For all the strides the body positivity movement has made over the past decade, including within the fashion industry, there have been signs that the thin ideal was always going to make a comeback. You can blame the “wellness” culture that idealises thinness, or the return of 90s fashion, and the “heroin chic” bodies that wore it. Blame the rise of weight-loss injections such as Ozempic, or the way fashion tends to swing back and forth. Or blame the demonisation of “wokeness” and diversity initiatives by conservatives. Or, blame it all, along with the fatphobia that never really went away, even though it pretended to. Models, activists and those of us who had hoped that fashion’s embrace of a range of sizes signified a genuine culture change are left wondering how it could have reversed so quickly. “I think you’re seeing the separation between people that were doing it because there was a movement at the time,” says Standley, “and the people who are truly passionate about it.”
So, fat birds were being used as models. Now they’re not.
Ho Hum.
But something a little deeper.
So, after decades of whining everyone agreed that no, it really is your genes, your hormones, the essential you, to be a tub of lard. It isn’t, in fact, that you just eat too much. Capitalism and the patriarchy perhaps, but deffo not lovely you.
And so celebration of the you. Or even, if we use a few whales then we can sell stuff to the population of whales out there.
Then some utter, utter, invents an injection which suppresses appetite. Anyone who gets the injection loses weight. So, err, in fact those rolls of bubblicious were in fact simply because you ate too much, weren’t they? Not genes, hormones, patriarchy or capitalism but doughnuts by the dozen.
At which point why celebrate? Why not just go back to pointing and jeering? And therefore….