Why 2026 Thin Hollywood Scares Me More Than 1992 Thin

I grew up in the 90s, and I started my career in fashion, so thin wasn’t just present, it was omnipresent: it was the expectation, the quiet rule that sat underneath everything, and I can still picture exactly how much attention I paid to the way clothes hung on a body, the way fabric skimmed or clung, the way certain women made everything look effortless in a way that didn’t feel accidental. Think Kate Moss, and given that Carolyn Bessette Kennedy is all over our feeds, think her too. I used to joke that when I left fashion industry and moved into beauty, it felt like a bit of a cultural shift, like people relaxed, like there was a little more room to breathe, and yes, like more people actually ate. And then, of course, life has a sense of humor. I left Estée Lauder, joined a beauty development company, landed Abercrombie & Fitch as my first client, and suddenly I was right back in it, back in a world of thin…like 00 thin.

Then something refreshing happened, and for a moment it really did feel like a cultural shift. Reality TV came in and real people came onto the screen. Say what you want about the Kardashians, but going on 20+ seasons, they changed the way women thought about body image. When Dove’s real women campaign debuted, it was a great attempt at making women feel accpeted no matter what. However, I feel like pop culture moments like when Lizzo entered the chat, Billie Eilish who didn’t fit the norm, and Selena Gomez changed the conversation, for the better.

Body positivity became more than a niche idea and started to feel like a real cultural movement. There was a broader spectrum of what was considered beautiful, and I genuinely believed we were moving toward something healthier, inside and out. The compass was pointing north toward a more accepting beauty norm.

And then GLP-1s entered the conversation, and I had this very naive thought that maybe this would be the thing that finally leveled the playing field, that if thin became easy, or at least more accessible, then maybe the real flex would become something like being natural, being balanced, being at a healthy weight without intervention.

But even with all of that, I was not prepared for where we are now. Because what I’m seeing today doesn’t feel like the thin of the 90s, and it doesn’t feel like the strong or athletic thin we’ve seen in other moments either. It feels sharper, more fragile, more deliberate in a way that is hard to ignore, as if thin is no longer enough on its own; it has to signal something more extreme, more controlled, more intentional.

What we have today doesn’t live just while you flip through a magazine that you can close. It lives on your phone, in your feed, in a constant stream of images that document every angle of someone’s life, and for young girls especially, there is no real escape from it, no natural off switch. In the 90s if you saw an image, maybe you internalized it or maybe you didn’t, but there were gaps, there were pauses, there was space to forget. Now there is no forgetting. It’s continuous.

We are living in a world where all of the handlers, comms people, agents, heads, and EMV feeding frenzies are all chasing attention at any cost. I recently saw a TikTok from a fragrance influencer who was encouraged by his PR team to create a scandal ahead of a launch (Daniel René), to stir something up, to manufacture attention, because attention, in this model, is currency, and the more chaotic the attention, the more valuable it becomes in the short term. Create a scandal? Just imagine that someone asked you to create a scandal in your own life. Assume that your sales go up, but what is happening inside cannot be deposited into the bank. How can it be worth it? And thankfully, he declined, which felt almost radical, because he reasoned that if the product is good, it doesn’t need that.

@danielrenemusic#danielrene #danielrenedrama #fragrance #fragrancetok

Tiktok failed to load.

Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser

That idea has been sitting with me. I can’t help but wonder what is being said behind the scenes right now to young actresses, to emerging talent, to anyone trying to stay relevant in a system that rewards visibility above almost everything else. Are they being told that weight speculation drives engagement, that being talked about, regardless of the reason, is inherently valuable, that any press is good press? Are the influencers we are influenced by merely the press engineers? Who’s really in power?

We are already asking so much of young women. To be smart, aware, ambitious, emotionally intelligent, resilient, to navigate a world that is loud and fast and often contradictory, to care about justice, to understand AI, to advocate for themselves, to close gaps that have existed for generations, to become fully realized versions of themselves in a landscape that is still being rewritten in real time. We don’t need this cherry on top of being rail thin.

Because there is an entire ecosystem that benefits from keeping these conversations alive, from pushing certain images forward, from amplifying specific narratives because they perform, because they drive clicks, because they increase EMV, because they keep the cycle moving.

But there is a cost to that, and it is not abstract.

It lands somewhere. It settles somewhere. It shapes how people see themselves in ways that are very real and very lasting.

And the people orchestrating it are rarely the ones visible.

They are the ones in the background, advising, shaping, nudging, suggesting the angle, crafting the moment, understanding exactly how far something can go before it tips, and choosing to go there anyway because the short-term payoff is clear.

That’s the part that scares me more than anything: not just what we are seeing, but how intentionally we are being shown it, and how little accountability exists for the people deciding that this is the version of beauty worth amplifying right now.