Body Trends and the Pursuit of Innocence
everybody wants to be god's favorite hot girl. but what does that look like these days?
Whenever I participate in a fashion trend, I tell myself that what’s in right now just happens to align with what I already like. It’s important, it establishes that I have autonomy and an inherent sense of good taste. I have found a liking for wearing bows, pigtails and pink, for instance, but I tell myself I had already liked excessive girliness before it hit the runways this year. But there is a part of me that remains suspicious, the hypocrite killjoy who narrates passionate debates in her head on how recent women’s fashion trends seem oddly infantilising. This part of me knows that not all trends are innocent - and that beauty standards never are.
What worries me isn’t just that the aesthetic du jour is to dress like an antique baby doll, somehow both matronly and childlike, with all its implications of traditional femininity, but the simultaneous shift in the bodies we see represented. We are treading in dangerous territory if it isn’t just clothes but bodies that become subject to the whims of the trend cycle. In 2023 the skinny ideal has officially returned as the ultimate feminine beauty standard, butts are officially out, and apparently, so is looking like a Black woman. In a 2021 post, Instagram user @darkest.hue documented how many of the white celebrities who have benefited from Black aesthetics throughout their careers in the 2010s, are all too willing to ditch their spray tans and butt implants, as soon as traditional white femininity becomes coveted again.
These developments might seem separate but I can’t help but think they are connected, many drops trickling into a much larger body of water that I’m afraid might wash over us and take our hard-won deconstructions of beauty standards with it. For almost a decade, Black and “curvy” bodies - formerly deemed too far removed from the skinny, white ideal - were reconstructed not just as appropriate objects of desire, but of gripping fascination. For the first time in my life I’ve seen the popular idea of beauty expand and as I watched more women who looked like me be admired in the media, I felt the pressure to look a certain way dissipate in my self. Of course, it wasn’t all positive. This was also an era in which we increasingly saw Black womanhood appropriated in mainstream media, and in which larger bodies were celebrated, not always for their beauty but for their assumed inherent sexuality.
But it finally seems like the world has satiated its appetite for flesh and Blackness. Standing at this turning point of body trends, waving goodbye the BBL-craze and looking ahead at a resurgence of size zero, a sour taste is left in my mouth. Because it seems that famous women who dabbled in these “experimental aesthetics” are now all too quick to wash their hands of the make-believe empowerment, all too willing to stop toying with sin and Otherness because it has always been understood that white femininity and its promise of innocence would still be there for them to return to.
And that makes me wonder what’s left for the rest of us, whose racial features aren’t considered timeless, whose size was only embraced as a brief fad and whose body is, so to speak, last season. For everybody who exists in a marginalized body, being denied their claim to beauty is nothing new. But now that non-white and non-skinny bodies have gone in and out of style, it feels like there is a new added layer of abjection, in that our physicalities aren’t just viewed as less beautiful, but also as a sign of bad taste. That is the obvious consequence of turning skin and fat percentages into fashion statements. There is a certain condescension with which we speak of those who cling to passé fashions. It made sense at the time but doesn’t it just seem so gaudy now, so obviously garish?
The other day I saw a self-proclaimed trend forecaster on TikTok deliver the good news that we can spare ourselves with the lip-fillers because celebrities are “opting for a more natural lip” now. She showcased a number of female celebrities, from Margot Robbie to Dua Lipa, who are now proudly sporting thinner lips. In this example, the aesthetic shift away from the plump overlined lips of the 2010s wraps whiteness in the language of the natural as opposed to the overstated and excessive. The same rhetoric is applied in discussions of the “end of the BBL era”. In that regard, we’ll have to open the can of worms that is the Kardashians, who decided collectively to embrace the appearance of rich, white pilates moms, after over a decade of aesthetically aligning themselves with pop culture’s widespread obsession with consuming Blackness. With their origins in scandal, becoming a cultural phenomenon through the leaking of Kim’s sex tape, and eventually through the sensationalism of her butt, they made clear that they are foremost playing with racialized sexual fantasy.
As Ren Ellis Neyra describes in their essay “What the Kardashians Reveal about Race”, the sisters pick and choose parts of the stereotyped Black female physique, all while enjoying the protection granted by their whiteness. Neyra describes their TV show as a “billion-dollar racial drama” and their infamous aesthetic as the “feminization of anti-Black caricature”. The family has for the longest time entertained this racial caricature, abstracting Black features from Black people, features we are still demonized for under colonial logic. By separating us from our bodies, they have turned these bodies, these parts, into objects that can be freely judged in the public arena, for their aesthetic value. Saying that having ‘massive’ lips isn’t elegant, or that Kim Kardashian looks more classy with her newly shrunken butt, becomes commentary on trends, rather than race.
What’s happening now is what we always predicted when we criticized black-fishing and cultural appropriation: That the white people who wear Otherness as a costume, can simply remove it whenever it suits them. And as darkest.hue points out, white celebrities who ditch the Black aesthetic usually do so to change their public image, into a more respectable and traditionally feminine one, which is why I believe that it’s no coincidence that everybody wants to be white again, at this same cultural moment in which everybody wants to be skinny again. Both represent the classic white, dainty and docile femininity that has been constructed as the cultural ideal in opposition to a black, fat, sexual and unruly one.
This is why white women who engage in the masquerade of Blackness often do so as a performance of disobedience against their prescribed gender roles and to explore their dual existence as sex object and sexually assertive being. Think of Miley Cyrus who got into Hip-Hop culture and made twerking the main pillar of her public persona at a time when she wanted to separate herself from the prudish good-girl image imposed on her by the Disney Channel. It wasn’t simply that Miley was portraying herself as more promiscuous but that she staged this moment in her career as a loss of innocence using Black aesthetics and culture as her props.
In “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia”, Sabrina Strings explores how this hypersexualized perception of Black people was constructed by early race scientists who were hellbent on categorizing and naming all people, whom they thought below them in the “natural” hierarchy of beings (so all people). Body fat was increasingly constructed as a racialised feature by these colonial scientist, and it was seen as a marker for the sexual deviancy of Black women. Unsurpisingly, as fat was reframed as uncivilized and immoral, restraint of appetite became a moral virtue for white women, especially the good upstanding Christian kind.
Historian Joan Jacob Blumberg points out how even the earliest diet books spoke of food as sin and temptation; and feminist author Naomi Wolf makes note of the parallels between the cult of weight loss and organized religion. Now, as the trend cycle bids that we long for skinner bodies again, we oblige because we want to embody this kind of angelic femininity. And we hope that our self-denial will purify us like a good juice cleanse or Khloe Kardashian’s SkinnyMe laxative tea.
As women, we cannot escape the judgment, sweet or nasty, angel or jezebel. Our identity and how we look will always impact in some way where on the dichotomy we fall. Usually, it’s out of our hands, although some women are more than willing to participate in this charade, which only serves to legitimize the cosmic Madonna-whore-complex. Rich and famous women are encouraged to play with their appearance in this way. A dermal filler to shape the face “ethnically ambiguous” or a lift for the corner of the eye, your anatomy is really just another accessory. Which pieces and parts are popular, says a lot about how we want women to look and even more about how we want women to be. In just a few years we went from daring and “exotic” to normative and frail. The fleeting nature of body trends makes sure that all women know that their appearance is up for scrutiny and might soon be outdated. If you’re happy with your body now, just wait till next season! It’s fill then deflate your lips, pluck your eyebrows then buy a serum to regrow them, accentuate with hip pads then starve yourself! Beauty is like Sisiphus’s boulder, an endless task awaiting no gratification.
It’s no wonder then, that Naomi Wolf theorized that beauty is really just an instrument to inspire self-hate and feelings of inferiority in women. Wolf’s famous thesis is that beauty standards are not actually about controlling women’s looks but women’s behaviour. To constantly alter ourselves in order to abide by these strict norms is an exercise in obedience, and practised self-loathing. She sees the obsession over a goal weight in particular, as mental hindrance that is depoliticing women, making us prioritize self-objectification over self-actualization. So considering the current shift we see in aspirational female beauty, could it be that the aim really is to amend how women act?
In the 2010s, when pop culture started to embrace a wider range of body types and non-white features, there were of course the not-so-fun consequences like cultural appropriation and the plethora of new plastic surgery trends, but besides that, people were genuinely distancing themselves from the compulsions to become thinner and to erase their ethnic traits. During this time beauty culture started to absorb narratives of the body-positive and intersectional feminist movements. Fashion media, advertisers and the influencer landscape were all swayed by the public's growing desire for diverse representation. This air of change we all got to breathe carried more with it than the notion that different types of bodies could be attractive. It was infused with ideas of self-love and body confidence.
Popular feminism of the time, also reckoned with the many ways women are policed for their sexuality. Women sang about their wet-ass pussies, protested for reproductive rights and pushed back against purity culture and slutshaming. It seemed like we were finally ready to turn the tables on a status quo that constantly ate away at our autonomy and confidence. There was a feeling of resentment towards the world and maybe even the wish to swallow it whole. All of this was reflected in the beauty ideals of the time, which became increasingly flexible, as we became less concerned about moulding ourselves in the tight confines that wanted to see our bodies small and our spirits smaller. The assurance that you can be okay with your appearance without radically altering yourself flips the patriarchal script for womanhood on its head. It obliterates the demand for obedience and makes your body less governable.
But isn’t this quite an indulgent idea, that as women we could just be happy with ourselves? That our bodies don’t have to be at constant war with our desires? We lived too lavishly, entertained the idea that our bodies could be a source of enjoyment for too long. In the process, we’ve rejected the idea of innocence which is so oddly defined by patriarchy as frailness, docility and whiteness and upheld as the ideal kind of femininity. Now we must repent. So I’m not surprised to see the beauty standard that made so many of us hate ourselves in the early 2000s, return after such a short glimpse at body liberation.
Clothing brands can easily go back to their worship of extreme thinness, white women can easily distance themselves from the Black aesthetics they benefited from. By doing so they not only get to stay up-to-date with current trends, unlike the rest of us who continue to exist in unfashionable bodies, but they also get to claim ideological innocence. Innocence, not only because they embody that virtuous patriarchal ideal, but also because they can absolve themselves from the sin of transgressing the norm. They don’t need to keep supporting subversive intersectional politics. They don’t need to challenge anything. They can just align themselves with the status quo and forget they ever supported the dissident notion that women of different shapes and sizes are beautiful.
A woman who is Black or fat could never claim innocence in that way, because her mere existence is offensive to patriarchy and white supremacy and because her body is seen as inherently sinful. Now she continues to exist as a testimony - of a moment in fashion, of the world’s temporary lust for Othered bodies, and of a brief chapter of disobedient womanhood in pop-culture. And again, we see that the return of the eurocentric beauty standard, doesn’t really prescribe appearance but behavior, because she can never be white and might never be skinny, but she must still relentlessly try to alter herself and she must hate herself for failing.
So gone are the days of “love yourself” and “all bodies are beautiful”. These slogans were just a fad. They were the corporatisation of a truly emancipatory feminist sentiment, and as such they didn’t have much meaning, because they were preached to us by the same media circus that is now going back to selling us an idea of beauty that is out of reach for the majority of women.
But I want to make abundantly clear that I’m not lamenting the death of the trend of pop stars trying to look like black women. I’m mourning that my body, the body of any woman, can become a trend and then a fashion faux-pas.
In the end I really do wish for women to misbehave. Not in a way that fits into this patriarchal script, where there are good girls and evil seductresses. But by rejecting the exploitative hold of beauty trends over our lives.