There are numerous dilemmas plaguing the modern fashion industry. Advertising in the fashion industry can be blamed for many of society's problems with weight and eating disorders. There are many individuals in the world who do not have the ideal body type and the aggressive advertising campaigns waged by numerous fashion companies, portraying beautiful, skinny models and muscle clad men, create this illusion that this is the perfect body type and everyone should strive to look exactly like this. This puts a great deal of stress on people to try and look this way. These types of advertisements have an enormous impact on the youth at the present as many of them appear in youth magazines.

Another very prominent problem facing the fashion industry is the extreme body forms many of the models are portraying. The vast majority of catwalk models are dangerously skinny and it has been suggested that they even suffer from malnourishment. Members of the youth, upon seeing these outrageously skinny models, may become obsessed with wanting to look like them to the extent to which they develop some eating disorder.

Of course these are just problems on the surface of the fashion industry. Underneath all of this is the issue of sweatshops and child labor. In search of a cheap, exploitable labor base, many multinational fashion companies relocate to the lesser developed countries of the world. In doing so they can hire young children to work for very long hours and at very low wages, especially since many of these children are so desperate. Furthermore, many of the less fortunate countries have no laws in place to protect children from being exploited in this manner at the hands of multinational organizations. As such, the slave-labored children do not have any means through which they can lobby for better wages or better working conditions and, if they wish to continue making the minute amount of money they are at the present, they must simply tolerate the conditions they are subject to.