What is it about?
We assembled nearly 800,000 records from 25 years of runway shows, advertisements, magazine covers, and editorials (2000–2024) to track how fashion models' bodies and appearances have changed over time. We found a contradiction. While models' hair colours, eye colours, and national backgrounds became noticeably more varied, the body of the typical model stayed just as thin as it was two decades ago. The apparent rise in "body diversity" came almost entirely from occasionally casting a few plus-size models at the extreme end of the range, not from shifting what an average model looks like. We also found that this added body diversity fell disproportionately on non-White models, who were about 4.5 times more likely than White models to be the ones cast as plus-size. Meanwhile, the thinnest models were concentrated at the most prestigious brands and magazines, and the roughly 20-percentage-point gap in body fat between models and ordinary young US women did not narrow at all across the period.
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Why is it important?
Repeated exposure to extremely thin body ideals is linked to body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and related health harms. The fashion and media industries have publicly committed to becoming more inclusive, and their headline diversity numbers suggest progress. Our work shows why those headline figures can mislead: the aspirational body itself has not moved, the visible "labour" of diversity is concentrated on groups already marginalised by ethnicity, and the distance between media ideals and real bodies remains as wide as ever. The findings speak to public health, to policymakers, and to the builders of AI image tools — since these same narrow ideals are encoded in the data used to train generative models. Notably, our comparison of two regulations suggests that a hard numeric rule (Milan's 2006 BMI floor) coincided with a larger reduction in underweight casting than France's more flexible 2017 medical-certificate requirement, hinting that explicit thresholds may work better than open guidelines.
Perspectives
We were struck that "inclusion" can increase on paper while the underlying standard stays untouched. The industry has found a way to satisfy several demands for diversity at once, by loading them onto the same, already-underrepresented bodies, without redefining what counts as aspirational. We think the conversation needs to shift from the tails of the distribution to its centre: rather than celebrating the occasional outlier, the goal should be a gradual change in the typical physique that is shown. We hope this dataset gives advocates, regulators, and researchers a quantitative baseline to hold the industry to its commitments, and we'd encourage future work to push past the simplified categories we had to use here toward finer-grained identities and non-professional media.
Louis Boucherie
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cultural evolution of beauty standards, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2602380123.
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