The Lady Vanishes - A History of Thinness and the Ideal Female Body

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?

This matters to me for reasons that have surprisingly little to do with beauty. I have lived with anorexia for most of my life, yet mine did not begin because I wanted to be thin or attractive. It began with gastrointestinal problems and, above all, with control.

That is precisely why I am interested in the culture surrounding thinness. Beauty standards do not simply cause eating disorders. Anorexia is vastly more complicated than that. But a culture that admires, rewards and increasingly sells thinness can legitimise behaviours that began somewhere else entirely.

Before thin was beautiful

There has never been one universally desirable female body. Ancient Greek and Roman cultures could associate excessive fatness with indulgence or lack of self-control, but the ideal female form was not the extremely thin body familiar to us today. Across many historical societies, flesh also signified fertility, health, prosperity and access to food.

Centuries later, Renaissance and Georgian art continued to celebrate soft, rounded female bodies. Rubens’ women are perhaps the obvious example: stomachs, thighs, breasts and flesh were emphatically present. The body ideal reflected its world. Where food could be scarce and physical labour unavoidable, possessing a well-fed body could advertise privilege.

But body ideals were never simply about attractiveness, they also reflected contemporary ideas about femininity, morality, class and the proper behaviour of women.

The Victorians provide an obvious example. The desired female silhouette was curvaceous, but tightly controlled. Corsetry physically manufactured the fashionable body, while appetite and self-discipline increasingly acquired moral significance.

Then dieting itself became a commodity.

In 1863, retired London undertaker William Banting published Letter on Corpulence, describing the low-carbohydrate regime through which he had lost weight. It became so successful that “banting” entered everyday language as a term for dieting.

Celebrity influence is not new either. Lord Byron notoriously restricted his food and consumed vinegar in pursuit of the pale, thin appearance he favoured. Long before Instagram, famous bodies could influence what ordinary people believed theirs ought to look like.

The shrinking twentieth-century woman

The First World War accelerated an extraordinary social transformation. Millions of women moved into work previously performed by men in factories, agriculture, transport and other physically demanding occupations. Restrictive clothing and elaborate Edwardian silhouettes became increasingly impractical. Fashion grew simpler, looser and more streamlined.

By the 1920s, the fashionable woman looked dramatically different. The flapper ideal was youthful, narrow-hipped and small-busted, with a straighter, more androgynous silhouette. For perhaps the first time, modern Western culture had enthusiastically embraced a distinctly slender female ideal.

It did not remain static however, and the twentieth century repeatedly redesigned the perfect woman.

The post-war years brought the hourglass figures associated with Marilyn Monroe and Christian Dior’s “New Look”. The 1960s produced Twiggy and a radically thinner, younger silhouette. The 1980s favoured a leaner but athletic body. The 1990s gave us “heroin chic”. The early 2000s brought size-zero culture and a tabloid obsession with women gaining and losing tiny amounts of weight. But then came an apparent revolution.

“Strong is the new skinny.”

Body positivity grew. Fitness replaced dieting. Women were encouraged to lift weights, exercise and celebrate their bodies,  except the rules had not disappeared; they had changed. The acceptable body might now have muscular legs or larger buttocks, but it was still expected to have a flat stomach and little visible fat. Social media simultaneously popularised an exaggerated hourglass figure that for many women was impossible to achieve naturally. As a result, “dieting” itself acquired an image problem. So we renamed it.

Welcome to wellness

The twenty-first century thin ideal arrived disguised as health. Now we have clean eating, detoxing, intermittent fasting, step counts, Pilates bodies, green juices, fitness trackers, supplements and elaborate “self-care” routines. None of these things is inherently harmful. Exercise is good for us, nutritious food matters. Looking after ourselves matters.

But the language is revealing.

Thinness can now be presented not as vanity but as evidence of discipline, health and successful living. A slender body can function almost as social capital: suggesting sufficient money, leisure and self-control to maintain it. And there is money - an extraordinary amount of it - in persuading people that their existing bodies represent a problem requiring a solution.

The commercial weight-management industry depends upon continued demand. The product changes (diet books, meal replacements, gym programmes, apps, supplements, injections) but the dissatisfaction that creates the customer remains remarkably useful. And now GLP-1 drugs have transformed the landscape once again. These medications may have legitimate and important medical uses, but their rapid cultural association with weight loss has also helped make dramatic thinness newly visible and desirable.

Thus after decades in which we supposedly learned to love our bodies, shrinking them is fashionable again.

The lady vanishes.

The internal corset

There is a wider historical irony here. Women have spent centuries fighting for greater control over our lives and bodies, and yet the female body itself remains extraordinarily scrutinised. Medicine and design have historically treated the male body as the default in ways ranging from drug research to crash-test design. Female bodies and physiology have often been comparatively understudied. So perhaps we should ask a different question. What would bodily liberation actually look like?

Not replacing one compulsory female ideal with another. Not declaring that women should be voluptuous instead of thin, muscular instead of soft, natural instead of made-up. Surely liberation means allowing women to exist without their bodies functioning as permanent improvement projects? Because the modern corset is particularly clever.

We put it on ourselves.

We count the calories. Download the app. Record the steps. Buy the programme. Photograph the progress. Restrict the food. Perhaps now inject the drug, and because nobody physically laced us into it, we call it choice.

Where anorexia fits in this

This is where I need to make an important distinction. I do not believe that fashion magazines or Instagram cause eating disorders. For the overwhelming majority of people with anorexia, the illness is far more complex. Mine certainly is. My anorexia has nothing whatsoever to do with wanting to be beautiful. It did not even begin with wanting to lose weight. Food was already difficult because of gastrointestinal problems, but more importantly, restriction gave me something else: control in a world in which I felt I had very little. And that distinction matters.

Culture may not create the vulnerability, but it can provide an extraordinarily powerful language through which it is expressed.

A frightened adolescent who discovers that restricting food produces a feeling of control does not live in a vacuum. She lives in a society that congratulates weight loss, moralises food, praises self-denial and repeatedly presents a smaller body as an achievement. The behaviour can therefore be reinforced long before anyone recognises it as illness.

For some girls, there may be another dimension too.

Severe anorexia can quite literally erase some of the physical signs of female sexual maturity. As body fat falls, reproductive hormones may be suppressed. Menstruation can stop. Breasts and curves diminish. For some this is frightening and unwanted. For others, consciously or otherwise, arresting or reversing the development of an adult female body may itself carry psychological meaning. It is an intriguing historical echo of women who have attempted, in very different circumstances, to escape the roles attached to being female.

There is also growing recognition of the overlap between autism and eating disorders. For some autistic girls and women, sensory difficulties, rigidity, intolerance of uncertainty and an overwhelming environment may interact with restrictive eating in ways that have very little to do with conventional ideas about beauty.

Again, control matters.

And yet these girls grow up surrounded by a culture that can make pathological restriction look remarkably like virtue.

Taking up space

We start remarkably young. Girls encounter princesses, beauty products, filtered photographs and endless commentary about appearance. Later come social media, celebrity transformations, exercise regimes, cosmetic procedures and the perpetual promise that a slightly improved version of themselves is available - if only they work hard enough or buy the right thing. There is nothing wrong with enjoying fashion, make-up, fitness or femininity, the problem comes when appearance becomes achievement.

A degree represents knowledge acquired. A skill represents something learned. A friendship represents connection. Courage, humour, kindness, creativity, curiosity and competence tell us something meaningful about a human being. Being thin tells us remarkably little, yet we continue to confer extraordinary moral and social value upon it.

Perhaps that is the final trick of the modern corset. Unlike its Victorian predecessor, nobody needs to force us into it. We have learned to police ourselves and increasingly to purchase the tools with which to do so.

None of this causes anorexia. My own experience tells me how inadequate that explanation would be; but a culture that repeatedly rewards women for becoming smaller provides extraordinarily fertile ground in which restriction can flourish.

Women have spent centuries fighting for the right to take up space.

Perhaps it is time we allowed our bodies to do the same.