On the tube home, I thought about the last audience member to brave the microphone, a flustered, lovely, twenty-something struggling to precisely articulate her discontent.  Despite Reed's casuistry, she just didn't buy the idea that the fashion world's attitudes to extreme thinness really is withering. Perusing the lurid-covered issue of Grazia thrust into my hands as I'd left the debate, I noted adverts offering 'full-bodied protection (Pantene's latest shampoo ad), or gingerly suggesting, in timid font, that, 'Long doesn't have to be skinny' (Maybelline's latest mascara). I thought again about Reed's assertion that there was a 'real woman' backlash on the way. Were these adverts the start? Or the kind of disingenuous tokenism that aims to creep into the collective female consciousness, soothing our reassurance-craving egos that fuller is fine, yet stopping far short of our actual bodies?

The trouble is, we're tired of hearing about women's battle against body fascism. Equalities Minister Lynn Featherstone has just announced government plans to hold a ‘body confidence' summit this autumn. She is also proposing attaching a ‘this image has been airbrushed' warning label to duplicitous digitally enhanced images in advertising and media. While well-intentioned, personally, I think Featherstone's proposals are pretty featherweight. But you only have to read the reaction of Harper's Bazaar creative director Sophia Neophitou, denouncing the hazard warnings as "a waste of tax payer's money", to see the fashion industry's resistance to representing ‘real' bodies.

While campaigns against domestic violence, infibulation or global female poverty need only a fresh PR spin to renew their potency, we're all too accustomed to just accepting it is the privileged woman's luxury to worry unduly about her figure. It becomes less of an irony and more a mere statement of fact that the sequinned mini dresses that provide female Bangladeshi textile workers with a livelihood scratch away at the morale of the Western women who squeeze into them. That both sets of women live on the same number of calories a day may seem an even more perverse disjuncture, the one electing self-starvation, the other stitching relentlessly to nourish itself.   Yet in the global quest for gender equality, fashion has the power to weave together these seemingly disparate strands of feminist cause.  Make it a body-positive, ethical brand of fashion, capable of nurturing a positive female identity and economic independence, and it may be time to judge it on more than appearances.