How fashion veered back into idealising skinniness

One night, browsing on Instagram, I clicked on an image of a woman unveiling a newly slender body in figure-hugging clothes. The algorithm soon served me reel upon reel of people celebrating weight loss achieved with GLP-1 drugs, including already slim women praising microdosing, and becoming even thinner.

Soon I found myself following a link to an online chemist, plugging in my weight and height, then tweaking it to qualify for diet drugs. Because, shouldn’t I be smaller too?

After all, skinny is back in fashion. After a brief fetishisation of body diversity by luxury fashion brands, plus-size women have been noticeably thin on the ground in this season’s runways.

According to a recent survey by Vogue Business, there was a slight decline in mid- and plus-size (over US size 14) clothing across the 182 fashion shows for autumn and winter this year, compared with the previous season, with 97.6 per cent of models wearing clothes between US size 0 and 4.

“Skinniness is winning and it wasn’t winning a few years ago,” says Dr Ysabel Gerrard, author of The Kids Are Online: Confronting The Myths And Realities Of Young Digital Life.

The Met Gala ball sparked debate about frailty among some of those walking the red carpet, and recently actress and activist Jameela Jamil posted on Instagram about celebrities looking “scarily thin, in a way that reminded me of watching when I was a kid. Where everyone looks like they could snap. It’s a specifically fragile type of thin”.

This lurch towards skinniness has been spurred by the proliferation of GLP-1s, algorithms shaping a homogeneous beauty standard, influencers and brands profiting from the new aesthetic and a political backlash against woke body positivity.

Ms Gina Tonic, author of Greedy Guts: Notes From An Insatiable Woman, has described this as a “regression that’s in line with the current political climate – as everything gets more conservative, it’s no wonder people feel more comfortable openly sharing fat-phobic views”.

Historically, feminists have seen the idealisation of thinness as harmful to women because it encourages them to take up less space or see their bodies as something to be worked on, distracting from other issues.

Nostalgia and internet culture

Perhaps skinniness is also due to a period of nostalgia for the Y2K era, as Gen Zs hanker for iPods and sport low-rise jeans and crop tops, popular when magazine straplines were advising readers how to lose 10 pounds (4.5kg) in 10 days and Bridget Jones was labelled a fatty for being a size 10.

Beyond the rise of GLP-1s, anti-woke and nostalgia are the influence of internet culture. Once, you might have felt pressure from your orthorexic “almond mum” disguising her restrictive eating with health regimes and Weight Watchers.

Now, loud voices scream from the palm of your hand, not least thanks to personalised algorithms.

One study concluded that “TikTok algorithms belonging to users with eating disorders delivered more appearance-oriented, dieting, exercise and toxic eating disorder videos than algorithms belonging to healthy controls”.

Last year, TikTok blocked the hashtag “#skinnytok”, which showed content encouraging extreme thinness, reminiscent of the “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) websites of the 2000s. But so-called skinny influencers such as Liv Schmidt, who encourages subscribers to her Skinni Societe to cut portions, remain popular.

Content creator Brooke Molyneaux, who bills herself as “your skinny bestie”, pushes back on whether their content is harmful. “We are being honest about how to get there if they WANT to lose weight,” she tells me in an e-mail.

The Advertising Standards Authority last year banned promotions by retailers including Zara and Marks and Spencer that featured seemingly underweight models, but the march of the thin aesthetic feels almost impossible to escape.

From tapeworm pills to GLP-1

While GLP-1 drugs have been a lifeline for those with diabetes and obesity, as my brief dalliance with the online chemist shows, the pressure is not just being felt by young women.

Recent research by the Health Foundation in the UK found that private GLP-1 prescriptions are predominantly taken up by affluent women in midlife, many of whom came of age in the Kate Moss era, although it is unclear whether they meet the medical criterion.

Menopause fitness coach and influencer Kate Rowe-Ham (@Katerh_fitness) posted on her Instagram account that the “rebirth of skinny hit harder than I expected. I have spent years unpicking my relationship with body image, belonging and worth. All the things women of our generation were quietly trained to attach to a number on a scale... Now we arrive at microdosing (GLP-1s). The latest wellness adjacent pitch being sold as a gentle, balanced, almost mindful way to support metabolic health”.

The business of skinny really took off in the 1920s when companies offering tapeworm pills and vibrating belts encouraged women to get the narrow flapper look. Over the decades, magazines, diet gurus and companies devised new ways for women to part with their cash in the quest to control their size, including pharmaceutical speed, liposuction, diet programmes of branded soups, shakes and snacks, as well as Spanx.

Recent developments are a departure from what Ms Felicity Hayward, a plus-size model and activist, calls a “golden era of body positivity”, between 2017 and 2019 when brands were “extending sizes and emphasising self-love in all sizes”.

She identifies the change starting in 2022, “when Ozempic entered the chat, (triggering) a huge shift in the fashion industry”.

Ms Kristina Zawadzki, who is head of curve at IMM Models London representing models size 12 and over, agrees, identifying a decline in the number “of curve bookings (for) agencies in London and worldwide. Where there used to be curve models included in (the) majority of brand campaigns, it feels lucky to have a curve model included in campaigns at all now. We have even seen major brands completely remove the curve sections from their websites”.

In response, Ms Zawadzki observes increasing numbers of “girls losing weight... We’ve noticed quite a wave of it with not only our models but a lot of curve models across agencies”.

While Ms Hayward is not tempted to use weight-loss drugs, after spending “years learning to love my bigger body”, she has seen many peers take them, “in public and in private, in truth and in lie”, and “dishearteningly seen them promote the weight-loss jabs with a promo code on social media”.

Business boost

Now it seems as if the body positivity movement, says Ms Zawadzki, “was just a trend, which bodies never should be. It’s evident which brands were just jumping on the movement at its height and which ones actually care about their customers seeing diversity in their brand”.

Ms Claudia D’Arpizio, a partner at Bain who leads the consulting firm’s luxury goods vertical, sees GLP-1s as a boost for the sector because by “eliminating the food noise, it’s opening the door for other pleasures” including perfumes and beauty products.

Moreover, designers are moving to body-conscious clothes as the newly slender want to show off their physique and buy new wardrobes.

The tweakment industry, she says, is receiving a boost from dieters experiencing so-called Ozempic face, with cheeks and jawlines losing volume, turning to “fillers and injectables” – an opportunity that those making skincare products are also profiting from.

Yet Rutgers University’s professor of psychology Charlotte Markey and author of The Body Image Book series says: “The skinny aesthetic never fully disappeared, even during periods when body diversity and inclusivity (from the early 2010s) were more visible in media and fashion.”

University of Warwick’s professor of philosophy Heather Widdows and author of the book Perfect Me: Beauty As An Ethical Ideal sees body diversity as “a distraction” from the perennial pull towards thinness. While some aspects of beauty representation have become more diverse, like ethnicity or age, the general message was that “everyone needs more work” with “diet or exercise regimes or cosmetic interventions”.

The recent penchant for a curvier shape was still prescriptive, says Dr Gerrard.

“My research participants talked about the Kardashian body, (with) wider hips, bigger bums, bigger boobs. There were still rules. You had to have a narrow waist, wide hips, a lovely curvy bum, you had to have boobs, but then you still had to have visible collarbones. And your arms needed to be slender or toned. So it wasn’t quite as liberating as one might have thought.”

Prof Widdows predicts that with the growth of diet drugs, there will be “more of an expectation of thinness”.

As slimness becomes the norm, new beauty ideals will come to the fore, such as “athleticism”, marking out a toned elite from the merely slender masses. FINANCIAL TIMES