It’s hip to be skinny, or at least that’s what the growing throng of celebrities flocking to get-thin-quick GLP1 medications and fastidious diets would have you believe in the post-Ozempic era. For those of us who’ve been around for long enough, it seems almost like a playback of the waif-chic aesthetic that was trending in the ’90s.

This time around, however, advertising watchdogs are beginning to sit up and take notice. The UK’s advertising regulator, Advertising Standards Authority, has reportedly banned two advertisements by a popular clothing retailer that featured painfully thin-seeming models, with photography effects used to make their limbs shrink to disproportionate minimums. While the offending images were removed, the incident points to a larger trend of unhealthy body standards being praised and even celebrated by the fashion industry all over again, after a brief dalliance with body positivity. 

Your body, the soft target