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It’s also inherently tied to how women cannot age. To die young and beautiful, before you can age. To die young and pure, fragile and innocent as a dove with a warm, gentle smile as you pass. To die of something slow and inevitable.

It’s a beauty standard that embodies the ideal of femininity.

Sick, hungry, weak, drugged. Puts us exactly where the patriarchy wants us.

People who have never seen death or disease up close think its beautiful. I think its a suburban middle class or upper class thing. Its like thinking poverty is fun or peasant asthetics /cottage core etc.

As a former heroin addict- I had a million followers on ig at rock bottom. Now I’m healthy and get no engagement, kind of suspicious

Our obsession with beauty standards is sickening

I hope this will mention the desire some male designers have for models to resemble preteen boys. That has immensely impacted the modelling scene for decades. Commenting before watching for the algo in case I forget at the end

There's a quote i heard once about how high heels and corsets make it harder to run away. I think it's interesting how many 'beauty standards'  make it harder to resist abuse. If you're sick, it's much easier to control you after all.

As a teenager who was an anorexic last year, and have been successfully in recovery for more than a year, this cyclic progression back to extremely skinny is worrying for me

As someone who lived through the “heroin chic” years, and thought Kate Moss, amongst other waif models were perfection, IT IS NOT WORTH RUINING YOUR BODY AND MIND.

I turned 40 last year and I have heart and other health issues. I used to be a gymnast and active in dance. I lost muscle, my bones fractured, and I was always dizzy. I would wake up in cold sweats, and my glycemic levels were so low I was practically glued to the bed.

Please to anyone reading this, don’t go down this path. It’s taken me 20 years to finally understand the purpose of nutrition of nurturing your body. Seriously, please.

Now it's Ozempic chic.

This really has me thinking about when Whitney Houston was suffering from addiction and lost all of that weight and everyone was confronting her on TV and telling her she looks sick and awful and MUST be a crackhead, meanwhile, Cindy Crawford and Kate Moss were on the cover of magazines.

Now, I have friends who are saying that they want to be skinny. That being thick is kind of falling out of trend, and even trying to reassure me that I’m black and black/brown men still like thickness so I’ll be okay 🥴🥴🥴 ( definitely can do a whole essay on THE LAYERS OF THAT ONE STATEMENT) bc even when I was at my skinniest, my body shape NEVER EVER CAME CLOSE TO a Naomi Campbell or Kate Moss, it was still Selena (1990s), Doja Cat, Crazy in love Beyoncé.

The wild thing is that in East Asia, this beauty standard never left. The fairer and thinner you are, the more beautiful you are considered. In America, standards evolved and changed over time, even if trends circulate back, they don’t last forever. That’s not the case in East Asia, aside from facial features that are considered beautiful changing from time to time, to be fair and thin is the pinnacle of beauty.

I just want to be healthy.

Thinking that having a eating disorder or being a drug addict is cool is very warped thinking. It’s not cool or beautiful.  You suffer. It’s not fun.

it sucks you were forced to re-upload this but the good thing is that you still have a banger on your hands, love 💗

As an ex opioid addict and (still) anorexic, while I was struggling with both, it was the most attention I've ever gotten on social media. Whenever I talk about my illness/past addiction, my posts still get way more attention than the others. When I do post a picture of how I looked back then... I'm getting COMPLIMENTS on it.

killer essay as always! works mentioned (I might have missed some, I tried)

- Susan Sontag — Illness as Metaphor (book)
- Rayne Fisher-Quann — The cult of the dissociative pout (article)
- Alex Peters — Succubus chic: get to know the deadly new It Girl (article)
- Annie Lyall Slaughter — The Era of Tuberculosis Chic (article)
- Henry Giroux — Heroin Chic and the Politics of Seduction (chapter of book, Stealing Innocence)
- Amy Spindler — A Death Tarnishes Fashion's 'Heroin Look' (article)
- Robin Givhan — Heroin Chic Turns Young-Junkie Look Into High Fashion (article)
- Charlie Curran — See Know Evil (documentary about Davide Sorrentini)
- (the Ingrid Sischy quote is from Spindler's article, listed above)
- John Green — Everything is Tubercuolsis (book)
- Jia Tolentino — Trick Mirror (book)
- Tiqqun — Theory of the Young Girl (book)

I'll say, as a naturally slim and very tall black girl born in '03, I was a teen in that rampant BBL 'era' and so perceived as undesirable because I was a 'stick figure'. I even got those comments from guys my age at the time and I just wanted to get work done to look like the Kylie's and Nikki's...... When I moved out to uni and started modelling it was a whole different world because first I realised that being skinny is a white beauty standard and while yes, drugs are used to maintain that figure most of the time and its obviously toxic; feeling desired and confident in myself only depends on what side of the internet I'm on. The romanticization of being super skinny is so scary because you use and abuse yourself until you eventually disappear.....

For me I started noticing a change from body positivity when stores like H&M stopped using plus size models, they will sometimes use mid-size, but I haven't seen a plus-size model in at least a year. They also go rid of their plus-size section, all sizes are integrated, which may "sound" like progress, but when there are no plus-size models to see what the clothes would look like on a body similar to mine, .......... you get the drift