It’s September, which means – exciting! – it’s fashion Groundhog Day again. This consists of fashion weeks starting up, followed swiftly by the announcement of a political initiative to protect women against this evil on the catwalk. (Another feature of fashion Groundhog Day, incidentally, is a slew of articles by male columnists expressing bafflement at why the models are so thin, which can be summed up as: “I don’t find this sexy, so why?!” However would we know how to look without men telling us what turns them on?)

Anyway, the latest initiative comes courtesy of the Women’s Equality party, which has launched a campaign demanding, among other things, that British designers and retailers stop using size zero clothes in shows and photoshoots. This, the WEP claims, “will tackle negative body image issues and eating disorders”.

I’m going to ignore the all-too-predictable connection between fashion models and eating disorders here, because I’ve written enough for this lifetime about how absurdly reductive it is to suggest that a mental illness is caused by Vogue. Instead, I’ll say this: the WEP is perfectly within its rights to address this issue, but – spoiler alert – it will not make a blind bit of difference. There have been efforts to legislate against fashion’s obsession with skinniness in the past; these laws, wherever they’re passed, always get a lot of play, because the media love a story that allows them to run a photo of a skinny model at least as much as the fashion industry likes the skinny model herself.

So it would be understandable if you were confused as to why things haven’t changed. The problem is not only that the laws are rarely enforced, but also that they are the equivalent of rearranging the Titanic’s deck chairs. For a start, fashion is too international for one country’s legislation to make a difference – especially, I’m sorry to say, when it’s this country doing the legislating. With the exception of Burberry, British-based fashion companies simply do not spend enough on international advertising for any laws to have an effect; the rest of the world won’t even see the photographs. Slapping legislation on a tiny British brand will not change the aesthetic if Chanel and Prada can carry on as before.

While fashion represents the connection between skinniness and perfection in its purest form, it is also the end point. By the time a woman is looking at fashion photography, she’ll have gone through years of indoctrination that the less of her there is, the better. It’s there in all the children’s books and films, in which the evil women are plump and the nice ones are slender (Roald Dahl is especially bad on this). It’s there in pretty much every film ever made (the only person I’ve interviewed with an evident eating disorder was not a model but an actress). And it’s there in the general atmosphere of being female today, the things you grow up hearing the adult women around you saying about their bodies, the way they decline dessert. According to a report just published by the Children’s Society, teenage girls are unhappier than ever, especially with their bodies, which they compare unfavourably with those of their friends and celebrities.

This masochistic tendency towards self‑erasure is a complicated issue, something a well‑meaning but overly simplistic campaign against thinness in fashion can’t fix. The WEP has also suggested including body-image lessons as part of the school curriculum, which is a better idea (and, tellingly, it has had less pick-up, what with it lacking the vital excuse for a photograph of a model). But instead of fussing about the meaningless phrase “size zero”, or conflating thinness with anorexia, the WEP would be more effective if it looked at the prevalence of eating disorders in the fashion industry and exposed this. Instead of pretending it can tell fashion editors what to put in their magazines, the WEP could talk to them to get a more realistic sense of the problem, and get them on side.

If we really want to end the association between female skinniness and female aspiration, women need to be doing this on an individual, focused level, not leaving it to politicians to act on an amorphous, collective one. Look at the way you talk about your body and what you eat, especially in front of young girls. Call out publications that condescend to larger women and feature photographs only of slim ones. Remind your female friends and your daughters that their jeans size is not a measurement of their personal value.

It is easy to damn the fashion industry for promoting skinny as the feminine ideal. It’s harder to admit that it is only echoing back too many of our own darkest thoughts, our own self-loathing.