The issue was immediately a subject of debate and AFW organisers didn't waste time. "Effective immediately, both male and female models participating in Rosemount Australian Fashion Week will need to be at least 16 years of age and must be represented by a model agency," organisers said in a statement. Clements said yesterday that Jacaciak, who has previously fronted a campaign for French fashion house Hermes and has been photographed in a white swimsuit being sprayed by a shower jet, was just too young.

Clements said she has kids around that age and could not equate the sexy poses and backstage drama of modelling with her own children. "What are we doing to our girls?" she said. "When will casting agents think that, maybe because a 10-year-old looks beautiful, then it's OK to have her representing a woman of 30 or more? "I think as women we need to make a stand." Clements was not short of allies yesterday, including Melbourne's Fashion Festival director Karen Webster, who banned models under the age of 16 from her catwalks last year.

She said she worried as much about the women at the fashion shows, as she did about the girl-women on the catwalk. "My feeling is that using a 14-year-old to pitch to a sophisticated and mature market is sending the wrong message. There is just no need to use a 14-year-old." But fashion has in fact invented a need. "The thinness you only get before a girl even has breasts, even has curves," says Clements, "This is what it's all about".

Clements and Webster identified at least half a dozen issues triggered by the Jacaciak affair, including the sexualisation of children, the extraordinary thinness of pre-pubescent models (understood to trigger low self-esteem and eating disorders among aspirational teens), exposure of under-16s to an adult environment, and the fundamental unfairness of pitching fashion products to y grown women using unattainable youth and beauty. But Matthew Anderson, director of top Melbourne modelling agency Chadwick, begged to differ yesterday. "People who say, 'But it's not real, it's not reality, to have a girl (made up as a woman)' are missing the point," he said. "It's not supposed to be real. Fashion is fantasy. It's art." In other words, don't copy the models, copy the clothes.

The issue of when young is too young is certainly not a new one for the industry. In 1980, Brooke Shields appeared on the cover of US Vogue at the age of 14. And in 1994, Vogue Australia featured a 14-year-old Kristy Hinze, (pictured right) grand-daughter of the famous Queensland politician Russ, on its cover and in an editorial spread. "It was a lot of fun," a chirpy Hinze said at the time. "But it was also very nerve-racking. I mean, I was a kid and I was doing this couply-type shoot where I had to wrap my legs around this guy and, of course, I had no idea."