling the size zero issue – I find it embarrassing that we are not even giving it a go. Unless the recommendations are actually enforced, they are just gimmicky sound bites.”

The British fashion council contends that the requirements would prevent some of the top models in the industry from participating and several models have stated that the policy amounts to discrimination. As a result of all the infighting the British Fashion Council decided to do away with the idea altogether.

Miss Renton’s position is a fair one to have. There needs to be some sort of control in place on zero sized models and models that are unhealthy, but the initiative put forth by the British Fashion Council was executed in a ham handed manner. The Council should have had a dialogue with the designers and models on crafting some sort of consensus agreement. Instead the embarrassing reversal means that worthy initiative now is dead on arrival.

Read the Telegraph’s article on this here.