There’s a new body in town. The cultural space created for larger bodies is narrowing once again. The skinny body is back, and its return isn’t surprising. It’s familiar. It’s expected. And most importantly, it’s strategic. The reality is that thinness, particularly thinness shaped by Eurocentric, classed and gendered ideals, never ceded its position as the normative standard. 

Over the last decade, the “BBL era” (named after the Brazilian Butt Lift surgery that came to define its aesthetic) held symbolic and commercial power. It was cool to be “thick”. But the BBL body never truly disrupted thinness as a baseline for desirability. Even at the height of its popularity, it was based on the fantasy that fat could only be acceptable when carefully distributed. Hips and buttocks were encouraged, but only when offset by flat stomachs, toned arms, and small backs. This conditional visibility of fatness — contoured, sexualised, and surveilled — did not signal the end of thin supremacy. Fatness that wasn’t contained, that spilled beyond the parameters of sex appeal, femininity, or marketability remained stigmatised. Now, as more celebrities and influencers show up with noticeably slimmer frames and noticeably less ass, the body conversation is shifting again.

 

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Even influencers who built platforms around loving their larger bodies are now visibly shrinking. They say it’s for health, or mental clarity, or peace and maybe it is. But their audiences aren’t imagining things when they feel betrayed. Many of these creators built communities that made fat feel human. They didn’t always claim the fat activist label, but they profited from its aesthetics and language. It is difficult to live in a fat body. Not because the body is wrong, but because the world punishes it daily. Fat people face a lot of denial. In medical care, in employment, in dating, in clothing, in seating, in photography, in air travel. In presence. In rest. In basic human assumptions of worth and competence. And for that reason, it is not difficult to understand why so many people are choosing to leave their fat bodies behind.

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But when those same people then celebrate their thinner bodies, especially after having publicly celebrated their fat ones, it becomes harder to separate personal choice from structural bias. It is one thing to make a private change for safety or survival. It is another to platform that change as victory over your former fat body which was previously used to inspire others. That celebration may feel individual, but it is still rooted in a system that treats thinness as a reward and fatness as failure. Do you, always, but understand that the choice exists within, and often affirms, fatphobic conditions. In other words, the return of thinness is almost always presented as individual choice, personal growth, or a health journey. And perhaps, for some, it is. But culture is not shaped by individual decisions. It is shaped by the patterns those decisions form, and by the systems that reward them.

The conflation of thinness with health has proven especially persistent. While many justify body transformations through medical language, weight loss for mental clarity, hormone balance, longevity, the belief that fatness is inherently unhealthy has little scientific basis and significant political consequence. As Aubrey Gordon writes in What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat (2020), “We do not pathologise thin people in the same way, even when they exhibit the same or worse health markers. We trust their bodies by default. We surveil fat bodies by default.” Thinness is a marker of discipline, status, virtue, self-control, and success. It reinforces every mechanism that makes life harder, more dangerous and less dignified for those who do not conform. And fatness remains the negative counterpoint: lack, laziness, excess, indulgence, failure. These associations are socially produced, economically maintained, and culturally enforced. And until they are systematically dismantled, shifts in the ideal body will remain surface-level adjustments within a deeply entrenched structure.

Fatphobia is a fully integrated system, calibrated through language, enforced through digital culture, and monetised at every step. It comes with its own doctrine: “big back,” “clean eating,” “low-cal,” “gut reset,” “discipline.” It produces new moral panics: sugar in fruit, the wrong kind of carbs. And it lives in coded metrics: macros, intermittent fasting windows, invisible calorie ceilings. The beauty and wellness industries are cashing in. The market for slimming products has exploded: teas, fasting apps, pills, injections, lipo alternatives, all thriving off this insecurity, offering to fix, hide, shrink, and “heal” the body into acceptability.

Like all systems of oppression, fatphobia evolves with the times. Because desirability is still currency, especially for women, the cost of opting out of beauty norms remains high. The conversation about body politics, then, is a persistent cultural condition. It will not disappear because desirability is not neutral. As long as beauty is attached to value, desirability will remain an economy, and the bodies deemed most profitable within that economy will continue to be shaped accordingly.

So yes, skinny is “back.” But the truth is, it never felt gone, because it was never fully dislodged. The BBL body, for all its visual difference, was still shaped by the same exclusions. As long as bodies are policed, categorised and monetised, the politics of appearance will remain central to how we understand power, belonging and worth. And thinness will remain a structure until it is no longer rewarded.