FLAVORFULL #017
Ozempic parties, wellness, and the resurgence of "heroin chic"
Welcome back!
This is a special edition of Flavorfull, so the whole version will be free to access for both paid and unpaid subscribers. I want to thank those who took the time to speak with me about these sensitive topics including eating disorders within the fashion industry. Please consider subscribing to support the continuation of this newsletter!
Books I’ve recently read and enjoyed: Letters to Eugène: Correspondence 1977-1987, Hervé Guibert, (trans.) Christine Pichini (2022); Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1961); Life is Elsewhere, Milan Kundera, (trans.) Aaron Asher, (2000).
Follow me on Goodreads for more!
First The Aesthetic, Next The Culture.
It used to stand that the most egregious offense a woman could commit was to inhabit a body that was “un-ideal.” So why are we bringing that back? An ideal, an expected shape, a genetic lottery that she will be blamed for lacking, can be pinpointed in each decade of the 20th century, and for all of recorded human history. The cultural construct that forms a period’s “ideal” body shape is the first step to allow women entrance into the basic level of society. Without the fleeting popularity of a button nose, elongated neck, waifish figure, or BBL hourglass shape, the lack of access, representation and humane treatment in media breeds obsession, nervous disorders, and a $16.5 billion cosmetic surgery industry. For so long women’s bodies have been subject the same ebb and flow and changing fashion trends as if waist size was as easily altered as a hem length, weight as a collection’s color palette, or bone structure as the season’s hottest accessory.
Within living memory, a very apparent and famous example lies in the dramatic shift of women’s bodies from the 1980s to the 1990s that spiraled into what we now look back at and refer to as “mid-2000s” diet culture, aka the exact low-cal-low-sugar-yoplait-hot-girl-walk-leaky-gut-gluten-free obsessive behavior that is returning to enforce the mold in which a modern woman’s body must fit in the 2020s.
The 1980s represented a bold, powerful time for women’s fashion pioneering big hair, big shoulders, and big personalities professionally and personally– for the first time women were allowed to take up space. By the mid 90s, fashion was reaching the end of the first generation of true supermodels, namely Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, and Christy Turlington. These glamazons set the standard: long-limbed, elegant, and athletic. These bodies were still straight-size 2s and 4s but they represented a dramatic comparison to what was to come next.
When Kate Moss entered the industry, everything changed. It is clearly hyperbolic to say that she solely caused the phenomenon of “heroin chic” and “size zero” fashion, but she is primarily credited for its sudden rise in popularity at the time. The effects of this image-shift paired nicely with the rise of celebrity media to create a poisonous love affair that subsequently has affected multiple generations since. Suddenly the mold for an “acceptable” woman's body narrowed even more, and many could not fit through the door.
A haunting example of heroin chic’s reverberations remains Gemma Ward’s expulsion from the industry after gaining ten pounds from when she was discovered at the age of 14, to walking Chanel three years later where headlines across global media outlets deemed her “too fat” for the runway. Her biggest crime? Going through puberty and still remaining imaginably thin while doing so– just not thin enough. Ward woke up, blindsided, to news outlets announcing her retirement irreparably severing her career in the fashion industry.
In no means to gloss over the immense damage that media has continued to wreak on women’s image of their bodies over decades, there was a slight shift from the aughts to the tens in which perceived self confidence began to rise hand in hand with the movements of body positivity and runway representation. With larger access to others via the internet, diversity of body types across the world became more apparent than the filtered viewpoint of magazines. The Kardashian’s embraced and dramatically enhanced their curves, Sports Illustrated featured its first plus-sized model, and runways started to open their boundaries a little bit more. So why are we falling so dramatically back down this hill?
Well in short, the consumer might have changed in the fight to subvert unrealistic body standards, but the framework of fashion has not. The pandemic, and the explosion of online personalities, to fashion’s implicit delight, rebranded the toxic diet cultures of the aughts into “wellness”. It was the perfect excuse, get outside, feel better, balance your vitamins, lose weight. These influencers, who often are unlicensed non-professionals, peddle theories like leaky-gut syndrome and gluten intolerance which all play a hand in building the trillion dollar wellness industry. Links between wellness diets, especially gluten intolerance and obsessive/disordered eating have been acknowledged and researched since the mid-20th century. All that’s changed between now and then? The marketing.
I refer to fashion’s implicit delight in this rebrand because despite the toe-dip into the kiddie pool of body diversity that runways began to “”embrace” before the pandemic, its not like the industry ever really changed. Any trend report over the last three years has thoroughly documented the revival of the Y2K aesthetic by noting through thinly veiled words that “skin is in.” Miuccia Prada, a self-described feminist, called out designers for this runway hypocrisy, yet it’s still the pot calling the kettle black. She understands plus-sizes “in theory” but states she does not have “courage” to do so. Designers who idolize the waifish figure, like Ludovic de Saint Sernin are stepping up the helm of an Antwerp-six brand. Celebrities like the Kardashian’s, who pioneer body trends, have dramatically lost weight and reversed their BBLs. The infiltration is complete.
One of the current hottest topics in relation to altering a woman’s body is the so-called “miracle-drug” Ozempic. Generally prescribed for insulin resistant diabetics and those suffering from PCOS, among other medical uses, it has transformed into the appetizer du-jour amongst celebrities and influencers to prompt their new and improved dramatic weight losses. Its sudden rise in popularity has even gone so far as to cause shortages in the US for those who need it for its intended medical purposes. I spoke to a few people in the fashion industry about their thoughts on the drug and its cultural implications below.
A signed curve model—
Q: You model, and you take Ozempic for medical reasons, what are your thoughts on the drug and do you know others who have started taking it for non-medical reasons?
A: I take it for PCOS and I literally cannot afford it in the US so I had to buy it in Canada but now I’m waitlisted in Canada. My Doctor has to keep it under lock and key in the hospital because nurses [are coming] in and taking it out of the fridge.
Q: Have you felt any kind of relation to Ozempic as a trend and how fashion is veering towards heroin chic again?
A: Majorly. I had no idea about it until I was sitting around a table with my girlfriends and they were like “did you hear about this new drug that the Kardashians took to lose weight quickly?” They added “it just sucks because you have to give yourself a shot.” I was in shock, I have to take it because my body doesn’t produce enough insulin. A day later, I started seeing all these articles about how heroin chic is back. I was audibly laughing because first, it’s so fucked up and second, I take it and it simply makes my body functions normal. I’m friends with a bunch of other curve models and we laugh (nervously) because we’re also in fear that it would mean detrimental things for our careers. I already feel it, I’ve been taken off option for editorials for high fashion brands that I was being considered for in favor of girls who fit the “waif” image. It also makes me embarrassed now to say I take it because people look at me, as a curve model, and they look at me and assume it’s for weight loss and think “well it’s not working for you”.
Archive collector, works in the fashion industry—
Q: When I put the call out for information about personal experiences with Ozempic in fashion I got so many responses saying “okay but why do I low key want it…”
A: Maybe I’m being dramatic, but it feels like it could be the nail in the coffin of homogenized beauty. We’d lose modes of existence. I’ve been thinking a lot about how perfected bodies can never be naked and being naked is a vulnerability, and vulnerability is being human. People’s bodies–there are ways in which they will not change–and that’s a difficult thing to accept.
Q: I agree, coming to acceptance on your own internal terms all of the sudden feels more difficult with the revival of this discourse.
A: Yeah, it’s really interesting to see people who were too young for “pro-Ana” and the body positivity movement to totally repeat the same mistakes. I think a part of it is being young. It’s inherently exclusionary to many people, but even the people who meet the standard are too young to understand they’re living on borrowed time. They won’t exist in a prepubescent body forever.
Ozempic is simply one in the millions of minor, non-invasive cosmetic surgeries that are being marketed to the feminine consumer as if it were no-calorie candy. Lip fillers, lip flips, chin lipo, cryo-therapy, buccal fat removal. It’s perceived as harmless but it’s riddled with the most vicious intentions, often leading women to seek out discounted procedures from unverified doctors in order to fit their body into the ideal of the hour leading to botched procedures, infections, and even death.
In the face of seemingly unstoppable trend reports on our own bodies, it’s important to share our stories in our own words. Models Gemma Ward and Holly Rose Emery star on the cover of this January’s Harper's Bazaar’s “Body Issue.” Both models experienced similar trajectories in the fashion industry and are back to confront the false stories that have been told about their bodies and their careers. Linda Evangelista, amongst years of being painted as “unrecognizable” and “deformed” after a botched cosmetic procedure has returned in British Vogue to express the experiences that she went through largely in part due to the scrutiny on her own body and made her runway return this past Fall in the Marc Jacobs x Fendi Capsule collab.
At the moment, the industry is stagnant for progress; however, the wide breadth of access that’s granted through the democratization of fashion and its discourse provides hopeful and ripe opportunities to tell a woman’s story and turn our backs towards the image that has never really existed.
And with that, thank you for subscribing to Flavorfull! All past newsletters are available on the website archives. If you would like to submit a question for an upcoming issue, feel free to reply directly to this email!