make that well over a size 10 . . . are in favour of banning catwalk models who are very, very thin. It doesn't matter whether you're buying high street fashion or haute couture, if you have any female curves at all, or are over the age of three, you are made to feel like a monster in the dressing rooms of the fashion retail world.

Surely the time has come for the fashion world to put us all out of our agony and abandon female models altogether. It would be much easier than trying to turn adult women, or even very young and skinny girls, into teenage boys. It would also probably be cheaper.

Let the stylists and the fashion editors fit the clothes on the male members of an under-21s soccer team and be done with it. Those lads have flat chests, washboard stomachs and long eye lashes. The hair and make-up departments can do the rest.

That way you will satisfy those picky photographers, paranoid designers and even the Muslim fundamentalists, all at the same time. Only the people in charge of air-brushing out breasts and stomachs would be made redundant.

The young girls who currently starve themselves to work as models would have to find a more congenial way to earn a living, and could treat themselves to an occasional meal.

This is not such a revolutionary step. Everyone knows that the fashion industry would really prefer it if their products were worn by teenage boys. The fashion industry hates the female body and, since Coco Chanel's unfortunate demise some decades ago, always has. Coco Chanel was a great genius who wanted to liberate women's bodies from the oppression of corsets and lacing, and give them the liberty and comfort to move about like adult humans. Well, it was a nice idea while it lasted.

Coco kept her own figure by ingesting cigarettes and recreational morphine, so in that regard she was quite de nos jours.

However, what she would have thought of a female world where acknowledged beauties had to purge themselves with laxatives in order to be allowed in to the precious world of high fashion can only be imagined.

Coco lived before the concept of the Body Mass Index had been invented.

She lived in a world where pretty girls held on to their dinner.

Now fashion hates the female shape and it also hates sex. Most top fashion designers are male, just as most great chefs are male. And, just as what Gordon Ramsay cooks has nothing to do with what your average person eats at home, so what the likes of Alexander McQueen designs has nothing to do with what your average woman wears.

Gordon and Alexander are just there to make us feel bad.

Coco herself did not approve of male designers, because she said they could not know what women really wanted.

Somehow we have let these guys sell us a version of ourselves.

The current fuss over the appalling thinness of catwalk models is being sold to us as yet another generous anxiety about the mental stability of our teenagers; but what no one is saying is that the fashion world is miserably ageist as well.

Having a lovely teenager coming home from town saying that there is nothing in the shops that fits her is upsetting. But having a lovely 70-year-old coming home from town saying the same thing is heartbreaking too. In fashion no woman survives her 35th birthday. There is no place for women who have got bigger and bolder.

At the Paul Smith fashion show in London last week a red leotard was worn by a model so thin that it was difficult to discern her gender.

And this vision was coming from the atelier of Mr New Labour, feminist designer himself.

Which is where the teenage boys come in. Let them take over the Vogue fashion spreads, the Louis Vuitton handbags and the fake tan.

They are the only ones who have a hope in hell of looking like Paris Hilton . . . that is, if anyone really wants to look like Paris Hilton.

And then young women . . . and old women . . . can get on with doing more interesting things.