Is skinny going out of style?

Early Monday morning, celebutante Nicole Richie was arrested for driving under the influence after she was spotted driving the wrong way on the 134 Freeway. According to the booking sheet, the 25-year-old star of "The Simple Life" is 5 feet 1 and 85 pounds.

By coincidence the next day, designer Diane von Furstenberg, in her capacity as president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, sent the organization's members a letter urging them to take a position on the issue of underweight models. Her letter followed a meeting last week of industry leaders such as Vogue editor Anna Wintour, designers Derek Lam and Vera Wang, and health and nutrition experts.

The letter called dangerously thin models a "global fashion issue." Further, Von Furstenberg wrote that "as designers, we cannot ignore the impact fashion has on body image. We share a responsibility to protect women, and very young girls in particular, within the industry, sending the message that health is beauty."

Forty years after the Twiggy era, critics might say that message is coming a little too late. Thinness has become so deeply ingrained in our food-obsessed culture that the ultra-thin standards of beauty have infiltrated the psyche of nearly every public and private figure, whether a teenage model or a red-carpet strolling actress.

At the extreme, a preoccupation with weight leads to eating disorders, which now affect nearly 7 million women and 1 million men, an epidemic level according to the National Assn. of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders of Highland Park, Ill.

Alarming recent events have put the gaunt under increased scrutiny. In August, a model in Uruguay collapsed on the runway and died of heart failure, possibly from being underweight. In September, the organizers of fashion week in Madrid issued the world's first catwalk ban on models who didn't meet a minimum body mass ratio of 18, a number calculated on height and weight that would exclude Kate Moss. In November, a 21-year-old Brazilian model, Ana Carolina Reston, died in a Sao Paulo hospital from complications of anorexia. She was 5 feet 8 and weighed 88 pounds. Brazil has joined the campaign to create guidelines.