I’m a size 16 and fear return of Noughties ‘lollipop heads’… why endless pursuit of the ‘perfect’ body must stop

HOLLYWOOD’S award season is in full swing – and it’s abundantly clear the super-skinny celebrity look is back with a vengeance. The shrinking frames of top stars, including Demi Moore, Selena Gomez and Ariana Grande at the Screen Actors Guild Awards this week signal a return to an era where women’s bodies were endlessly scrutinised against an unrealistic ideal.

The inevitable focus on these miniature women of Hollywood depressingly brings to mind a cruel Noughties catchphrase — the so-called “lollipop heads”. The term refers to a woman’s frame being so small that her head looks precariously large, as if balanced on top of her body. In that era, emphasising thinness was everything.

Giant sunglasses and oversized handbags became hot accessories, because they contrasted with those tiny bodies, making them look even smaller. Having worked in the fashion industry for two decades, watching the fluctuating attitudes towards women’s bodies, I’m concerned we have reverted to an unhealthy ­period that I’d hoped we had left behind for good.

I was in my twenties during the Noughties and to try to fit in with the fashion and attitudes of the era, I smoked and starved my way through that decade. I might have shrunk to a size 12, but there was nothing healthy about it. It’s one thing having ultra-skinny models walk the catwalk, but now A-list actors have bought into this new — or rather “old” — body ideal, I worry that it has been cemented into mainstream culture.

I fear it is transmitting the message to women and girls across the globe that it's desirable. At the Golden Globes last month, host Nikki Glaser quipped that it was “Ozempic’s biggest night”, while White Lotus star Jennifer Coolidge joked that “you can eat whatever you want now”.

A friend who has attended the Baftas for years said that, at this year’s ceremony a fortnight ago, it was all too apparent how much smaller everyone was. Both men and women were ­thinner — although we know it is women who bear the brunt of scrutiny and judgment over their bodies.

Wicked star Cynthia Erivo, Dreamgirls actress Sheryl Lee Ralph, and child model-turned-actress Brooke Shields, are among those who appear to have slimmed. As much as we might like to think we’ve moved beyond the “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” mantra made famous by Kate Moss, and the era of Heat magazine’s ring of shame, drawn over pictures of celebrities deemed to be too thin or too fat, in truth, nothing much has shifted.

That fixation on being skinny is something I had hoped my seven-year-old daughter and her friends had escaped, thanks to changing attitudes. Now, I’m not so sure. A couple of weeks ago, high-street chain Next had a picture of a young model banned by the Advertising Standards Authority for looking “unhealthily thin”.

The concern stems from the sad reality that many people with eating disorders seek out imagery of this kind for “thinspiration” — something dangerously rife within social media, with its endless “what I eat in a day” videos. But it also underscores the pressure that women in the public eye are under, and brings me to question what lengths they are being asked to go to in order to retain their box-office value or leading-lady status.

A friend recently took her daughter to see the film Wicked and felt uncomfortable watching Ariana Grande’s frail frame in it. While Ariana’s people are adamant that her shrinking figure is a result of her demanding schedule, others have questioned whether she is on weight loss injections.

Either way, it must make us wonder what the producers of that movie were asking of their stars. I was taken aback by her co-star, Brit actress Cynthia Erivo, posing with two hands around her waist at the Baftas last week. Her fingers met, showing just how miniscule she, too, has become.

The sad truth is that our endless pursuit of the 'perfect' body — no matter the cost — is blinding us to its very real dangers. It is all reminiscent of America Ferrera’s famed monologue from the 2023 Barbie film. Her character Gloria laments that “You have to be thin, but not too thin.

“And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin.”. Sadly, the powerful words do not seem to have cut through because, if anything, society has become even more allured by thinness since then.

For a while, in the 2010s, the body positivity movement quashed the open scorn and debate surrounding women’s bodies. We grew to understand that openly commenting on women’s figures is wrong and that people come in all shapes and sizes — and that beauty does, too.

On the catwalk, models Ashley Graham, Precious Lee and Paloma Elsesser were booked to show just how open the fashion industry was to this newfound enlightenment. As a size 16 now, it resonated with me, too. I could finally picture myself wearing the catwalk clothes I had written about for years.