We’ve known it for a while, but still – it’s depressing to have the news confirmed. When it comes to fashion, skinny is back in. This week, retailer M&S kicked up a stink when one of its ads was criticised by the advertising watchdog for being “unhealthily thin.” And it’s true.
Looking at the image (which was of a woman so skinny that her legs look like flagpoles) does cause a Noughties-shaped shudder to roll down the spine.
M&S, for its part, has stopped using the ad and said that the models were wearing clothes “at the lower end of their sizing range”.
But to place the blame squarely onto the retailer (even if the retailer in question has a history of being inclusive rather than exclusive in its sizing) is to miss the fact of the matter entirely. The fact is, everybody’s at it these days.
The fact is, it’s not just M&S who are to blame. Everybody’s at it these days
Earlier in the year, Next was pulled up for an ad promoting its blue skinny jeans. The image, which was eventually banned, was criticised for the model’s pose, which made her look “unhealthily thin”. Though Next pushed back, saying she had a “healthy and toned physique”, that, oddly, did little to sway the regulator.And it’s not just retailers.
Over the weekend, The Sunday Times ran, on its front page, no less, a piece proclaiming ‘How not to gain weight this summer (and still have fun)’. When I saw it, I almost spat out my full-fat cappuccino.
What in the everloving diet fad are we doing? Why is this obsession with being skinny back – and worse, why do we think it’s acceptable again?
I can still recall the bad old days of the Noughties. As a tween and then teen, it was a dark time to grow up – I spent most of my formative years being bombarded with clips of Kate Moss telling us that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels,” and front pages fat-shaming women for the audacity of having cellulite. If a girl at school gained weight, the news would be around the entire year group in seconds.
This is the kind of stuff that gets internalised, and to see us wrestling once more with this particular hydra makes me inexpressibly angry. After years of agonising progress towards inclusivity (and yes I do mean agonising), the advent of Ozempic appears to rolled back the clock.
Now that losing weight is a simple matter of an injection or two, the entire industry is veering back towards the old, depressing norms.
Showing skinny models in adverts isn’t innocent; it’s promoting an unhealthy obsession with body image that we all should know better than to give any airtime to. If even salt-of-the-earth British forever brand M&S is joining them, then we must truly be entering a dismal era.
Vicky Jessop is lifestyle and culture writer at The London Standard
