Do These Sparrows Make the Spring?

For over ten years I've been reading about how the fashion industry is about to turn to models larger than size 0. There was Sophie Dahl for a bit* and the supposed breakthrough was being welcomed and almost announced in women's press for years -- with no effects, as far as I could tell.

Until this year, it seems, when for the first time in history I saw in a magazine a belly that resembled mine. Later in the summer I had the good fortune to go to Canada and, as one of the many souvenirs from that trip, I brought back a copy of Canadian Elle with a beautiful Frida Kahlo-inspired fashion shoot featuring Crystal Renn.

Does this mean that the runway, too, has finally ceased to be off limits for sizes larger than nothing?

It would be great.

And I'd love it if the next move was to confront the age question. I'm sick of looking at 13-year-olds showing off clothes for 30-year-olds (and bodies that are impossible for most of that audience without plastic surgery). These girls should be in school.

* I vaguely remember reading an interview in which Dahl complained that the larger girl image was imposed on her and had nothing to do with her natural weight or the image she had wanted for herself.