Meathwoman's Diary: When did our bodies become fashion trends?

Every ten years or so, fashion trends come back around. The clothes we once thought were embarrassing become desirable again, dragged from the back of our wardrobes and repackaged for a new generation, but fashion doesn’t just recycle clothes. It recycles bodies, too.

When the early 2000s came back into fashion, so did the body ideals that accompanied them. Scroll through TikTok or Instagram now and you’ll find people talking about a “skinny epidemic”, the return of extreme thinness, and the increasingly normalised use of weight-loss drugs and diabetes treatments such as Ozempic. It feels like we have somehow come full circle.

I remember being a little girl in the mid-2000s and hearing about the women in my family going to Weight Watchers. The house was scattered with Trinny and Susannah books, while Ten Years Younger and America’s Next Top Model played on the television. At the time, I was too young to understand what any of it meant. Looking back, I realise just how early I was introduced to the idea that a woman’s body was something to be constantly monitored, altered and improved.

As I grew into my teenage years, the Kardashian family became some of the most recognisable people on the planet. Suddenly, the ideal body wasn’t simply thin. It was curvaceous in very specific places.

Girls my age experimented with push-up bras, butt pads and corsets, trying to manufacture a body shape that most teenagers simply did not naturally have. The infamous “Kylie Lip Challenge”, which saw young women suctioning glasses to their lips in an attempt to temporarily enlarge them, became a bizarre symbol of just how far we were willing to go to imitate the women we saw online.

When I was a teen, I hated being thin. The body that was “in” wasn’t mine.

The language and aesthetics of diet culture may have changed since the early 2000s, but the underlying message never disappeared, it simply reinvented itself.

The unauthorised supply and use of drugs such as Ozempic has become increasingly normalised. It is no longer something that exists solely in the deepest corners of the internet.

What worries me most is not simply the desire to lose weight, it is how willing we have become to sacrifice our health in pursuit of external validation. Whether that means depriving ourselves of the nutrition our bodies need or putting substances into them without proper medical oversight, the message remains remarkably similar: your body, as it is, is not enough.

If body types continue to move in and out of fashion, what are we asking our bodies to endure over the course of a lifetime? A young, healthy body is something incredibly valuable. The ability to walk, run, dance, exercise and simply exist without our bodies becoming a battleground is something many people would give anything to have.