Rome - - Italy's advertising standards body has ordered the removal from billboards, newspapers and magazines of a controversial ad featuring a photograph of a naked 27-year-old model suffering from anorexia. Run by the Italian Nolita fashion label the ads violated the Istituto dell' Autodisciplina Pubblicitaria, or Institute for Advertising Self-Discipline (IAP) code in relation to "honesty, truthfulness and accuracy in advertising," the body said on its website.
The ads also contravened another article of the IAP's code, not to offend "citizens' moral, civil and religious convictions and that it should respect human dignity in all its forms and expressions," IAP said.
The ads have to be removed within seven days since the order was issued on Thursday, an IAP spokeswoman told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Many Italians have reacted with shock when the photographs of French woman Isabelle Caro's emaciated naked body - her skin pulled tight over her bones - next to the slogans, "No-Anorexia" and "No-li-ta," first appeared in September on billboards and publications.
And on Thursday the news that the ad would be removed appeared welcome.
"It's too stark. She's too naked and it frightens children," said Kim Vumi Garroy, speaking under a gigantic billboard of Caro in Rome's Piazza Cola Di Rienzo square not far from the Vatican.
"In France and Belgium, where I'm from, many people know about Caro, but here no one knows her personal story. She's just a sick woman who is naked in a photograph," she added.
"Anorexia is not something to parade around. Some of my friends have the disease and they are offended by these pictures," said Rossana who was on a coffee break with a friend at a cafe-restaurant on the square opposite the billboard.
"There must be ways of warning people of the dangers of anorexia but not like this, it's horrible and everyone I speak to thinks so too," Vincenzo Potito who works at the cafe-restaurant, the Le Roy, said.
Letizia Moratti, mayor of Italy's fashion capital Milan has repeatedly called for the removal of the ads which have also met with disapproval within a fashion industry notorious for its obsession with ultra-thin figures.
Mario Boselli, who heads Italy's fashion-trade group the Camera Nazionale della Moda and has championed the use of fuller-bodied models and an awareness of eating disorders in the fashion industry, said he was "bothered" by the commercial purpose underpinning Nolita's campaign.
The Camera Nazionale della Moda together with the Italian government has drafted guidelines designed to get fashion houses and magazines to use healthier-looking models, including that models produce doctors' certificates and limiting the use of models under the age of 16.
Also dismayed with the Nolita campaign is the president of ABA - the Italian association against anorexia, bulimia and obesity - Fabiola De Clerq, who said it "glorifies a woman who is sick and could lead others to be sickly-thin because of all the attention."
"The girl (Caro) needs to be in a hospital not at the forefront of an advertising campaign," De Clerq said in remarks published in the Wall Street Journal in September.
On Thursday Nolita's parent company Flash & Partners was not immediately available for comment, but photographer Oliviero Toscani, who took the disturbing pictures, defended the campaign.
"What about the perfect woman, the top models normally used in all advertising? Those are the ones that normally throw women into a crisis sending them off to plastic surgeons ... That's were the cultural push towards anorexia comes from," Toscani was quoted as saying by the Ansa news agency.
Toscani who is no stranger to controversy, provoked outrage in Italy and abroad during the campaigns he ran for Italian clothing company Benetton in the 1980s and '90s, which included the photograph of a man dying of AIDS and series of portraits of US death-row prisoners.
While detractors have accused him of sensationalizing human suffering for advertising's commercial aims, others have praised him for raising awareness for social and health issues through the mass media.
But judging by the responses to the Nolita ad, this time he may have gone too far.
