If you’ve taken a trek through fashion TikTok lately, you’d know all too well that thinness is back again. On my “For You” page, women dance in low–rise jeans, shake in bodycon dresses, and lace up their corsets so tight that their waists look carved into their body. K–pop idols take the stage in micro mini skirts and bolero tops, while fans dissect the suitability of their styling to their body type. Even among high fashion, a Vogue Business report showed that 97.18% of models in Spring/Summer 2026 fashion weeks were “very small” (size 0–4). Out of 9,038 analyzed looks, only 2.0% featured “regular–sized” models, while 0.9% were “plus–size” (size 14+).
To those familiar with the trend cycle, this feels strangely reminiscent of the 1990s and 2000s, when extreme thinness dominated billboards and magazines. The body positivity ushered in by the 2010s sought to combat this, and in came a golden age of plus size fashion creators and models. Now, though, that progress has been lost. Waistlines have been going down, but eating disorders haven’t. Pro–anorexia content is back on TikTok, celebrities have an Ozempic pandemic, and health visits for eating disorders amongst children doubled between 2018 and 2022. “Truth be told, I thought we were past this,” The Story Exchange journalist Candice Helfand–Rogers says. Samantha Bush echoes the sentiment on X: “Thin is in again and it worries me. My early 2000s PTSD is creeping up.”
While trends in body standards have always been cyclic, many had hope that body diversity would last, or at least, last more than a decade. At the same time, the ideal beautiful figure in certain other nations have barely budged an inch. In this piece, we’ll investigate why thinness in America came back so quickly, and why America is uniquely susceptible to impossibly–fast changing body standards.
The extreme thinness of the ’90s emerged as a rebellion against the prosperous, disciplined supermodel of the ’80s with visible biceps and toned abs. When GDP was increasing 7% in one year under Reagan, Elle Macpherson’s Olympic–ready body was aspirational fodder before your evening workout. But a decade later, the end of the Cold War erased the clear, bipolar structure that had organized global politics, creating a mass sense of aimlessness and malaise—some called it the “end of history.” The 1990 oil price shock, combined with high interest rates and a crumbling real estate market, sent the economy into a recession. When the youth of Gen X graduated into a 7% unemployment rate in 1992, the same supermodel image became a reminder of the boomers’ broken promises.
Upcoming magazines like i–D and The Face began portraying models sitting on the floor with sunken–in cheekbones, wearing ripped fishnet tights, and flicking cigarettes at a camera. This was the heroin chic movement—hollow eyes and visible ribcages hinted at emaciation due to drug addiction. The extreme thinness, a direct revolt against the prosperity and polish of the previous decade, resonated with the increasingly cynical and nihilistic youth. As the ’90s trudged on, heroin chic became all the rage, making its way into Playboy and Calvin Klein perfume campaigns.
Sounds familiar? With the rising fascism and college graduate unemployment rates of 2026, the desire amongst youth to rebel against glamour is back. The femcels of TikTok are no longer just rotting in piles of unwashed clothes—they’re now hunching over against walls, dressing up in ballet tutus and pointe shoes, showing off their emaciated collarbones, and tweeting, “I’m not ‘glamorizing anorexia,’… I’m simply glamorous and anorexic.” Frailness and skin–tight bones have come back as a protest against body positivity, which can easily turn toxic by constantly demanding self–love.
These girls are gaunt, depressed–looking, and visibly unwell—yet, they are famous for it—suggesting that markers of poverty and illness become aspirational. We often think of fashion trends, whether clothes or body type, as trickling down: the middle and lower classes try to emulate high fashion, magazines, and celebrities. Then, when they’ve caught up, the upper classes find a new luxury item to adopt as their status symbol, and the cycle repeats.
In a 2020 paper by Wharton and Columbia Business School professors Jonah Berger and Silvia Bellezza, an alternate theory is introduced: The rich emulate the lower classes “as a costly signal” to distinguish themselves from the middle. In the early 19th century, amid a tuberculosis pandemic (which was responsible for 40% of working–class deaths), wealthy women of the early Victorian era drank vinegar, starved themselves, and used cosmetic products to mimic the ghostly skin, thin figures, and hollow eyes of the ill. The heroin chic aesthetic and the celebrity obsession with ozempic today can also be read this way: if a person afflicted with poverty has their bones poking out of tattered clothes, you’d assume their frail figure was due to starvation. But put the same body on Ariana Grande in a $15,000 Glinda dress, and you’d think it’s a deliberate aesthetic choice. When a marker of poverty is paired with a symbol of wealth, the rich further differentiate themselves from the middle class, whose positioning lies too close to the lower class to risk such a presentation. Even at the height of heroin chic, fashion photography of the dirtiest, most vile images always contained an undercurrent of glamor—they maintained photographic distance from the depraved addiction it portrayed. The waif femcel girls, too—by dressing up in elaborate ballet sets, they maintain a sense of glamor to their sickness.
Fashion creator Liz Drayna explains that trends die when they become repetitive and hence boring. In a single TikTok scroll in spring 2025, you could see dozens, even hundreds of people wearing suits, jackets, and dresses in a very specific shade of yellow resembling that of raw butter. Within just two weeks, people got tired of it, and that was the end of the butter yellow trend.
Trends, according to Liz, get old “all the quicker” in the social media age. You could get tired of butter yellow without ever having seen the color being worn in person. To get tired of a trend from in person exposure, you’d have to walk around SoHo an entire afternoon—even then, you wouldn’t see as many.
It can be argued that the Kardashians were the first to set a body standard in the social media age. Between 2015 and 2021, the number of BBLs grew 77.6%. When Kylie Jenner posted her lip filler in 2015, the search term increased 3,233% overnight. The “royal family of America” defined the ideal body type of the 2010s, shaped with an uncannily narrow waist with wide hips. Growing up in Gen Z, Kim Kardashian was always undoubtedly the ideal body. You couldn’t go to Miami Beach without seeing 15 BBLs.
After a decade of Kim in Vogue, it’s only natural that Gen Z began to crave something fresh. The Y2K flat tummies and booty shorts or the ’90s cigarettes and fishnets increasingly carried an allure of nostalgic fantasy.
The cycle of thin to curvy and back is not new, but the scale at which it’s moving is. In the 18th century, a fuller, rounder figure symbolized health and wealth. This was the ideal body type for 150 years, before Massachusetts—born artist Charles Dana Gibson popularized the Gibson Girl—a thinner, hourglass figure. When contrasted against the Kim curves, which lasted just a decade, the acceleration of the change of body standards is undeniable.
The ideal American body is a constant negotiation between tradition and rebellion. Whether it’s the defiance of body positivity in precarious economic times, the desire of the rich to mark themselves distinct from the middle class, or the overexposure of a hyperspecific body type, the chronically online nature of American fashion discourse accelerates the cyclic and disposable nature of trendy bodies. The beauty standard is an artifact of an incessant tug of war between hundreds of ever–changing economic, class, and artistic factors.
Across the Atlantic, however, that tug of war never quite took hold. Gabriela R. Proietti, a Philly–born writer, details how living in Italy flipped this conception on its head. In Italy, there is a common saying, “la bella figura.” It translates to “the beautiful figure” in English, but really, it’s used to describe someone who is healthy, well–dressed, and confident. “English has no word or phrase to describe this phenomenon that language does so eloquently,” she says.
Italian style is often characterized by neutral, earth–tone palettes, high–quality fabrics, and well–fitted, refined pieces. It is a “smart–casual” look that remains polished, comfortable for walking, and appropriate for both city, and rural settings. In contrast to American style, it emphasizes timeless virtues of elegance, quality, and sophistication.
Health and wellness are “at the root of the culture,” but counting calories or restricting carbohydrates are taboo. When Proietti mentioned to her Italian relatives that she didn’t want to eat pasta because of its high carb content, they replied incredulously: “But Gabriela, you love pasta! We eat pasta every week, every day. It’s only water and flour, why all of a sudden is pasta unhealthy?” Pasta and pizza have been integral, prized parts of Italian culture for centuries, and to insinuate you know better can almost feel like an insult to the beloved traditions. Italian pasta, which is often cooked fresh off the cutting board without preservatives—many common American preservatives are illegal in the European Union—has never caused health issues for the country in the past.
Instead, Italian health is centered around community, embodied experience, and sourcing of ingredients. “For example,” Proietti says, “meals are never rushed or skipped. Coffee breaks are sometimes longer than ten minutes, going to the outdoor market to purchase seasonal produce is a right of passage, and sitting down for a glass of wine with a friend in an open piazza is not a threat or reward but a ritual that Italians believe we all deserve.” Mealtime is sacred; food should be enjoyed with one’s full attention.
Cassandra Santoro, a New York City native who moved to Italy for a year, detailed a similar experience. “When you start to understand what’s special to the specific area, you understand what’s in season, that’s when you start to change,” she says. “I just feel more inspired to eat better, to support the local people and keep learning.”
In contrast, American health fads often focus on more quantifiable—and arguably more superficial—metrics. In his book In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, UC Berkeley Professor Michael Pollan argues that nutritionism, the reduction of food to its carbs and calories, is an ideology that alienates us from the embodied, earned knowledge that comes with paying attention to how we eat. He writes, “regarding food as being about things other than bodily health—like pleasure, say, or sociality or identity—makes people no less healthy; indeed, there’s some reason to believe it may make them more healthy.” American late–stage capitalism commodifies the deeply personal experience of inhabiting a body into sellable metrics.
Thinness sells. Rutgers University assistant professor Mary Rizzo writes that corporations used images of heroin chic to sell their products to “alienated Gen Xers, who are estimated to have a buying power of 125 billion dollars.” Today, the Miu Miu mini–microskirt, one of the token clothing pieces of the 2020s thinness rerise, is notorious for its exclusive use of ultra–skinny models with concave stomachs. When you buy a product on a thin model, you’re also buying the aspiration of thinness. As prominent American feminist author Naomi Wolf argues in The Beauty Myth, “Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the self–hating, ever–failing, hungry, and sexually insecure state.”
As a relatively new country composed of diverse cultures, America doesn’t benefit from the same centuries of rituals to ground us as a collective. As a result, our body standard is constantly being tugged in opposing directions by cultural forces—socioeconomic anxiety, rebellion, and desire for novelty—hence, undergoing a massive shift every decade. The body becomes a vessel onto which we project all of these cultural anxieties.
Of course, Italy faces the same tensions as the rest of the world. A 2024 study of 1,740 Italian teens found that over 27% were at risk of developing eating disorders, with social media body comparison as a significant predictor. “La bella figura” was never a perfect solution, but it did offer a foundation, with centuries of pride in elegance and confidence, that’s harder to crack. When your relationship to food and the body is built around a Wednesday market with your favorite local farmer and a glass of wine with your mom and dad, it’s harder for ads to destabilize it.
The question, then, isn’t whether we can copy Italy, but whether we can find our own version of what Proietti found in an Italian market.
“Here in Italy, the body is sacred,” Proietti says, “celebrated no matter the age, size, or number. My moment of truth was here, amongst complete strangers, who showed me that life is meant to be lived and enjoyed, something I couldn’t fully embrace because of my insecurities.”