The cultural conversation around bodies has entered a hall of mirrors. In the space of a few years, the radical demand for body liberation has been replaced by a whispered consensus: thinness is back, it is chemically achievable, and nobody is allowed to name the change without sounding cruel. The evidence is everywhere — on catwalks where 97 per cent of models are a size four or under, in social feeds algorithmically stuffed with injector-influencers and “before-and-after” reels, and in the boardrooms where pharmaceutical giants sponsor fashion weeks while insisting they are merely advancing “health.”
The Vogue Moment That Said It All
The contradiction crystallised in Milan last month. Vogue World, staged beneath the glass domes of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, featured Gigi Hadid in archival Valentino and robots dancing past a scowling Miuccia Prada. The sponsor that drew the sharpest ire was Eli Lilly, the trillion-dollar manufacturer of Zepbound and Mounjaro. Eating disorder advocates called the partnership a grotesque conflation of aspirational thinness and medical treatment. Lilly’s response was a masterclass in corporate doublespeak: the company collaborates with “cultural platforms like Vogue … because that is where conversations about bodies and health take place,” a spokesperson said, adding that Lilly is “working to shift the conversation about weight from aesthetics to health and to challenge the stigma people with obesity face every day.”
The dissonance was impossible to miss. Vogue has been a byword for fashion, glamour and thinness for more than a century. To claim a partnership with its flagship event serves an anti-aesthetic agenda requires a suspension of disbelief that only the current moment can sustain.
From Radical Roots to Corporate Slogans
Body positivity did not begin as a marketing hook. The phrase has been used by eating disorder therapists and, “especially fat liberation and fat activists,” since at least the 1990s, according to Tigress Osborn, chair of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. She views it in tandem with Health at Every Size — which argues that higher body weight should not be pathologised — and bodily autonomy in its fullest sense: “you own yourself and you get to do what you want” with your body.
The mainstream explosion began on Tumblr and Instagram, where plus-sized people posted pictures with captions of self-love under #BoPo. By 2015, Tess Holliday was on the cover of People as “the world’s first size 22 supermodel.” Lizzo rapped about “getting thicker.” Meghan Trainor topped charts with All About That Bass. Brands from Dove to Lane Bryant rushed to monetise the mood, and US Vogue put Ashley Graham on its cover in 2017 — though she was wedged between straight-sized models, her contours obscured. When Lizzo covered the same title in 2020 in tomato-red Valentino chiffon, the milestone felt harder won.
Yet the industry’s embrace was often skin deep. Michaela Stark, an artist and couturier who worked in fashion at the movement’s peak, recalls creative directors treating diversity like a shopping list: “one Black, one Asian, one old, one fat.” Brands rarely manufactured the plus-sized garments they staged; Paloma Elsesser’s 2022 I-D cover featured Miu Miu, which did not produce clothes in her size. “Every single micro level of fashion has catered to creating clothes for an ultra-thin body,” Stark says. “Brands would have to invest a whole lot of money and expertise into reinventing that.” They didn’t.
The data bears out the retreat. The Fashion Spot tracked a rise from six plus-sized models in autumn 2016 to a record 103 — 2.34 per cent of castings — in autumn 2022. Since then, Vogue Business reports a sharp decline: 95 per cent of looks on straight-size models in 2023 and 2024, rising to 97 per cent in the two years since. Calvin Klein, Versace and Chanel used zero plus-sized models between 2013 and 2018, according to one academic study. The progress, always marginal, has evaporated.
The Algorithmic Pipeline to Disordered Eating
The timeline is not coincidental. Wegovy, the first GLP-1 approved for weight loss, arrived in June 2021 — just as TikTok became the world’s most-downloaded app. Its For You page, driven by opaque engagement metrics rather than chosen follows, served a relentless stream of thin fitness influencers, GLP-1 testimonials, and plastic surgery reveals. Studies found the platform perpetuated “toxic diet culture” and the misconception that “weight is the most important measure of a person’s health.” Instagram followed suit.
The old body-positivity advice — curate your feed, follow diverse bodies — collapsed under algorithmic pressure. Amanda Raffoul, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, describes “algorithmic funneling”: content pushed “to people who might not have been seeking it out in the first place.” Platforms have banned overtly pro-eating-disorder hashtags like #SkinnyTok, but “grey area content” — calorie deficits framed as “protein goals,” body checks disguised as “fit checks” — remains rampant and profit-generating.
Celebrity bodies fuel week-long churn cycles. When Ariana Grande appeared visibly diminished in her Petal video, debate raged for days over whether comment was concern or cruelty. Raffoul notes there is no right answer: “If you were worried about a person in your real life circle, the advice would be straightforward: you ask them about how they’re feeling. But we can’t ask a celebrity, ‘Hey, girl, how you doing?’ And those people have social capital.” Silence carries its own message. So does the noise.
A New Lexicon for an Old Obsession
In sanctioned spaces — red carpets, school gates, corporate interviews — the desire for thinness is only ever whispered. A new vocabulary does the heavy lifting. Influencers speak of “macros,” not calories; “snatched” or “toned,” never “skinny.” Feeds overflow with advice on protein targets and body-composition scans — fat percentage, visceral fat, lean mass, metabolic age — while insisting the scale is “a flawed metric.”
This week’s Victoria’s Secret show illustrated the shift. Preparation, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley said, is “a mindset more than anything … feeling strong and fit, as opposed to thinking about a number on the scales.” The regimen includes strength training, hydration, lymphatic drainage, cold plunges and facials. “Nothing is off the table for me ever with my diet,” she added. The doublespeak is seamless.
Fashion magazines that would never openly applaud skinniness run galleries titled “Abs Are the Best Beauty Flex at the 2026 Grammys.” Injector-influencers claim they would never comment on a celebrity’s face — before unpicking “why this look can happen and what you can do if you feel like it’s happening to you.” Demi Moore, radiant at 60, tells People her appearance “doesn’t define my value,” then promotes Lancôme’s Absolue Longevity MD range, which aims to “reverse the skin’s visible biological age at every life stage.” The language of acceptance has been hollowed out and refilled with the same old imperatives.
The pressure is particularly acute for people in larger bodies. Osborn describes a new boldness: “People get to tell themselves that they’re being kind to you by telling you that you should be using it.” This, she argues, violates bodily autonomy: “If you want to lose weight with these drugs that’s your business. But you shouldn’t be sociopolitically coerced into it.”
A rare moment of honesty arrived recently when Joey King, 26, addressed speculation about a facelift after the Met Gala. She disclosed a 36-hour fast — “No food, nothing but water … I don’t promote that” — and lymphatic drainage. The internet largely accepted it. Headlines framed it as her “shutting down” rumours, borrowing body-positivity language to sanitise a starvation tactic. Perhaps, finally, there was nothing to argue about. At least she was being honest.
Why it Matters
The collapse of body positivity into wellness doublespeak leaves a vacuum where honest conversation used to be. A generation taught that all bodies are beautiful now watches those same bodies shrink under chemical and algorithmic pressure, while the language to describe what is happening — desire, coercion, loss, grief — has been declared taboo. The result is not liberation but a deeper, quieter shame: the sense that your body is a project you are failing to optimise, even as the culture insists it never asked you to change. Until we can name the pursuit of thinness without euphemism or moral panic, we remain trapped in a hall of mirrors where every reflection is filtered, every compliment coded, and every silence complicit.
