Beauty standards continually shift and have historically been shaped by male-dominated perspectives on how women should look. Today, the modelling industry plays a central role in defining the “ideal” female body and aesthetic that the regular woman is expected to emulate. This raises important questions: Who decides what beauty looks like? How are models chosen to represent it? What ethical concerns does this selection process create? How do these standards influence how we perceive ourselves in everyday life? 

The modelling industry has long positioned itself as the authority on physical beauty, blatantly discriminating against models who deviate from the narrow height, weight, and body-type norms which becomes apparent in events such as Victoria Secret fashion shows. Its selection process relies on exclusion, specifically classed and racialised hierarchies. For example, scouts target extremely young girls from impoverished regions such as Brazil’s favelas, the post-Soviet bloc, and war-torn African countries because their bodies exhibit the aesthetic of malnutrition such as hollow cheeks, extreme thinness, and angular bone structure.  

The New York Times post on this scouting process in Brazil followed a modelling scout, Alisson Chornak, who said that he researched both the genetic makeup of smaller towns and their colonial histories, preferring people from places that have Italian and German lineage and smaller villages because it “helps keep the genetic makeup more concentrated”. 70% of Brazilian models come from the southern region of the country which was historically heavily settled by European immigrants. As a result, a disproportionately high number of people in this region have features often valued globally in fashion, such as lighter skin tones, taller stature, and angular bone structure. This shows a strong structural bias. Even though Brazil is ethnically and racially diverse, the industry majorly draws from a small segment of the population with “desirable”, often Euro-centric, characteristics. Specifically, Rio Grande do Sul is an interesting area, comprising only 5% of the country’s population but 50% of the country’s models, with notable names such as Gisele Bündchen and Alessandra Ambrosio.  Eerily similar is the capital of Siberia, Novosibirsk, which is known in the fashion world as “home to the most beautiful women”, with girls as young as 12 beginning to apply to modelling agencies in the hopes of being scouted.  Evidently, the industry is fostering body dysmorphia and unrealistic beauty expectations from an alarmingly early age.  

Beauty is not democratically determined; it is dictated by fashion houses, designers, and wealthy cultural gatekeepers. The industry is fundamentally predicated on aspiration and unrealistic goals. If beauty feels unattainable, consumers feel the need to buy something to get closer to it, and ultra-thin bodies are statistically rare which keeps it the ideal exclusive, creating desirability and thereby profits to be made by fashion houses.  

However, beauty standards have always swung like a pendulum. In the 15th century, fuller figures with wide hips and larger busts were idealised because they signified wealth. Only privileged women could afford abundant, rich foods, making voluptuousness a marker of prosperity, status, and power. By the 18th century, this shifted to favour tiny waists and exaggerated hourglass silhouettes achieved through tightly laced corsets, again restricted to elite women. Thinness became a symbol of class distinction, setting wealthy women apart from the working class, who, due to rising industrial wages, had greater access to food and were more likely to be well-fed.  

In the late 1990s and early 2000s we saw the heroin- chic Eurocentric look in fashion with shows like Andrews Grove’s 1998 ‘Cocaine Nights’ glamourising drug use. These models regularly misused drugs and alcohol to achieve such body types, leading to its normalisation. An industry insider even claimed that cocaine was used as a “performance enhancing drug” in the same way athletes use steroids.  Despite the fact that images of Kate Moss using cocaine circulated in the media in 2005, her earnings doubled in the years following the coke scandal and she continues to be one of the highest paid models in the world. 

Then in the early 2010s came the rise of cosmetic procedures, something only wealthy celebrities could afford: BBLs, lip injections, and breast implants with the likes of the Kardashians popularising this craze. Known as the “celebrity effect”, certain procedures gain mainstream popularity due to celebrity endorsement, leading to a trickle-down effect in which the wider public gets these same procedures. This breeds harmful consequences for young, impressionable women who try to emulate their favourite celebrities. 

At the same time, the 2010s saw the rise of body-positive movements driven largely by social media, which gave ordinary bodies public visibility for the first time. Suddenly anyone, not just models, could share images of themselves, creating space for plus-size creators, disabled people, queer and trans communities, and women of colour to be seen outside traditional industry gatekeepers. Movements such as #EffYourBeautyStandards gained momentum precisely because platforms like Instagram and Tumblr made them instantly shareable. This shift was strengthened by fourth-wave digital feminism, which centred intersectionality, representation, inclusivity, and online activism. It challenged beauty standards as mechanisms of control, tying body image to politics, labour, racism, and gender norms. Politics matters here: beauty trends often reflect the political climate. The mainstreaming of the plus-size movement coincided with a period of cultural liberalism, the rise of the #MeToo movement, and a Democratic resurgence in the United States. 

However, nowadays a problem is the reversal back to extreme thinness. This current trend is characterised by “aesthetic poverty cosplay”. This is a horseshoe of cosmetic procedures which render the subjects extremely thin; this stems from people living in such excess wealth that poverty becomes an exotic aesthetic. For example, recently there has been a surge in buccal fat removal among celebrities such as Zoë Kravitz, Lea Michele, Jenna Ortega, and Miley Cyrus, all speculated to have undergone the procedure. Furthermore, the surge in Ozempic use has led to people attempting to achieve the “Ozempic face” by abusing this extreme weight loss drug, with celebrities such as Katy Perry, Sharon Osborn, and Jesse Plemons taking advantage. Additionally, recently the ultra-wealthy have been dissolving their fillers and implants to regain a thinner appearance to fit with the aesthetics of the day, which is seen in Kylie Jenner, Simon Cowell, and Victoria Bekham. The fact that these celebrities get these surgeries to look so emaciated makes one thing clear: these bodies are not healthy and can only be achieved through under-eating or cosmetic procedures. 

Additionally, “poor-core” fashion has become a trend cycled by the rich which is seen in Balenciaga’s “homeless chic”. This emerges as bag lady silhouettes, overcoats inspired by unhoused populations, and torn clothing selling for thousands of pounds. These surgeries coupled with the homeless fashion trend show that poverty has become an aesthetic for the wealthy. 

The wealthy fetishize the trauma of others: sharp bones, sunken cheeks, and narrows hips are considered beautiful but only when extracted from the bodies of the poor and repackaged onto runways. Beauty becomes a commodity only elites can afford to manipulate. Why does this matter for society at large? Trends established on high-fashion runways quickly transform into mainstream expectations. The elite aesthetic of “designer starvation” filters down through celebrities and influencers, who present extreme thinness and cosmetic modification as markers of luxury and desirability. I am not immune to this influence either: social media encourages constant comparison, pushing many of us, myself included, to try to emulate what we see online and fit into beauty ideals that are often unattainable. 

The consequences are visible in public health data. Among girls, indicators of potential eating problems more than doubled from 2017 (8.4%) to 2021 (17.8%). Young women aged 17–19 were around three times more likely than their male peers to report feeling fat even when others described them as thin (64.7% vs. 21.7%), to blame themselves if they overate (54.9% vs. 17.1%), and to report that worries about eating interfered with their daily life (49.5% vs. 13.9%). They were also over three times more likely to feel ashamed if others knew how much they ate (39.0% vs. 10.3%).  

Ultimately, society learns that suffering, so long as it is curated, is beautiful. Ordinary people are encouraged to chase a look that originates in exploitation: the trauma-coded, war-zone-scouted body becomes the baseline of desirability. Beauty becomes a hierarchy, where privilege imitates deprivation, while deprivation is punished.