TOO YOUNG!

This is 12 year old Maddison Gabriel, the face of Gold Coast Fashion Week. Call me an old fuddy duddy but I wouldn’t let my daughter enter the fashion industry at 12 years of age. It is unlikely she has the emotional maturity to deal with the issues she is going to come up against. Her mother believes she will cope and perhaps that is true but it’s a lot of pressure for someone who is just entering adolescence.

Forget drugs, booze and eating disorders; the thing I worry about is that a 12 year old is ill-equipped to deal with the high level of competitiveness among models in the fashion business, not to mention the demands of designers. Some designers have said they would not place her in anything too revealing or inappropriate for her age but if you believe that you’ll believe that Britney Spears turned up to a nightclub last night wearing underwear.

Maddison Gabriel is still formulating her view of herself and how she fits into the world, I hope that this experience doesn’t cause that view to become distorted. And let’s hope the models don’t get any younger, or as Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous said :

“The models are getting so young soon they’ll be throwing foetuses down the catwalk.”