Last year was supposed to herald the moment when we made peace with our bodies. Plus-size models in ad campaigns; realistic-looking boobs, bellies and bums in underwear shoots; and record numbers of what the fashion industry calls “curve bookings” on the catwalk.
Goodbye, hang-ups; hello to letting it all hang out – during the heatwave months of the summer, I noticed young women dressing for comfort and cool, with none of the self-consciousness around size that was drilled into my generation.
Now 2023 has rolled round, and with it a revival of the now vintage crop tops, ultra-low-rise jeans and body-hugging dresses of my teenage years in the late Nineties and early Noughties, it isn’t just those of us who wore them the first time round who can feel the old neuroses of that era roaring back too.
Because 2022 was also the year of legally mandated calorie counts on menus – a move the Women’s and Equalities Committee warned against – and a global shortage of the diabetes drug Ozempic, after a glut of before-and-after content on TikTok highlighted its weight-loss side-effects. Its name has been searched more than 300 million times.
More than 10,000 young people started NHS treatment for eating disorders between April and December 2021, a record number that is two-thirds higher than pre-pandemic. One in three teenage girls on Instagram say the app has made their body issues worse, while 40 per cent of its users feel “unattractive” since using it. A Good Housekeeping survey this year found that almost 20 per cent of respondents would trade years off their life for the “ideal” body – which is beginning to look increasingly skinny again.
The 30-year-old Dutch influencer Vivian Hoorn tells me she feels she is “screaming at a society that doesn’t want to listen”.
The former model, who is between a UK size 14 and 16, has made a career of sharing outfits with her half a million followers on Instagram, yet many of her most recent posts have included no clothes at all. She is having difficulty finding things that suit.
“I saw this Nineties and Y2K look happening, and my first thought was, ‘You have to be thin for these clothes,’” she says. “They didn’t show my body well. I felt more confident naked. I could see the art in my figure – like a Rubens woman or a statue. So I thought: right, I’ll share without clothes then.”
Tanned flesh with dimples and puckers. Soft folds and rounded rolls. Stretch marks and the sort of shadowy crevices that are usually sucked in or blurred out, posed or angled away under the scrutiny of the lens. Hoorn is the average women’s clothing size both in her own country and ours, yet her body feels radical on a platform usually known for its pert bum-selfies, prominent cheekbones and waspish waists.
These tend to be the attributes most highly prized among the clutch of plus-size models repeatedly booked for the catwalks too. One of fashion week’s most prolific “curve” models is 29-year-old Jill Kortleve – smaller by some way than most women at a UK size 12. Others, such as Paloma Elsesser (size 16), Ashley Graham (16), Tess McMillan (12) and Precious Lee (14 and a DD cup), have become recognisable faces not only at the shows but on magazine covers too. Yet their sharp cheekbones and defined waists tend to represent a larger version of what designers are already used to working with rather than the average size 14 body, and one sees these same few faces again and again. Not only that, booking one or two plus-size models increasingly feels like brands ticking a box – and licence for the rest of the cast to be skinnier than ever.
On the fashion week catwalks in New York this autumn, 103 appearances by plus-size models set a new record, but in London, Milan and Paris, front-row editors were shocked by how thin some of the models were. It felt like a return to the bad old days. While the industry proclaims its own progressiveness, many are decrying curve bookings as tokenism and warning of a throwback to the etiolated look dubbed “heroin chic” in the Nineties.
“Every bigger model is progress,” Hoorn says without hesitation when I ask her thoughts. “Because it’s one more than none. You see people’s faces lighting up, getting their phones out, clapping when there’s a bigger body coming down the catwalk. So why aren’t brands listening? Why do I still get sent to the men’s department when I want to buy a designer belt?”
Hoorn came of age snapping outfit pictures and documenting them on her blog, desperate one day to become a model. With her freckled, heart-shaped face, ski-jump nose and luscious pout, it’s easy to see why she thought she might have a chance.
“I grew up in a cosy family on a farm in the Netherlands,” she tells me. “My family loves food. We enjoy eating together. My mum has a bigger body and she was always very confident, so I was too – until I started modelling.”
When she was taken on by her agency, they told her the industry’s standard measurements were 34-24-36 (a UK 8-10). She measured 37.5 on her hips.
“I was 16 and travelling back and forth to Amsterdam to see the agency’s personal trainer. My family was supportive, gave me proper healthy meals, but it became an obsession. I’d get angry with myself when I didn’t have the discipline only to eat carrots.”
The same social media platforms that have given Hoorn her voice and following are still serving up this diet culture of old – sometimes dressed up as fitness, wellness or cooking content, but just as often as weight-loss tips, restricted eating and the thinness of others presented as part of an aspirational and perfectly curated lifestyle. A survey by the social media company Be Real found that 46 per cent of teenage girls worried “always” or “often” about their appearance. The platform is popular with Gen Z because it aims to strip artifice from users’ posts by offering a small time window to upload them and no filters with which to fake a glow or airbrush out a few inches.
Instagram and TikTok have recently brought in redirects to eating disorder helplines when users search the hashtag “thinspo” (short for “thinspiration”), but a study in November found that teenagers using the platforms were often served up “pro-ana” content (pro-anorexic posts that encourage disordered eating) without having searched for it. For many users, TikTok is a source of new and wacky recipes, but extreme diet content slips through under the label “cuisine”.
Research also found TikTok’s algorithm perpetuates a “toxic diet culture” among those who use it, unless they actively seek not to engage with content around weight loss. One innocent, accidental or even regretful trip down the platform’s dieting rabbit hole will generate a feed full of similar offerings on the assumption that it is of interest.
You don’t have to be on social media to have been influenced either – simply try shopping. Every single model in the dress section of Zara’s website right now – and I have trawled through hundreds – has the same waifish aspect of the “heroin chic” era. On M&S they look marginally less hungry but are, to a woman, slender and narrow-waisted. Browse Mango’s plus-size section – which goes up to size 26 – and it is striking how normal size 12 and 14 models look compared with the very thin ones in the brand’s main section. Many of its more body-conscious pieces only run to a size 12.
“We’re used to men in boardrooms making decisions about women’s bodies,” says Emma Grede, the co-founder and CEO of Khloé Kardashian’s denim brand Good American, which runs from size 00 to 32-plus and uses models of every size in all its imagery. “If she’s fuller, it has to be cut on the bias and calf-length. But I found that when we did vinyl miniskirts in a size 22, they sold like crazy because there are so few other options.”
Even so, most of the bodies we see are wildly different from those many people inhabit. On TV, almost everyone from pop stars to newsreaders now has a hard-body physique – even our latest prime minister. I have developed a habit of watching old episodes of Top of the Pops on Friday nights and I am constantly struck by how much more ordinary – civilian and plump-looking – even the famous bodies were in the Eighties and early Nineties.
The most famous body on earth has slimmed down recently too. Once inspiration for a newly fashionable voluptuous silhouette, Kim Kardashian admitted in June to losing about a stone in three weeks to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy birthday, Mr President” dress for the Met Gala. Despite her own curves having been surgically enhanced, Kardashian’s undulating look has meant that, for a decade at least, the desired answer to the diet-obsessive mid-Nineties mantra, “Does my bum look big in this?” has been, “Yes.”
“I don’t want to blame Kim Kardashian,” says Hoorn, “because I think she’s probably super-insecure always to be changing her body like that. But I grew up during ‘size zero’, desperate to be very skinny and small, and I don’t want to go back to that.”
She isn’t the only one. The 32-24-35 physique – smaller than a UK size 6 – became a “goal” for catwalk models and Hollywood starlets during the early Noughties. It was a time of celebrity clavicles and pterodactyl elbows, xylophone sternums and hipbones like door handles – all required for the low-riding cargo pants and hipster jeans, belly-baring handkerchief tops and skintight bandage dresses of the era. As these clothes creep back into vogue, the worry is that a certain body shape will too.
“I graduated from high school in 2003,” recalls the fashion writer Amy Odell, whose biography of the Vogue editor Anna Wintour came out last year. “And I cannot remember ever getting the message while at school that it was OK not to be extremely thin.”
It was a time when celebrity interviews detailed week-long watercress soup diets and Friends’ Courteney Cox reasoned that “to get your bottom half the right size, your face might have to be a little gaunt”. Odell cites the example of Wintour telling Oprah Winfrey to lose a stone and a half before giving her a Vogue cover in 1998, being open even in the late Noughties about having done so.
Then there were the Zoebots – a literal skeleton crew that included Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie and Lindsay Lohan – named after their ectomorph stylist Rachel Zoe, whose look accessorised extreme thinness with chunky boho belts, enormous bug-eyed sunglasses and giant handbags all designed to make the people wearing them look even smaller.
“The institutions that defined beauty standards during the late Nineties and Noughties – such as Vogue and Victoria’s Secret – are crumbling now,” Odell says. “As are the standards they set. So it’s perplexing to people my age to see this time coming back.”
The recent hit song Victoria’s Secret, which calls out the lingerie brand best known for its catwalk angels and their famously gruelling exercise routines, is hopefully proof that young women are wise to Y2K’s toxic messaging. “I know Victoria’s Secret,” sings 26-year-old Jackie “Jax” Miskanic. “She’s an old man who lives in Ohio/ Cashing in off body issues/ Selling skin and bones with big boobs.” It has been streamed 77 million times on Spotify since its release in June.
“I feel really optimistic about this generation,” says Dr Tara Porter, author of You Don’t Understand Me: The Young Woman’s Guide to Life. “Young women have more of a voice now and say in society. Twentysomethings are good at calling out body-shaming and they understand more about the manipulation involved.”
They are holding the old guard to account too.
“At Vogue we are very clear that bodies are not a trend,” says Rosie Vogel, global director of the magazine’s talent and casting. “Where before we might have done a ‘shape issue’ once a year, we now need to showcase all bodies and have diversity in every issue.”
It is a work in progress, she admits. “It sometimes takes longer, because we have to plan to make sure designers have pieces available for different bodies.”
When Paloma Elsesser posed on the cover of the style bible i-D in February, the headline was, “I’m not wearing a stretchy dress, I’m wearing Miu Miu” in reference to the way curve models are usually styled: clingily.
Yet the £850 tailored micro-miniskirt she wore had to be made specially for her in a 16, because the only sample that existed came in a catwalk-sized 6-8. This is the standard for the samples that labels make for their shows and magazine shoots before the range goes into production for customers. It’s where the term “sample size” comes from and why models are encouraged to fit its measurements.
Vivian Hoorn posted a picture of herself last month from a changing room, giving the finger to a not dissimilar chino pleated mini that wouldn’t fasten around her waist.
“I never got those 36in hips,” she says. “I did lose a lot of weight in the end, but I still wasn’t skinny enough. I didn’t get many jobs, because I was too big. Often the clothes didn’t fit.”
She became depressed and insular, losing friends over her preoccupations with food, exercise and her low self-esteem. When one day she ordered soup for lunch but asked the waiter to sieve it and serve it without bread, her friends staged an intervention.
“They told me I had to make a change,” she continues. “They told me that all I spoke about was how much I hated myself; how ugly and fat I was. I realised I had been struggling with depression. So I went to therapy and I learnt to say that I am beautiful and worthy of love.”
Now she is creating a line of clothes designed with women her size – the average – in mind. When designer labels cut their garments, they do so according to that small sample size and then scale up. Hoorn says (and she is not the first) that this means the fit isn’t right on bigger bodies.
“We will make items that I feel confident about on my body, and then scale down and up instead,” she explains. “You don’t know how it is to be in a bigger body unless you have one.”
The brand is called Viveh and is set to launch next spring.
These days Hoorn eats what she likes and works out for her mental health, rather than to lose weight. Her boyfriend likens the flesh on her upper arms to delicious pizza dough.
“I still have that voice every day that tells me I’m not pretty enough, not good enough. But now I can say, ‘Bye bye, off you go.’ I’m busy enjoying myself at the size I am meant to be.”
As for the crop tops?
“I thought I’d never wear that trend,” she says. “Because who wants to see my belly? But then I thought: my belly is beautiful. So I’ve been rocking low-rise pants and miniskirts and I get compliments. It wasn’t until I showed my true self that people finally said I was beautiful.”
Written by: Harriet Walker
© The Times of London