With the headline \u201cBye-bye booty: heroin chic is back\u201d, a New York Post article this month announced that thin is in, again. Or maybe it never left. No, it left, but has returned, perhaps as a backlash to the past decade of progress on size inclusivity in the fashion industry.<\/p>\n
The response to the Post\u2019s glorification of heroin chic was a wave of dissent. \u201cOUR BODIES ARE NOT TRENDS. SAY IT WITH ME,\u201d Jameela Jamil wrote on Instagram. \u201cI\u2019m starting Not Hungry Chic. Happy Chic. Fu*ck off Chic? Anything but this.\u201d The Vogue culture writer Emma Specter tweeted: \u201cDo people who insist the return of crop tops and low-rise jeans means we all have to adhere to early-aughts levels of compulsory thinness realize i will just\u2026\u2026\u2026wear those things w my large and beautiful stomach hanging out?\u201d<\/p>\n
A slew of articles have come out with writers worrying that brands have co-opted the body positivity movement of the 2010s, rendering it meaningless, or positing that our obsession with thinness never went away.<\/p>\n
The Post headline seems to be conflating \u201cheroin chic\u201d \u2013 the 90s look characterized by grunge Calvin Klein ads featuring avatars like Kate Moss and Jaime King \u2013 with general thin-worship, a perennial problem in the industry. Both are concerning, but the term \u201cheroin chic\u201d comes off as especially problematic, given the current opioid crisis and its devastating past.<\/p>\n
\u201cHeroin chic\u201d is not just an aesthetic: it was coined after the overdose of the wunderkind photographer Davide Sorrenti. His mother campaigned for reforms in the fashion industry to honor his short life and called magazine editors urging them not to cast heroin users.<\/p>\n
Gia Carangi, one of the first supermodels (who was played by a young Angelina Jolie in a 1998 HBO film), was a heroin user who died from Aids complications. Though remnants of her addiction showed up in photos \u2013 her track marks are visible in Vogue\u2019s November 1980 cover \u2013 her lover and friend the makeup artist Sandy Linter doesn\u2019t think her body fit into the strung-out aesthetic.<\/p>\n
\u201cGia was booked for her beautiful body, boobs and all,\u201d Linter told the Guardian. \u201cNo one ever wanted to book a very thin Gia. I don\u2019t remember her ever wanting to be extremely thin. Gia always promoted her curves in every photo.\u201d<\/p>\n
Linter calls heroin chic \u201creally just a term for a cool look. Gia had that effortlessly cool look. She was born with it. It has nothing to do with drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n
Atoosa Rubenstein worked at Cosmopolitan during heroin chic\u2019s heyday. \u201cI remember a new editor, Bonnie Fuller, came into Cosmo [in 1996] and put Jennifer Aniston on the cover. The fashion director was like, \u2018Ugh, she is so fat.\u2019 The fact that we thought Jennifer Aniston was fat is telling of that era.\u201d<\/p>\n
Things changed a bit as the 90s waned into the 2000s and fashion preferred a \u201chealthier\u201d \u2013 but still incredibly skinny \u2013 body type. \u201cWe did kill photoshoots because the girls were too thin and looked like they were perhaps ill,\u201d Rubenstein said. \u201cAt least where I worked, there were some boundaries.\u201d<\/p>\n
When Rubenstein became an editor-in-chief at CosmoGirl and Seventeen, she brought in \u201creal girl\u201d models who wore larger sizes for shoots and covers. \u201cWe did show different body types, but when I think about women\u2019s media [in general], they would do these \u2018size issues\u2019, which always seemed very condescending,\u201d she said. \u201cIt was total tokenism, so they could feel good about what they were doing the 11 other months of the year. And I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s that different now.\u201d<\/p>\n
There is one difference. When Rubenstein was editing over 20 years ago, magazines were the only authoritative voice in fashion. \u201cOpinions have become democratized, and so have our standards of beauty,\u201d she said. \u201cSocial media allows for different types of body types to be celebrated. I\u2019m not sure that I buy all of these new heroin chic headlines \u2013 they feel perhaps a bit inflated.\u201d<\/p>\n
You can still find skinny-worship on social media, though apps try to restrict content that glorifies eating disorders. TikTok has blocked the search term \u201cheroin chic\u201d, saying it violates content guidelines. Search \u201cthinspo\u201d on the app, and you\u2019ll be redirected to resources like the National Eating Disorder Association. (The same goes if you look up the word \u201cskinny\u201d on Instagram.) But the fact that these precautions exist mean that young people were searching for thinspo to begin with \u2013 and will probably now go elsewhere to find it.<\/p>\n
Rob Smith worked as a merchandise manager for Macy\u2019s from the late 1980s to 2010, and then spent two years at Victoria\u2019s Secret. He now runs the gender-inclusive clothing line the Phluid Project. He knows that Gen Z is nostalgic for the 2000s \u2013 but he doesn\u2019t think that has to do with the standard body types from that era.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 2000s were a time of defiance, of rebelliousness, of irreverence in fashion,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re in an anti-fashion phase now, too. I highly support that, but it\u2019s time to be more responsible than we were [back then] when it comes to understanding body dysmorphia and mental health.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brands use body positivity, Smith said, as a marketing tactic \u2013 but the feelgood messaging rarely impacts how clothing actually gets designed. \u201cWhen you design, everyone works off of a fit model who is a [size small], and that\u2019s their starting point,\u201d Smith said. \u201cThey scale up from there. Products are designed for those sizes, so most brands are pushing for inclusion in a very performative way, but not when it comes to product creation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The aesthetic may be back, but the phrase has dark roots. Industry veterans warn we shouldn\u2019t revert to 90s beauty standardsWith the headline \u201cBye-bye booty: heroin chic is back\u201d, a New York Post article this month announced that thin is in, again. Or maybe i\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":838,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/image-109.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":840,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/836\/revisions\/840"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/838"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautybyneature.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}