WHEN Luisel Ramos came down from the catwalk last month, she walked backstage heading for the dressing room of the Radisson Victoria Hotel in Montevideo. According to her father, in the three months beforehand she had eaten green, leafy vegetables and drunk Diet Coke. In the two weeks before her appearance at Uruguay’s fashion week she had eaten nothing. She didn’t even make it to the dressing room before she collapsed: her heart failed, she died in the corridor.

She was 22.

In the weeks since her death, her boyfriend has claimed she had a pizza the night before the show; Spanish television has reported her autopsy found no evidence of an eating disorder. But in haute couture fashion, Ramos’s death has had a huge impact.

After the supermodels of the 1980s and the 1990s rise of heroin chic, 21stcentury catwalks are dominated by a super slim, athletically toned and tall silhouette: thin has always been “in”.

But Ramos’s death triggered an awakening in the minds of officials: is being a size zero too thin for public display?

Two weeks ago Madrid Fashion Week officials decided to ban girls and women from appearing if their body mass index (BMI) is below 18.

Culture secretary Tessa Jowell made an appeal to last week’s London Fashion Week to do the same. That request was bluntly refused in the name of creativity, and New York’s fashion week decided that to ban “too skinny” models was tantamount to discrimination and would leave them open to legal action.

Last weekend, however, organisers of Scotland’s fledgling fashion event, the Edinburgh International Fashion Festival, announced that “excessively underweight” models would not be used in 2007.

In a perverse way though, the announcement from the Edinburgh International Fashion Festival is an about-turn for its creative director Colin McDowell, a revered fashion critic and advisor. At the 2006 fashion festival earlier this year, there was a remarkable moment during an event chaired by McDowell, who was in conversation with the designer Matthew Williamson.

McDowell made his feelings about fat, or the lack of it, very clear: when an audience member asked Williamson why he didn’t make his clothes in bigger sizes, McDowell answered for Williamson, sharply insisting that “if you want to wear fashion, then get a fashion body”.

Three members of the audience walked out at this remark, and the room divided into camps of opinion: the discussion became distinctly “fattist”, with some of the young, slim girls present showing a measure of hostility towards the overweight.

McDowell is now apparently determined to showcase beautiful clothes on healthy, beautiful people, saying the show will employ “models who speak of glamour, not anorexia”, the exact criteria of which will be detailed nearer the event.

Mark Tungate, author of Fashion Brands: Branding Style From Armani To Zara, has studied the culture of models and says the outcry over banning skinny models won’t achieve as much as parents talking to their children about the power of advertising.

“I can’t see it changing - fashion is about fantasy and glamour. It’s been like this for at least 60 years, and slim has always been the key look, ” says Tungate.

“But it’s partly an educational thing - I really wonder how much do teenage girls realise that they are watching a business, an image, something airbrushed and polished. It’s not real, it’s a fantasy. I wonder if they realise that.”

Additional reporting by Leanna MacLarty

QUESTION 1: ARE MODELS BEING BULLIED INTO LOSING WEIGHT?

STORIES abound of model agencies’ “thin or die” casting couch approach to weight. Phil Collins’s model daughter Lily, 18, has said that at her first interview with top agency Next, “they told me I was pretty for a normal girl, but not for a model”. She was asked to lose eight inches from her hips and says: “I’m a lot happier now that I’m thinner.”

For Glasgow-born model Joni, 24, it’s simply the case of accepting the demands of the job. At 5′ 8″ , and seven and a half stone, she is probably under the BMI threshold of 18, but the Glasgow School of Art graduate says she has always been “very healthy'’.

“If you are getting into modelling, like any industry, you have to play by the rules, ” she says.

“I know this sounds harsh, but when you put a larger model on the catwalk it is kind of the opposite of what fashion is about: it’s meant to be about aspiration and beauty. Girls don’t aspire to be fat - they aspire to having beautiful clothes.”

In the current climate, many agencies are now going to great lengths to showcase how healthy their models are.

“From next month we are going to put our models’ BMI on their vital statistics cards, ” says Alex J of Cape London, who has responsibility for talent scouting models in Scotland. “It’s then up to the clients whether they want to book them.

“When we take new models on they get a lot of information about health, diet and fitness. If you are facing a week of 6am call times and then travel and then a shoot you need to be healthy.”