Column: When Did Our Bodies Become Trends?
By Campbell Baker — November 3, 2026
There are some trends that are easy to participate in. You can buy ballet flats. You can pull the low-rise jeans out of the back of your closet. You can simply decide that capris deserve another chance.
Then there are trends that are a little harder to take off at the end of the day. It is becoming clear that women’s bodies are one of them.
For most of the 2010s, the ideal body was all about curves. Tiny waist, bigger hips, bigger butt. Clothes were designed to show this silhouette off, celebrities were praised for having it, and social media made it feel like everyone was working toward some version of the same body.
Now everything looks smaller. The ’90s and early 2000s are everywhere again. Low-rise jeans, tiny tops, slip dresses, micro shorts, and barely-there fabrics have made their way back into fashion. Along with them came another familiar idea: being extremely thin is cool again.
This time, though, there is something new in the conversation. GLP-1s are everywhere. “Ozempic” has practically become a pop culture word of its own. Every time a celebrity loses weight, the comments fill with the same question: “Is she on Ozempic?” Someone posts a transformation and people immediately want to know what medication, diet, or workout made it happen. Even when nobody actually knows the answer, the speculation starts anyway.
GLP-1 medications themselves are not the problem. They are real medications used by real people for a multitude of valid health reasons. For many people, they can be an important part of taking care of their health.
The problem is what happens when a medical treatment gets mixed into a culture already obsessed with making bodies fit an aesthetic. Suddenly, being smaller starts looking less like one person's body and more like the latest trend to achieve.
A few years ago, people were building entire workout routines around growing their glutes. Before that, the goal was a thigh gap. Before that, it was something else. Now, “tiny” is back in our vocabulary. The body changes, the buzzwords change, but the unhealthy pressure stays exactly the same. There is nothing wrong with being thin or curvy. There is nothing wrong with wanting to lose weight, gain weight, or build muscle. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make a change that genuinely makes you healthier.
The problem is doing something because the internet decided your current body is out of style. Being healthy does not have one look. Health is eating enough to fuel yourself and moving your body in ways that make you feel good. Health is sleeping, taking care of yourself mentally, and going to the doctor when something is wrong. Health can also look completely different from person to person.
And health definitely cannot be determined by whether you look like whoever is currently on your Instagram and TikTok feed. Social media makes that distinction so hard. We are constantly watching other people change. Someone loses weight and their comments turn into an investigation. What are you eating? What workout are you doing? What are you taking? Someone gains weight and people notice that, too.
No matter how a person's body changes, we have gotten very comfortable treating it like public information. That obsession makes it easy to forget that the person behind the picture has an actual life, an actual body, and a state of health that cannot be measured through an Instagram post.
Fashion may also feed into it. When an old era comes back, we rarely bring back only the clothes. Low-rise jeans come with pictures of the celebrities who originally wore them. Slip dresses come with old runway photos.
Before long, we are not just recreating the outfit. We are comparing ourselves to the bodies wearing them. But you should not need a 1999 body to wear 1999 jeans. Trends are supposed to be fun. They are supposed to be about the clothes and self-expression, not picking apart your body. Try the low-rise jeans and the slip dress. Skip both if you hate them. Fashion gives us the chance to change our minds constantly. Our bodies do not need to follow the same schedule.
You do not need to become smaller because thin is trending. You do not need to become curvier when curves come back. You do not need to force yourself into whatever shape happens to be getting the most likes.
Take care of your body because it is yours, not because you are trying to make it match the moment. Make health decisions based on your actual health, not an aesthetic. Fashion will change again. It always does. But you are allowed to stay you.
For more fashion month coverage, keep reading at Square Magazine. Follow Square on Instagram.
All images belong to their respective owners.