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By the time Kate Bosworth turned up at New York City's Fashion Week, she admittedly had been having a rough few weeks. First came her breakup with longtime boyfriend Orlando Bloom. Then came what she thought was an attack of allergies, but "I think it turned into a little sickness," Bosworth said while sitting in the front row of the Sept. 14 Zac Posen show.

Still, it was Bosworth's physical appearance that most concerned friends and onlookers as she made the runway-show rounds and stopped in at the afterparties. "She's so small, it's frightening," says one insider who saw her at Fashion Week. Adds another attendee and well-placed Bosworth source: "She's always been small, but now she is really, really skinny."

One possible reason: With her recent split, "she's emotionally and physically strained," says the source. And although the 23-year-old actress's rep declined to comment on her weight, Bosworth has spoken in the past about pressure to be thin. "I think part of being an actress [is] that your body's your tool," she told Showbiz Tonight in July. But since Bosworth hasn't filmed anything in over a year now, some are hoping she will take a closer look at herself. "Every time I saw her," says the source, "I kept thinking, 'Please eat something.'"

NOW
"A size zero is big on her," says one source of Bosworth (at the Sept. 14 Zac Posen show).

THEN
Bosworth added about 20 lbs. of muscle to play a surfer in 2002's Blue Crush.

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Fashion Week
SEPT. 11 Bosworth's hip bones protruded from this Jill Stuart dress.

SEPT. 12 When the actress leaned forward in this Marc Jacobs dress, her chest bones were visible.

SEPT. 11 Bosworth (at the Marc Jacobs show) "seems frail," says one Fashion Week attendee.

Movie Premiere
JUNE 21 At the L.A. premiere of Super man Returns, Bosworth's gaunt appearance stunned onlookers.

No Waifs Allowed
SPAIN SETS OFF AN INTERNATIONAL CONTROVERSY BY BANNING UNDERWEIGHT MODELS FROM ITS RUNWAYS

SHE'D BE BANNED IN MADRID!

Model Petra Nemcova knows what it's like to struggle to be a size zero in order to stay on the runway. "I'm naturally more curvy, so I always had to lose weight," she recalls. "I took laxatives. I went through all of it just to be able to model."

Well, no más—at least in Spain. On Sept. 6, Madrid Fashion Week officials set off an international catfight by announcing that models participating in Madrid Fashion Week (which took place from Sept. 18 to 22) had to meet a weight standard: Their body-mass index needed to be at least 18—or 122 lbs. for someone 5′9″. "We want to encourage girls to be healthy and beautiful—which can mean slim but not skeletal," says Madrid Fashion Week director Leonor Pérez Pita.

The consequences—in Madrid, anyway—were immediate. At a Sept. 16 casting session for the city's fashion shows, some 300 models were expected—but only 68 turned up, with one of Spain's most famous cover girls, Eugenia Silva, among the no-shows. "I had to change the whole lot in one day!" designer Antonio Pernas lamented to reporters after losing all 18 of his models. Still, he said he supported the new rules. "This industry sets an example to young women, so I'm not against the measures."

That sentiment wasn't necessarily shared in Paris and London. "If [models] look healthy and they're naturally thin, then they will go on my catwalk," designer Ben de Lisi told PEOPLE at his Sept. 18 London show. Furthermore, says one top booker for the Paris shows, the average model—who measures 5′11″ and weighs 117 lbs.—isn't worried about losing work in Madrid. "It's an unenforceable ban, because it's just the opposite," she explains. "They're concerned about losing shows in Milan or New York for being the tiniest bit overweight."