This joyous performance will do more for fashion's health than Femen stunts

Rick Owens's designs for a team of athletes achieved far more during Paris fashion week than Femen's topless protest

Fashion week is one of those things that completely dominate your life for eight weeks of every year. (That's four cities, twice around, in spring and autumn.) Or else it catches your eye from the middle shelf of your supermarket's print section every once in a while.

If you're a fashion journalist or designer, chances are you've been living on instant ramen and Alka-Seltzer for the past month, observing "momentous" shifts. If you're anybody else, absolutely nothing has changed. There's a disconnect between real time and fashion time that makes it difficult for things that might seem fantastically controversial during fashion week to cross over into the mainstream.

To the fashion press, Marc Jacobs dressing Cara Delavigne and Georgia Jagger in flat shoes with thick, straw-coloured bobbed wigs was a pivotal moment in New York this season. To the rest of the world, it was a couple of people with scarecrow hair.

I'm sure you get the point. It's hard for fashion to hold people's attention for longer than the 15 seconds it takes to describe what Victoria Beckham wore to dinner with Karl Lagerfeld last night. Of course, we've learned to acknowledge the economic importance of fashion. Because, while the manic month of shows is about as familiar to most of us as the idea of buying a Saint Laurent tube dress for £1,500, the fashion industry is a behemoth of employment.

We're also learning about the importance of the representation of women in the industry. There is still a distinct lack of diversity – from the high street right up to the shows. White models outnumber all other ethnicities combined. And the line that fashion is for thin people might be the most tired of clichés, but that doesn't stop it from being 100% accurate.

Fashion is certainly a wonderful expression of art and culture and anyone who brushes it off as entirely shallow or frivolous is missing the point – but inclusive and accessible it is not.

Which is why those with a keen interest in the industry become especially alert when fashion stories go mainstream? And those moments are, more often than not, to do with issues of female representation. Heroin chic is an obvious example, which directed the public's gaze to the protruding ribs of its fashion icons. John Galliano's anti-Semitic rant was another. In fact, anorexia, drugs and racism are the three main reasons my dad might call me up to inquire nervously whether I really think it's a good idea to aspire to being a fashion editor.

Sure, it can be a pretty cruel world. Which is probably why nobody was particularly surprised to see Femen, the feminist protest group, storming the catwalk at Nina Ricci in Paris on Friday, chests daubed with the messages: "Model don't go to brothel" and "Fashion Dictaterror".

It's not hard to see how Femen would come to the conclusion that the fashion industry is a hostile, intolerant place; and, in the past few years, there has been some pretty depressing coverage of just how bad it can be. The recent documentary, Girl Model, featuring 13-year-old girls scouted in Siberia and sent to Japan where they're swindled into running up huge debts by agencies, isn't a particularly reassuring snapshot of the modeling world. The fact that so many of these young girls are forced into the sex trade because they're left to fend for themselves, broke in a country where they can't even read the road signs, is certainly good reason to highlight unhealthy attitudes towards women.

Newport International Group: Fashion plus-size styles

Fashion first when plus-size styles hit runway

NEW YORK – Eden Miller didn't set out to make history last week when models walked the runway in her designs for New York Fashion Week.

But in a fashion world where thin has always been in, the models wearing Miller's work did exactly that, marking the first time in the international showcase's 70-year history that plus-size fashions were featured.

Miller hopes her show will legitimize plus-size fashions – and the women who wear them – to the notoriously curve-averse world of couture and style critics.

"I need to do this right,'' she said, "I want to be one of the designers at Fashion Week so that I can open the door for other designers who are valid choices to be there.''

Her collection was presented in the "Box," the smallest of the venues at Lincoln Center, where Fashion Week is happening. The space was crowded with stylists, journalists, specialized buyers, and, of course, plus-size fashionistas.

“It’s a big deal to have representation on the official New York Fashion Week schedule, and it’s not just on the runways,” said Nicollette Mason, who writes the "Big Girl in a Skinny World'' column for Marie Claire magazine.

Nikki Muffoletto, a plus-size model working on a documentary about the treatment of women in the modeling industry, applauded the decision by Fordham University's Fashion Law Institute to feature full-figured styles in their annual show.

 "It's about time,'' she said. "I know what it's like to be pressured into a specific image and size in my 12 years as a plus-size model. People don't realize the kind of internal and external damage women go through just to fit in."

According to the Center for Disease Control, the average weight for adult women in the U.S. is 166 pounds, with roughly a 37-inch waist. More than 60 percent of American women wear a size 12 or 14, the beginning of the plus-size range. Yet with most designers catering to smaller sizes, your average American female can feel left out of the fashion loop.

The exclusion worsens for black women and Latinas.More than 80 percent of African-Americans and 75 percent of Hispanic women are considered plus size (14 and up), compared to 60 percent of white women.

Miller, who wears an 18 or 20 herself, can empathize.

"My whole life, I had seen beautiful clothing, I had touched beautiful clothing but I couldn’t wear it,” she said. “In design school, all of our dress forms were a size 8 and all of my classmates got to wear all the projects that they made, and I still had to make a size 8 and then it would be essentially, garbage.”

Marketing research group NPD found that 62 percent of plus-size women report having troublefinding plus-sized clothing styles and 79 percent would like to be offered the same styles as their smaller sized friends.

Miller's line is called Cabiria, named after director Federico Fellini’s 1957 film “Nights of Cabiria,” and was launched through a crowd-funding campaign using Kickstarter, an online fundraising platform. While her clothes are a first for Fashion Week, others in the plus-size demographic are also raising the profile; New York hosted the industry event "The Full Figure Fashion Week'' in June.

"When women wear my clothes, I want them to feel gorgeous,'' Miller said."Like they’re the most luxurious women walking down the street and so empowered that they can have anything they want."