Did The Fashion Industry Create Breast Implant Rush?

It's hard to say which came first: the D-cup or the designer.

The news that the Food and Drug Administration has asked for a moratorium on silicone gel implants once again raised the perennial question: Does the fashion industry, by setting impossible standards of physical perfection, promote an aesthetic of bigger breasts and thereby encourage women to surgically improve their own?

The industry, of course, says no.

"It makes fashion the scapegoat," said Paul Cavaco, a leading New York photo stylist whose credits include Calvin Klein's Obsession ads. "Linda Evangelista is probably the most successful model in the business right now, and she is not big at all. Cindy Crawford is actually the exception to the norm."

Linda Wells, editor in chief of the magazine Allure, raised a few questions herself: "Are the modeling agencies only hiring big-breasted girls? Or are the big-breasted girls the only ones getting the work? And I think Hollywood probably has a bigger influence. When movie stars like Morgan Fairchild and Jane Fonda have their breasts done, you don't ever see them in bandages. You only see them at the Oscars, in sequins."

"I don't know anyone in the world who promotes these things," declared Eileen Ford, the founder of the Ford modeling agency, booker of big and small "girls" alike. "I'm so dead set against them. It's a terrible thing to do to yourself. Why do models do it? Have you ever talked to a makeup artist, a hairdresser or a model? They all know more about everything."

In the modeling business, cup size is a relative dimension. Amplified by contour creams, minimized by masking tape and elevated by underwires, the working breast swings from A to D. And if larger breasts are in fashion, as they have been for several years, it is because this is how a handful of people - editors, designers, stylists - see women today. "I think it's great to show a womanly woman, but I also don't believe in dictating body types," says Wells.

It is an aesthetic, really, of marginal differences - between "full" and large, "womanly" and voluptuous. And it is based, to a large extent, on current fashion. "Don't forget that fashion has changed," said Cavaco. "Clothes are tighter now, more curvaceous, they show the body. It's really just a barometer of the time."

In any case, bigger breasts, not to mention fuller hips, may be an improvement over the days when fashion was routinely accused of promoting anorexia, back in the '60s and '70s, when virtually all models were flat-chested, rail-thin and seemingly starved to resemble street urchins. The pure lusciousness of models such as Crawford and Claudia Schiffer, the blonde who appeared in the Guess? ads, could actually be viewed as healthy. They, by fluke of nature, do not need breast implants.

Anyway, the fashion business has never taken kindly to implants - or "jobs," as they're called. There are relatively few models who have had their breasts altered, according to designers, models and their agents. "I know of six," said Ford, perhaps understating. In Washington, Darlene Jackson, a booker for Stars Casting, said implants are popular among local models although by no means ubiquitous. The reasons vary. "I wanted to feel more feminine," says one local model, who isn't worried about the FDA warnings.

For the industry, at least, the reasoning comes down again to critical judgment. "You can always tell when a model's had her breasts done," said Cavaco. They don't look good on the runway or in print. They make clothes bulge, explode. "Some of them are like missiles," said Wells.

"I don't like them," said the designer Isaac Mizrahi. "They're like microwave ovens. I don't trust them."