Last awards season, the gossip around town, salacious and disturbing in equal measure, was that hotel suites all over Hollywood were populated by tailors taking in gowns coming straight off the runway. Those sizes vary from size four all the way down to zero, but even the zeros weren’t small enough. Wasp waist? Wasps are huge! Give me a gnat waist. A flea waist. An amoeba waist.
In 2026, handwringing over certain physical standards feels passe. We know that those bodies — lush boobs and booty, itty bitty everything else — are rarely found in nature. And it feels like the battle may be lost on this one. As reality TV helped normalize plastic surgery, more people than ever are having it. With liposuction being the number one ask, breast augmentation third and Brazilian butt lifts pulling up the rear. So to speak.
Lately, the talk behind closed doors is about extreme thinness. Who looks good? Who looks scary? Who’s flaunting their skeletal frame and who hides a bit behind a couture wall of feathers? Often it seems we’re judgmental and envious. As a person who nearly died from anorexia as a young woman, I find the images upsetting on a number of levels. My reptile brain gets the message — Check your thigh gap! Do the chicken arm test! — while my higher brain and activist side reacts with alarm.
