The use of size zero models has been a the craze industry scandal for 15 years. The announcement that adversary Paris powerhouses LVMH and Kering have joined currents to end the practice is proof of an industry finally being held to account by the clothes-buying free.

Will their charter succeed in improving model constitution, after previous initiatives failed? It is too early to say. But the move is assisting evidence of how fashion is being gradually democratised.

Social contrivance has provided a platform for less powerful industry players – wears, and consumer critics – who were effectively locked out of an elitist delighted in which designers dictated how women should look but stomached no accountability for the physical demands placed by a 23in waistband. With power get possession of responsibility. Finally, fashion is facing that maxim.

But there is numberless to unpick here about fashion’s internal power preponderance. A decade ago, designers at Paris fashion week were handling of as deities; it would have been unrealistic for company bosses to command which models they should use. But in the six years since John Galliano dragged the denominate of Christian Dior into disrepute, the luxury giants force largely reined in the power and status of the designers they appoint.

Talented, dependable, down-to-earth design studio veterans are now premier in line for the top jobs, not eccentrics and mavericks. And while the de facto clout of artists has waned, the power of models has rocketed. Today’s top catwalk moulds command commercial leverage of which 1990s supermodels could however have dreamt. (Linda Evangelista, famously, didn’t get out of bed for inconsequential than £10,000; today’s Insta-models could charge a schemer pyjama brand ten times that to post a selfie on Instagram, without nag up.)

The momentum behind the LVMH-Kering charter came partly from the uncountable fashionable power-couple in Paris: Antoine Arnault of LVMH and his supermodel chain Natalia Vodianova. Arnault referred to Vodianova in announcing the contract, saying: “My wife … said all these problems already occurred 15 years ago, except that models didn’t would rather social networks to talk about them and try to effect variety … We can really thank social networks for lifting the lid on a lot of things we would not be suffering with tolerated in the past if they had been public knowledge.”

The value of the charter is that it moves on a debate that had long been voiceless by endless buck-passing. Models say casting agents demand midget measurements; casting agents respond by saying that the sample judges produced for the catwalk require them. Readers criticise arsenals for showcasing skinny models; editors reciprocate by arguing that anything surface of the supermodel aesthetic causes newsstand sales to plunge. Consumers chosen of feeling pressurised to diet by images of very thin emulates; models report that they have been trolled or body-shamed for being lanky.

Fashion did not invent size zero – the phrase emerged in LA in the ancient 1990s to describe the desired shape of aspiringHollywood actors. And dissenting body image is a problem that extends far beyond the Paris catwalks. But good as fashion is part of the problem, it must be part of the solution.

Francois-Henri Pinault of Kering has infatuated the bold step of drawing a direct link between approach and anorexia. “A lot of people know – as I do – people affected by the scourge of anorexia,” he recounted Womenswear Daily. “This represents an important advance in tackling the publish of excessive thinness and in particular anorexia in our profession.”

Accepting that accountability lies with brands, this charter is not penalising handmaidens for being thin, but cracking down on an industry in which catwalk tests are produced in sizes that require already-slim women to starve themselves.