MIRROR MIRROR ON THE WALL WHO IS THE SKINNIEST OF THEM ALL ?

Ajouté : 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]She needs to [music] lose 5 to 10 pounds like, "Hey!" They're all fat. Somebody has to tell these celebrities that like they're skinny. Like, [music] I don't think they realize The Wicked cast is going viral for how skinny they are. And it is quite alarming given that we can see the bones protruding from the skin.

[00:00:19]In many of them, you can literally see the rib cage. Maybe a hot take for some people, but if you're 200 pounds, you shouldn't be in a Pilates class. [music] Why is everybody so skinny? And it's not a skinny like, you know what that abs and you know, just being thin in general, like bone-chilling thin. They look starving in these photos.

[00:00:38]They don't look snatched. They are walking the carpets right now and they look like the Corpse Bride. They look like something out of a Tim Burton movie or like the Dark Crystal. Skinny is back. You have seen it, felt it, and you have watched it quietly creep [music] back into your feeds, your magazines, and the red carpets. And before anyone says this is new and shocked at the trend, it [music] is not. Because here's the thing about beauty standards, they don't really change. They recycle or get themselves rebranded. It's just [music] like putting on a new outfit. But underneath all of it, the same pressure has been running since long before any of us were born.

[00:01:15]>> [music] >> Today, let's just go back to get a context on what's happening right now.

[00:01:20]You need to understand where it actually started. [music] I think the real issue with everybody walking around super skinny, we're just now pretending that skinny is not in.

[00:01:32]Meanwhile, everybody is shaped like a piece of paper.

[00:01:37]Being thin wasn't a trend or an aesthetic. It wasn't something you worked towards on a vision board. For most women, it was just a reality of their existence. There. Friends, here's an amazing free offer for everyone who's overweight. Even though you've tried other methods and failed, you can still lose ugly fat fast.

[00:01:57]>> During the period of the experiment, the girls eat at a diet training [music] table. Their eating habits are closely observed as part of a research program to determine how overweight young women can return to normal weight and stay that way.

[00:02:12]>> But here's where it gets interesting.

[00:02:14]People had access to food and a fuller body signaled wealth. That means you weren't struggling. And then something shifted. As food became more accessible, the goal posts moved. Suddenly, thinness became the marker of discipline and control. Because the beauty standard has always been whatever the majority cannot easily have. The standard was never about health or what was natural. It was about the distance, about maintaining a visual gap. And women, mostly the women in the public eye and show business, felt the gap most acutely. The industry had expectations and those expectations were not gentle.

[00:02:52]>> Slim Fast is making a pledge. Give us a week, we'll take off the weight. I used Slim Fast for breakfast and lunch. It was delicious and in just 1 week I lost weight.

[00:03:02]>> to shout it from the rooftops. [music] This is the thinnest I've been, maybe ever. I was fat. Slim Fast was the best thing that happened to me. I have [music] a Slim Fast for lunch every day.

[00:03:11]That's the secret.

[00:03:13]You know, honey, it's really nice coming home to a slender wife again.

[00:03:23]Thank you, Weight Loss, honey. Diet culture in its early form was not subtle. It was blunt, aggressive, and it was built entirely on shame.

[00:03:32]Advertisements from this era are genuinely difficult to look at. Women being told their bodies were problems to be solved, pills being sold as miracle cures, products promising to strip the fat, to shrink the waist, to make you look acceptable. They were clever. They had such subtlety in their messages and I have tremendous admiration for the genius. It was genius put to ill purpose perhaps, but it was genius. The exhibit traces ad campaigns starting in the 1920s when tobacco companies promoted smoking as a cure-all for everything from weight loss to asthma.

[00:04:11]Cigarette brands actively marketed to women on the promise of appetite suppression and the tagline was smoke [music] instead of eat, stay thin, stay desirable and women believed it because they had been given no reason not to and because the alternative was being told that their body was wrong every single day. It took decades of medical evidence to dismantle that [music] particular lie and even the underlying message didn't go away. It just found a new packaging.

[00:04:41][music] A really great model, very hard.

[00:04:44]We're looking for the strangest girl in the class, the tallest girl in the class, taller than the boys. We're looking for a girl who's lanky and skinny because that's really what the designers want. The hard truth is you need to almost disappear to appear at Fashion Week.

[00:05:04]If you don't fit an American size zero, a size four in Australia, the designers simply won't book you.

[00:05:11]>> delicious meal, I can't even remember the last time I ate a meal. Probably the Cliff bar I ate and then they had to wait more eggs which they didn't understand.

[00:05:18]No condiments? Condiments are important.

[00:05:20]Kids, remember that. I would have a a hamburger. Would be better for the show, but fruit is okay. This is when skinny stopped being an expectation and became an industry. The supermodel era didn't just celebrate a certain body type, but instead it industrialized it and put it on the runway along with a contract to sign [music] and told every girl watching it that this was the destination. Today's Hollywood actresses are wasting away to nothing. When anybody ever sees a star in real life, they're always amazed by how tiny they are.

[00:05:52]>> The pressure for stars to become stick thin is intense. Nobody's immune to it.

[00:05:56]>> It's their job to stay in shape. Their pocketbooks sort of depends on what they look like.

[00:06:01]>> They're just going to starve themselves.

[00:06:03]You know, they don't care how dangerous it is. What many people suspected is that this particular era produced a generation of women with deeply disordered relationships with food and their bodies. And those girls watching at home absorbing all of it through music videos and red carpet were quietly being handed a standard that was never meant to be healthy.

[00:06:24]>> I'm obsessed with my weight. Now I'm obsessed about what I eat.

[00:06:29]>> I'm determined to be a model and if I have to be skinny to be a model, I will be.

[00:06:33]I've seen She's got a cute young look.

[00:06:35]She might be a little bit She's not exactly size two.

[00:06:40]I think that your thighs are a little big for this dress. We're going to have you walk in it with this zipper open.

[00:06:46]I think the biggest concern with Cassie for me was the size of her hips. It wasn't just magazines and ads pushing the standard.

[00:06:55]It was primetime television. Shows like America's Next Top Model put it on full display. You had young women, perfectly healthy, standing in front of panel of judges who seemed to compete with each other over how brutally they could tear a body apart. Hi Anna. Hello. How do you feel about being the only plus-size model here? You are a little fuller, a little bit more thicker. And how do you feel about the fact that maybe the thickness may hinder you from, you know, getting certain parts and and doing certain things? Now, to be fair, a lot of fashion brands and magazines did eventually change the course. Size inclusivity became part of the conversation. The language [music] around bodies in the industry noticeably shifted. But let's not romanticize that moment too much because the brands that led to change were not sitting in board rooms having a moral awakening. They were looking at the numbers, and because body [music] positivity movement had become a market, millions of women who [music] had spent decades feeling excluded were now a consumer base for these brands. [music] Editors of Vogue magazine say they want to change the way the fashion industry approaches body image. All 19 editions just pledged to stop using models under the age of 16.

[00:08:13]And they also promised not to use models who appear to have an eating disorder.

[00:08:18]The editors say they are listening to people who buy Vogue, who are tired of seeing overly skinny models. And into this supercharged atmosphere walks the young CEO of H&M, one of the world's largest clothing retailers, with an eyebrow-raising admission. Karl-Johan Persson telling Metro World News, quote, "Some of our models have been too skinny. That's not okay." Now, of course I recognize that most people that are fat, they're not doing that with intention or purpose. They simply are.

[00:08:47]In the same way that I have brown hair, they are fat. The idea of being thin is being sold to all of us in one way or another. And so I say that being fat, for example, is an embodied political statement because you are living resistance against the culture, against this idea that to be valued, to be beautiful, to be seen, to be treated like a normal human being, you must look a certain way. You should strive to be healthy and strong. And yes, there are plenty of women that are naturally thin.

[00:09:24]I know that. But if that's not the case for you, don't harm yourself trying to look like that. The pendulum did a 180-degree and brought back curves. Body positivity emerged as a genuine movement rooted in real pain, activism, and was surely a necessity. People became more aware and started accepting it. I'm going to do my best to not use the O word because I find it um pretty offensive. Uh so I'm going to use fat-bodied.

[00:09:54]Um Oh my god. [laughter] You're telling me that fat-bodied >> [laughter] >> is less offensive than obese?

[00:10:03]Unfortunately, the actual truth got buried under all that celebration. They started mocking skinny girls, and flat-chested women were invisible. There was still one correct body, and if you didn't have it, you were still considered a failure. The movement started as radical acceptance quietly became its own beauty standard. BBLs replaced eating disorders, and now, as predicted again, the pendulum started to swing again. So apparently skinny is trending again, and I have so many [music] thoughts and feelings towards this. People are saying that Hollywood has brought back in this ultra-thin ideal, and now people are perceiving that to be the image of health.

[00:10:42]Particularly, they're blaming Wicked and Emily in Paris. This just worries [music] me so much because I was that girl that developed an eating disorder around 9 years ago from looking [music] at this type of media on my socials all of the time. Skinny is not a health goal [music] to aim for. If you guys were paying attention, the signs were always present where you could see public figures on red carpets appearing visibly thinner.

[00:11:04]>> [music] >> And the comment sections were filled up not with concern, but with compliments.

[00:11:09]And if you look at some of the images coming out of these events [music] right now, the appearance of these celebrities is something that even Wednesday Addams would recognize and call [music] it death-like. This particular industry doesn't accidentally stumble into these movements. Trends [music] at that level are decided years in advance. know this by now that body types, especially women's body types are trends. Squats, weight training, which engage the glutes and also using waist trainers. These exercises were incredibly popular because they were associated with the most sought-after body type of that time. And now that that trend has changed, you know, the way that people talk about Pilates on social media, people are beginning to associate Pilates with this very slim and toned body type.

[00:11:57]>> Y'all are really skinny. Cuz you know, in the early 2000s when skinny was in, it was like a loud and proud situation.

[00:12:04]But nowadays, you know, we have a little bit more social awareness, right? We don't want to offend people. We're just now pretending that skinny is not in.

[00:12:15]Meanwhile, everybody is shaped like a piece of paper. The skinny trend actually never went away.

[00:12:22]It became less socially acceptable to say out loud. [music] And the reason this particular cycle is worth paying attention to because you might have a teen currently growing up watching it happen in real time. The black and white era had magazine ads. The '90s had MTV.

[00:12:40]As of now, we have something infinitely more targeted and personal and it is hard to escape. The diet pill, the cigarettes and the detox tea, whatever comes next, they are all selling you the same thing. The feeling that you're almost there but never seem to arrive at the destination.

[00:12:58]>> I was just in the gym and like, why is everyone looking like we are in 2006?

[00:13:04][music] Like, and I am the first person to admit I have unfortunately always loved the emaciated look. I'm like, if I'm deeply concerned, like, there >> [music] >> there's a problem.

[00:13:15]>> thought I'd say this because I'm a weight loss dietitian, but everyone is getting so skinny. I'm scroll on TikTok and I see people's faces. Part of being a dietitian is you can see for signs of malnutrition. Like I'm seeing people's temples go in.

[00:13:30]>> So, what do you actually do with all this information? Because I'm not going to just stand here and tell you to love yourself and leave it at that. What I will say is this, understanding the history matters. When you can see that the standard has been changed a dozen times in 100 years, what was ideal in 1950 was unfashionable by 1995 and back again by 2025. This kind of cycle is the product running in a continuous loophole and it's your choice whether to opt yourself or the standard.

[00:14:02]>> was a child, the desirable body was like Kate Moss, super tall and lean, something I could never be. Then as a teenager, it was Kim Kardashian, you know, curvy, [music] BBL era. And now I hear that skinny is back. And I see that in fashion and celebrities and influencers losing weight. The thing is, it is a trend. So I caution people from trying to chase a trend that may cause harm to their bodies. Because the thing is, as Ozempic becomes more affordable and accessible and being slimmer is more achievable for people, [music] the elite will then chase another body type, right?