After Reclaim the Night, Riot Grrrl, #MeToo and the symbolic bra-burning of second-wave feminism, you might imagine that Western women have largely escaped the constraints imposed on previous generations. We discarded the corset, entered professions once closed to us and claimed greater sexual and bodily autonomy. Yet something peculiar happened at almost exactly the same time. As women’s lives expanded, the fashionable female body shrank. The corset came off, but did the discipline disappear? Or did we internalise it?
Over the past century, thinness has become not merely an aesthetic ideal but an enormous commercial opportunity. Diets, gyms, supplements, surgery, apps, fitness programmes and now weight-loss drugs all offer solutions to the apparently perennial problem of the female body. Today, in the age of wellness culture and GLP-1 drugs, the disappearing woman is fashionable once again.
So how did we get here?
