Look, I know we’re really not supposed to comment on women’s bodies in the media any more. It’s deeply un-feminist, according to the course correction celebrity journalism has attempted to make after the 2000s, where young stars were hounded for even a slightly unflattering paparazzi shot.
But when Lily Collins, star of Netflix’s Emily in Paris, attended the Calvin Klein show at New York Fashion Week, I felt an unnerving moment of deja vu. Just like during the Wicked press tour last year, we are once again being asked to watch a woman in the spotlight flaunt a perilously thin body and either applaud her on her magnificence or shut up and keep our commentary to ourselves.
This isn’t just a question of Ozempic blitzing through Hollywood, with A-listers and Z-list influencers alike suddenly becoming ultra-skinny (and extra snatched thanks to the sudden popularity of deep plane face lifts). It’s a question of how fashion brands and film studios are failing in a duty of care, and how young women are being presented with a dangerous narrative about extreme thinness as both aspirational and financially rewarding.
To be clear, it is not Collins’s fault, at least not exactly. She has been far more open than she needs to be about her personal history with an eating disorder. In 2017 she published a collection of essays titled Unfiltered: No Shame, No Regrets, Just Me, where she details how she began overexercising and using laxatives to lose weight when she was just 16, after her (famous) parents divorced. Alongside anorexia, she says, she also also developed bulimia.
The effects were horrifying, and in the book Collins does not skimp on demonstrating how devastating and pervasive the effects can be. “Between the starvation, the diet pills, the laxatives and throwing up, I not only lost all of my energy, but my body started to shut down,” she writes. “My period stopped for a couple of years, and I was terrified I had ruined my chances of having kids.”
That same year, Collins starred in Netflix film To the Bone, playing a college dropout struggling with anorexia. Understandably Collins connected with the script, but taking on the role while in recovery from your own anorexia journey seems like an insanely risky move, especially as she intentionally lost weight for the role. The film came under a lot of scrutiny for the risks it took potentially glamourising the condition. But stills and quotes from the film began popping up on pro-ana websites (online spaces inhabited by young women encouraging each other to lose dangerous amounts of weight) almost immediately.
Some quarters of the media sensibly raised questions about how potentially triggering a role such as this in a movie such as this could be, others were wildly irresponsible. Lily Collins: ‘How I overcame my eating disorder' was the actual headline from one glossy magazine feature. In the interview, Collins discussed working with a nutritionist to ‘help’ her lose the weight and recover it.
“I never got sick, I never missed work. It's a miracle that my body kept functioning,” Collins said of the process. As if not losing your health or even your life for a Netflix film is a high bar to clear. The studio may have provided her a support team to gain the weight back, but it became apparent by the latest season of Emily in Paris that Collins was once again terribly gaunt.
Recovery isn’t linear. If Collins is having a very public relapse, she deserves nothing but sympathy and fervent wishes that she has access to the support she needs. But her doing interviews where she talks about how she’s fully in recovery and doing well when photos suggest otherwise is demonstrating exactly the kind of disordered thinking that harms people in the throes of eating disorders.
Maybe she still has a crack team of nutritionists feeding her all the supplements she needs to keep healthy and working, but girls and young women constricting their eating and looking at all the photos of her online don’t have that luxury.
There’s also the sticky issue of motherhood with Collins. We also apparently shouldn’t condemn her ‘choice’ to use a surrogate to begin a family. Choice feminists would have you believe its it’s immoral to police another woman’s family planning methods. Which is fair... up to a point. The US surrogacy system is deeply unethical and open to horrifying levels of exploitation — just read the jaw-dropping case covered in Wired a few weeks ago where a surrogate was hounded by a venture capitalist after suffering a tragic stillbirth.
This will not win me fans on the internet, but the truth is I don’t think it is ethical to outsource the physical risks of carrying a child to term and birthing them to another human being, only to parade around a diminished waist that could trigger your audience of primarily young female fans. Especially if you have an eating disorder that potentially negatively impacted your fertility or ability to bear children.
That being said, it’s the brands dressing celebrities and parading them round for publicity that should be condemned. How could the team at Calvin Klein sign off that photo carousel where Collins is so clearly underweight? If anything, the two-piece co-ord they selected seems designed to show off her visible rib cage and spine. Perhaps after the Sydney Sweeny debacle died down they needed another social media backlash to stoke.
And then there’s Netflix, who had her lose weight for one film, then keep pushing out new seasons of Emily in Paris — where Collins is costumed in all the high-end fashion brands to serve brand tie-ins. We’re right back to 2006, where Anne Hathaway and Emily Blunt were literally crying on set because they were so hungry on the restrictive diets the studio put them on to be able to fit into fashion sample sizes.
Frankly, it should be illegal for actors to be asked to lose weight for a role. If we have the technology to de-age Al Pacino in the Irishman then surely an actor can be made to look gaunt in post-production. And this isn’t just about women in entertainment; male actors should also not be required to go on dangerous bodybuilding diet and workout regimes (that may or may not involve steroids) to get eye-poppingly stacked for superhero movies.
Fashion brands should also know better, but now that thin is supposed to be ‘in’ again, they’re sending increasingly skinny models down runways and putting out adverts that fall foul of industry rules. Perhaps the Advertising Standards Authority’s powers should be extended to all kinds of brand tie-ins profiting off women pushing their bodies to dangerous extremes. But that won’t happen unless we all start talking about it honestly.
India Block is a columnist at The Standard
