Slim, beautiful women are back in fashion. Apparently, we should all be grateful

The 24-year-old Stranger Things actress is the new face of the denim brand, appearing in jeans and a bra, and looking, by any conventional measure, extremely beautiful.

For some, this is not merely an advert for jeans, it is evidence that “sanctimonious wokery” is finally on the out, after a decade of brands subjecting consumers to a torrent of bodies which did not fit conventional beauty standards.

For these people, the body positivity movement of the 2010s can be reduced to a fleeting chapter in which brands jumped on the virtue-signalling bandwagon, pushing liberal values to make money from progressive consumers.

There’s no consideration of the possibility that in this era, consumers might have briefly lifted their brains from the vats of acid they were plugged into, and made the radical decision to celebrate difference and diversity.

For millennia, women’s bodies have been policed by rules around what is acceptable – valued by how thin, curvy, feminine, young, or pale they were.

Those judgements are subject to cultural and social changes, shifts in preferences, and even economics - prompting some to argue that the return of extreme thinness is a recession indicator.

'Attractive' as an objective category is especially questionable when the beauty standard referenced is overwhelmingly rooted in Western, and historically white, ideals.

The ideal female body in Western, white society does not necessarily travel across cultural (or physical) borders.

Even within the Western world, the ideal female body has shifted from waifish to curvy and back again, ad nauseam, for centuries.

Critics argue that during the body positivity movement, consumers were forced to endure being lectured by corporations about politics.

Right-wing commentators seem to see politics everywhere when the politics happen to be liberal or progressive, but treat thin body standards as though they simply fell from the sky.

In order to survive, advertising must resonate with its consumers, and to do so, advertisers must reflect the political zeitgeist of any given era.

When corporations stopped putting plus-sized bodies on billboards, they did not just “stop lecturing us on politics” – they quietly announced which values they had decided to align themselves with.

The oh-so-familiar beauty standards we have returned to in 2026 are not society’s “default settings”. Thin bodies are, and always have been, the preference of conservative values. The politics haven't disappeared. The Overton window has just moved.

So if we accept that including larger bodies in advertising was political, then the return of thin bodies is political too.

A preference for thin bodies is just that: a preference. Shaped by a litany of social, cultural and political forces – not an immutable law of nature.

Critics have also argued that they don't want to see someone who "looks like them" in an advertising campaign. They believe fashion should be aspirational.

I don't dispute this, but I would gently suggest that if seeing somebody with a body like your own produces that level of disgust, the problem may not be the model. Perhaps it’s the idea that your body is something to be ashamed of - even repulsed by.

There's nothing wrong with wanting to look good or preferring a particular aesthetic. There’s certainly nothing wrong with Sadie Sink looking fabulous on billboards.

But there is an issue with claiming that one very specific, very rigid body standard is the only one synonymous with beauty, health and social capital. Because it means every body outside that becomes a personal failure.

There is a strange assumption underpinning so much fatphobic rhetoric: that plus-sized people are somehow unaware of their bodies.

That if they see someone who looks like them in one of every 50 adverts, they will somehow become convinced that their body has become the beauty standard.

I can assure you - that is sadly not the case. A lifetime of being told your body is wrong is not undone by one Calvin Klein campaign.

And importantly – plus-sized people still need clothes. Bodies do not come with a Ctrl-Alt-Delete button.

They do not have to wait until they are thin to leave the house and participate in public life, and they deserve to see themselves represented in shops, magazines and advertising while they do so.

The consequences of relentless thinness culture are not imaginary. In Britain, eating disorder charity Beat says that roughly one in 20 people is living with an eating disorder, and psychologists warn that this number is on the rise.

So perhaps we should be a little more careful before announcing that the return of thin beauty standards is something to celebrate.

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Georgia Bell is a journalist at LBC.

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