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.

- Emma Jacobs

A model on the runway during Milan Fashion Week in March. Ms Kristina Zawadzki of IMM Models London, who represents models size 12 and over, sees a decline in the number of "curve bookings" for agencies in London and around the world. "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," she says.

(PHOTO: REUTERS)

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”.