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Especially when it is taking place in an arena separate from the images themselves. Especially given that the age of a model is not nearly as obvious as her race.

I have spent more than a decade watching models walk the runway, and even I have a hard time telling the difference between a fully styled 14-, 16- and 18-year-old.

I see a 16-year-old now, and to ask her to take her clothes off would feel really weird. But they were like, ‘If you don’t do it, then we’re not going to book you again.’ So I’d lock myself in the toilet and cry and then come out and do it. I never felt very comfortable about it.

Fashion is in essence an industry based on deception: the promise that if you simply wear this you will look better/cooler/thinner/taller/more powerful than you really are. The suit was created, after all, to craft an illusion of physical perfection. That’s the upside. We all benefit.

But the pretense that these girls are older/more knowing/more seductive than they can possibly be at their age — and that anyone who buys the clothes they are modeling may look like them, when they clearly can’t because they are not in their early teens, a distorted physical time when girls have the bodies of children but the height of an adult — is the downside.

Unlike their silver counterparts, who are celebrated precisely because they are the age they are and hence held up as inspiration, these kids are celebrated because they don’t look anything like the age they really are.

No matter how much you take care of them, this disjunction between reality and image is jarring.

It’s telling that models themselves, including the most successful ones, have publicly addressed this. Young models are put in a situation “that treats them as adults, and they do not know how to work with that,” Coco Rocha told Anderson Cooper in 2011. “They are just thinking, ‘How do I please you?’” She added that she believed 15 was “too young” for the business.