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Thin Is Back In
But why are we dying to look ill? (TW: diet culture)
In the early 1800s, Lord Byron sparked a fashion for looking like you had tuberculosis. Thin, pale, delicate, and on the edge of life was the look du jour. People followed very odd, restrictive diets to achieve the look — Byron himself often survived on liquids (Champagne was a favourite) and tobacco.
It might seem quite surprising that people wanted to look ill. TB can only be treated with antibiotics, which hadn’t been discovered when Byron was advocating for disordered eating. These people were literally starving themselves to look like they were dying.
Actually, maybe it’s not such a foreign idea. When I was a teenager in the 1990s, uncritically devouring fashion magazines, it was considered desirable to look like you had a class A drug problem. Things didn’t improve in the 00’s when the celebrity magazines were promoting bodies that could only result from fairly serious eating disorders or the regular use of recreational drugs.
But why? Why is this considered OK, never mind desirable?
Why would western societies treat illness and addiction as a template for beauty? Especially since these fashions do nothing to reduce the stigma of actual illness or drug problems. What makes this, or any other period in history, the time…
