There is something strange happening to women's bodies again.
Perhaps “again” is the important word.
The body has always been fashionable in the sense that women's bodies have always been given assignments. Be thin. Be soft. Be voluptuous. Be delicate. Be athletic. Be fertile-looking, but not too maternal. Be sexy, but not vulgar. Have breasts, but not too much cleavage. Have hips, but keep your waist tiny. Have a backside, but somehow remain otherwise impossibly small.
The instructions change. The obligation does not.
I was thinking about this recently when I came across a fashion image that stayed with me precisely because of what was missing from it. The models were plus-size, and the presentation was ostensibly about inclusion. Look, we are making space for different bodies. Look, we are celebrating women who have traditionally been excluded.
Except that several of the models' faces had been replaced by mirrors.
I remember looking at it as a plus-size woman and thinking: Why?
Why, if we are celebrating the woman, do we need to remove her face?
There was something deeply unsettling about seeing the body presented so prominently while the person disappeared. The clothing itself did not always seem particularly interested in accommodating the bodies wearing it, either. Instead of feeling like an ordinary fashion editorial in which women happened to be plus-size, it felt strangely theatrical, almost like an exhibit. Look at the body. Look at the shape. Look at the difference.
Look.
Look.
Look.
And that distinction has stayed with me because I think there is a difference between representation and fascination.
Representation says: We want you here.
Fascination says: We want to look at you.
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
Fashion has a long history of doing something peculiar with women's bodies. It takes them apart.
The hip becomes an architectural feature. The waist becomes a measurement. The breast becomes a silhouette. The backside becomes a trend. The thigh becomes a proportion. The face becomes secondary to the shape beneath it.
And sometimes, when a particular part of a woman's body becomes fashionable, the woman herself does not become fashionable along with it.
This is where I find the current fascination with exaggerated curves so interesting.
We have watched fashion move through several different body ideals within the span of a few decades. In the 1990s, the heroin-chic aesthetic elevated extreme thinness. The ideal was angular, narrow, almost deliberately unwell-looking in some of its most extreme manifestations. The body was supposed to recede beneath the clothes.
Then came the great curve revival of the 2010s. Suddenly the silhouette changed. The waist became tiny again, but the hips and buttocks were supposed to be enormous. Breast augmentation and Brazilian butt lifts became increasingly visible parts of popular beauty culture. Body positivity entered the cultural conversation. Curves were celebrated.
But even that supposed liberation came with instructions.
You were not merely supposed to be larger. You were supposed to be larger in very specific places.
A small waist.
A flat stomach.
A large backside.
Full breasts.
Slim arms.
Long legs.
The body-positive ideal could become its own impossible geometry.
And now, in the middle of the 2020s, the pendulum has begun moving again. Extreme thinness has returned with renewed force to fashion and celebrity culture, alongside a much broader cultural conversation about weight-loss medications, cosmetic procedures, and the pressure to become smaller.
And here is the thing I find most exhausting about all of it:
Women are expected to keep up.
We are all floundering to keep up.
The woman who spent ten years learning to love her curves is suddenly looking at a culture that has decided thinness is desirable again.
The woman who spent ten years trying to become thin is suddenly told she should have a dramatic backside.
The woman who naturally has a large backside is told she has too much of a body.
And the woman who has spent her entire life being told that her body is too large can watch the fashion industry take the very characteristics she was taught to hide and put them on someone else's body, where they become avant-garde.
That is the part I cannot stop thinking about.
They don't always want the plus-size body.
Sometimes they want the idea of it.
They want the hip.
They want the curve.
They want the silhouette.
They want the drama of the body without necessarily wanting the woman who naturally inhabits it.
The curve becomes an accessory.
And perhaps this is why I keep returning to the mirror-faced models. The mirror is almost too perfect a metaphor. We are told to look at the body, but the woman disappears. What is left is a surface on which everybody else can project their ideas.
This is not entirely new.
The history of women's beauty is filled with examples of bodies being admired, mocked, controlled, appropriated, displayed, and reconstructed according to whatever a culture has decided is desirable at a particular moment.
The history of race makes this even more complicated.
European beauty standards have repeatedly treated features associated with women of colour as undesirable when they appeared on the women themselves, only for those same features to become fashionable when detached from their cultural context and repackaged for a different consumer.
Full lips are one obvious example. Fuller backsides and hips are another. The cultural history surrounding these features is enormously complicated, and it would be dishonest to pretend that any one person or culture invented a particular beauty ideal. But the pattern is recognizable: a feature can be ridiculed on one woman and sold as desirable on another.
Perhaps one of the most haunting historical figures in this conversation is Sarah Baartman, the Khoikhoi woman who was exhibited in Europe in the nineteenth century. Her body became an object of European fascination and racist spectacle. Her story has subsequently been invoked in discussions about European fascination with Black women's bodies and the later popularity of exaggerated posterior silhouettes in Western fashion.
The history of the Victorian bustle is more complicated than saying that Baartman “caused” the trend; padded and enlarged silhouettes existed in European dress before her exhibition, and the bustle developed through its own fashion history. But the association is revealing nonetheless. A woman's body can be turned into spectacle, and the features that made her a spectacle can later be transformed into a fashionable silhouette.
The woman can disappear.
The shape remains.
And that is a pattern we still see.
The beauty industry can sell a fuller lip without having to reckon with the women whose lips were once described as excessive.
Fashion can manufacture a pronounced hip without necessarily making room for the woman whose body naturally has one.
A backside can be padded, sculpted, injected, surgically altered, celebrated, and photographed.
And somehow the actual woman can remain too much.
This is why I hesitate when I hear that fashion is simply “celebrating curves.”
Which curves?
On whose body?
Under whose control?
For whose consumption?
And what happens to the woman when the trend changes?
Because trends do change.
That may be the most important thing to remember about beauty standards. They are not laws of nature. They are not revelations handed down from some eternal authority about what a woman is supposed to look like.
They are fashions.
And yet we are encouraged to treat them as though they are moral imperatives.
A woman who is thin is disciplined.
A woman who is curvy is sensual.
A woman who is youthful is desirable.
A woman who is aging is encouraged to fight time.
A woman who is fat is told to become healthy.
A woman who is muscular is praised for discipline.
A woman who is soft is told she has let herself go.
The body is never allowed simply to be a body.
It has to mean something.
It has to prove something.
It has to tell the world whether we are disciplined, desirable, feminine, successful, youthful, traditional, liberated, healthy, sexy, respectable, or worth looking at.
And this is where fashion's relationship with patriarchy becomes so interesting to me.
I don't mean that every designer is sitting in a dark room plotting the next way to make women miserable. The world is rarely that simple.
I mean that there is a much older cultural system in which women's bodies become places where social expectations are written.
The corset did not merely shape a waist. It participated in an idea of femininity.
The bustle did not merely enlarge a silhouette. It created a particular visual architecture for the female body.
The ultra-thin model did not merely wear clothing. She represented a particular ideal of what the fashionable woman looked like.
The bombshell did not merely have breasts and hips. She represented a particular idea of sexuality.
And the contemporary woman is expected to navigate all of these ghosts at once.
She is supposed to be natural, but not too natural.
Curvy, but not fat.
Thin, but not visibly hungry.
Sexy, but not promiscuous.
Feminine, but not weak.
Strong, but not intimidating.
Traditional, but modern.
Independent, but desirable.
There is no finished version.
The woman is always provisional.
That word keeps returning to me: provisional.
Fashion teaches women that their bodies are provisional.
There is always another version coming.
Another silhouette.
Another measurement.
Another procedure.
Another cream.
Another medication.
Another diet.
Another exercise programme.
Another “secret” that celebrities supposedly use to maintain the body that the culture currently finds acceptable.
The target moves, and we are expected to run after it.
And perhaps that is why the current moment feels particularly strange for plus-size women.
For a brief period, there was a sense that perhaps the fashion industry was beginning to understand that women could simply occupy different bodies. Plus-size women appeared more visibly in advertising. Body diversity became a cultural conversation. Designers spoke about inclusion.
But inclusion can become another spectacle when the woman is not treated as a whole person.
There is a difference between saying, “This woman belongs in fashion,” and saying, “This woman's body is interesting enough for us to photograph.”
One gives her agency.
The other gives her an audience.
And I think women understand the difference instinctively.
We know what it feels like to be looked at without being seen.
We know what it feels like to be admired for a feature while the rest of us disappears.
We know what it feels like to be evaluated according to what we can provide rather than who we are.
And that experience does not end at fashion.
It follows women into dating, too.
There are times when a woman is not treated as a whole person but as a means to a whole.
She is someone's future wife.
Someone's future mother.
Someone's proof that he is successful.
Someone's beautiful girlfriend.
Someone's sexual fantasy.
Someone's domestic partner.
Someone's status symbol.
She is placed into an imagined finished life and evaluated according to whether she fits the role.
The body and the woman both become provisional.
You are not quite right yet.
You are not quite the right shape.
You are not quite the right age.
You are not quite feminine enough.
You are not quite agreeable enough.
You are not quite desirable enough.
You will be right when you become what somebody else needs you to be.
And I am tired of that sentence.
Perhaps the radical thing is not learning to love every body.
Perhaps the radical thing is refusing to treat women's bodies as arguments in the first place.
A woman's body does not have to prove that she is liberated.
It does not have to prove that she is disciplined.
It does not have to prove that she is feminine.
It does not have to prove that she is sexually desirable.
It does not have to prove that she is healthy.
It does not have to be fashionable.
It does not have to be an act of rebellion.
It does not have to represent anything at all.
And perhaps this is why the face matters.
The face the mirror covered.
The face that says: I am somebody.
Not a hip.
Not a waist.
Not a silhouette.
Not a trend.
Not a demographic.
Not an accessory.
Not a specimen.
Not somebody else's unfinished idea of a woman.
A person.
Because fashion may change its mind next season.
The body standard may change again.
It probably will.
And women will once again be handed the new assignment and told that this is what beauty looks like now.
But underneath every changing silhouette is the same woman.
She was there when thinness was fashionable.
She was there when curves were fashionable.
She was there before either of them.
She will be there after both have gone.
Perhaps we should stop asking whether her body is fashionable enough to be seen.
Perhaps we should simply let her be seen.
