Germany’s highest-circulation women’s magazine Brigitte says it will stop working with professional ultra-skinny models in favor of ‘real women’. Apparently nobody told Chanel and Fendi head fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld who was quoted as saying that curvy women have no place on the catwalk.

“No one wants to see curvy women,” Lagerfeld was quoted as saying on the website of news magazine Focus on Sunday. “You’ve got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly,” he added.

The world of fashion is about “dreams and illusions”, he said, dismissing as “absurd” the debate prompted by Brigitte magazine which said it would no longer feature professional models on its pages.

Brigitte, one of Germany’s top women’s magazines, said last week it would only publish photographs of “real women” after readers complained they could not identify with the models depicted. The magazine’s editor-in-chief Andreas Lebert said he was sick of having to retouch photos of underweight models. “For years we have had to use Photoshop to fatten the girls up,” he said. “Especially their thighs and décolletage. But this is disturbing and perverse, and what has it got to do with our real reader?”

He said he would invite German women to put themselves forward as models for the magazine. According to The Guardian he is likely to extend an invitation to Chancellor Angela Merkel. The magazine will stop using professional models from 2010.