Capsule #57 ft. Serena Smith

Hello hello! 

This week’s issue features a longer essay on the topic of Ozempic, body image, and why our culture is striving for super skinny once more. It’s a topic I’ve avoided or danced around because it’s hard - hard to talk about in a way that’s considerate yet fair, hard to explain when the refrain of “let women do what they want” has been drilled into us for a long time. It’s complex, but it’s happening, and if you have any thoughts or feel compelled to write back to me, do reply to this email and I’ll get it! Of course if you don’t feel like reading about this topic right now, please skip.

As usual there’s also a bunch of recommendations to add to your queue this weekend (thank you Clairo), and I’m pleased to welcome Serena Smith to the duty of Hot and Not!

With love,

Holly x

Last week, Namilia presented their Spring 2025 collection ‘Good Girl Gone Bad’ (shout out Rihanna) in Berlin. And despite being a buzzy, contemporary brand - Namilia was the first collaborator for Kylie Jenner’s khy drops - they made more headlines than usual. That’s because one of their looks featured a white vest with “I ❤️ Ozempic” printed on it. 

This is a brand known for being provocative: they’ve sent brazen messages down the runway before, they invented the ‘dickini,’ and generally create clubwear you wouldn’t want your grandparents spotting in your wardrobe. But the Ozempic vest disgruntled many, and that’s because we’re knee-deep in a super skinny revival. It’s not an easy time! 

(Before we dive into the meat of this, I want to highlight that the Namilia collection featured a variety of looks inspired by “the lifecycle of fame and the pop cultural landscape of the 00s and early 2010s, a decade defined by paparazzi shots and ruthless tabloid gossip and its cultural impact on us today”. It also featured plus-size models. But as with any form of clickbaity, viral media, most of us see the tip of the iceberg and don’t dig for context. Read more about the collection here.)

To continue: We’ve witnessed the dramatic weight loss of many celebs (Kim K, Khloe K, Kylie Jenner, Ariana Grande, we could go on) and some stars have admitted to using Ozempic and other weight loss drugs (Rebel Wilson, Kelly Clarkson, Amy Schumer). The dominant Y2K fashion trend of the past few years has brought back low-rise jeans and baby tees - a look ostensibly designed for slim people. And I don’t actively search for diet content, but in recent months, my feeds have shown me posts like this:

Things have shifted in real life, too. Over the past year, and especially in the last six months, I’ve heard more conversations about weight, wanting to be skinny, skipping meals, and praise for those who look thin than ever before. It’s a lot. And it’s not something I just observe from a tower like a king assessing their kingdom – I find myself pinching my stomach (“if just this was gone”), I get a sense of satisfaction if I eat a high protein/low carb meal, and if I see a photo of myself where I think I look fat, or look in the mirror and think the same thing, it knocks my mood in a way that doesn’t feel healthy. This isn’t a phenomenon that only impacts women - more adolescent boys have eating disorders and male body dysmorphia is rising - but I’m confident that most if not all of the women in my life would know what I’m getting at. But why are we here?

In a recent episode of the If I Speak podcast, Ash Sarkar offers a theory about why skinniness prevails in our modern times. She notes that since we started mass-producing clothes, there have been two dominant silhouettes: “completely fitted to the body or oversized,” which is the case because “for anything else, you need tailoring.” Ash explains that thin bodies look best in these shapes, which sends the signal that you must alter your body to fit the clothes, in the absence of tailoring to dress for the body you have. 

I think she is right, and her theory is no better proven than on those hot afternoons, in a high street changing room, wondering why none of the dresses or jeans look good on your body. You feel like the problem, you ask the group chat “where are we buying clothes from these days?” and head home empty handed. It’s rare to find clothing that fits you really well, and when you do, you keep it for years. I do think this is why I default to oversized t-shirts for 4-5 days of the week. 

But I don’t think this is the whole story - our clothes have been mass produced for many decades now, and there has been a specific return to 90s/00s skinny goals over the past 12 months. This past week, Google searches for “how many calories in” reached an all time high and “do you burn more calories in the heat” more than quadrupled. We commonly cite Ozempic and the Kardashian-Jenner influence on body ideals, which are undoubtedly making their mark, but something is shifting in us too - as a culture we’re accepting this as our norm. The calls from the camps of body positivity (love yourself as you are) and body neutrality (your body is just a body, no big deal) feel quieter, either waning in interest or simply weaker than the collective desire to slim down. 

Two things come to mind for me. First, our appetite for keeping up with trends, emphasised and accelerated by TikTok. The fashion industry has always sold trends to us, but short-form video has made them feel more urgent, and more closely tied to our identity. It feels pressing to state which kind of ‘-summer’ you’re having (Dolce Vita in Italy, Brat on the streets of London or New York, cottagecore and slow living vibes in the countryside) and to recreate your own moodboard-style content to prove it (Instagram dumps, lo-fi TikToks sharing a collection of 2-3 second clips of a trip). Slim bodies appear in our inspiration references, so of course we feel like they are the right vessel through which to live our own experiences. 

There’s also the moral underbelly of trends, the way it feels important to align with the correct trend of the moment. Like the millennial vs Gen Z discourse, which is often lighthearted but sometimes veers into “if you do this thing you are wrong/backwards.” A classic millennial/Gen Z dichotomy is that millennials will generally opt for a loose top with fitted bottom half (like straight or skinny jeans), whereas the dominant mode for Gen Z is a tight top (vests, baby tees) with baggy trousers. If, then, you’ve been told that keeping up with youthful trends keeps you relevant, and those trends push you to wear a tiny, tight vest, you’re likely to try that silhouette, not love what you see, and feel like slimming down is the only avenue into feeling accepted or cool. As we quoted from Ash earlier: the body has to fit the clothes. 

@gracetutty

you can immediately tell if someones millennials vs gen z by the rise of their jeans… #lowrise #highrise #lowwaisted #lowwaistedjeans #mi... See more

The second aspect is harder to explain, and something I’m still trying to figure out, but has something to do with the collective fatigue with the feminism of the past decade. The now-cringe “yes she can” ethos, lofty statements and choice feminism (the idea that doing just about anything as woman is empowering) seemed to do little more than sell t-shirts with slogans and give birth to a new way of writing LinkedIn posts. As a culture we’ve altered how we talk about gender, but changed very little in terms of how easy it is to be a woman (cost of childcare, maternity pay, gender pension gap, the list goes on). In the wake of all of this, we’ve splintered off into different directions. A prominent one is something we might call ‘post-woke,’ where returning to traditional values (like the role of women in the home, Catholic values, dieting to be skinny) is embraced as the progressive/right thing to do. With prominent tastemakers adopting this stance, you can see how we might have returned to a Kate Moss “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels” Tumblr-esque mode of thought. 

You’d be forgiven for reading this and thinking that everyone around us has undergone dramatic weight loss. That’s not true. You only have to spend time in a busy public place - the beach, a festival, a swimming pool - to see that bodies are still incredibly diverse. I find it totally life affirming to lie by a body of water, watching people plunge and play, noticing folds and moles and discolouration, the varying ways shoulders can slope, how the thighs always look sturdy, the way in which the chest is carved to make space for a resting head. I think it’s important to be present in these spaces to reduce hyperfixation on the self. People also talk about “cleansing your timeline,” which can feel a bit hollow as a piece of advice, though I do value seeing variance in my feeds. Like this week, when model Paloma Elsesser shared this to her Instagram story:

There’s no real ending to this story. Since reaching my word count, I’ve thought of so many other examples we could discuss (the Lorde verse in ‘Girl, so confusing,’ the Gen Z reaction to Sex and The City, ‘what I eat in a day’ videos, that TikTok trend where people ask “what should I change about myself,” almond mom discourse, what endlessly photographing ourselves does to our brain), which goes to show that this topic will always be fertile. While the super skinny revival feels of the moment, the general desire for thinness never really went away, and I can’t see that changing any time soon. Although I do want to close by saying that the happiest people I know use their bodies frequently, to do things without purely aesthetic aims: indoor climbing, outdoor swimming, dancing in the club, running to brunch, playing football in a park. I think that might be a better way to fill our summers than abstaining from joy, in an effort to slim down for the photographs.

Further reading/listening:

• Let Them Not Eat Cake, Lux magazine

• You are your body: here’s how to feel more at home in it, Psyche

• Making a case for custom-made clothing, Vogue Business

• Skinny Is Back in Fashion. FFS!, If I Speak podcast (Novara Media)

• Singing About Body Image Is a Pop Taboo. These Stars Are Breaking It., The New York Times

And to finish…

Other news from the Capsule extended universe this week:

• Julia Fox came out as a lesbian

@juliafox

#stitch with @emgracedawg pt.2

• Speaking of going off men, Britney Spears also said she will never be with a man again

• More details about The Devil Wears Prada sequel have emerged, and people are wondering if it will reflect the state of media today

• Brat summer reached Centre Court as Charli xcx went to Wimbledon

• Troye Sivan is Rabanne’s first makeup ambassador 

• Gabbriette launched a lip kit with Mac

• Katy Perry has returned with a very 2010s music video to ‘Woman’s World’. Some people think working with Dr Luke was an odd choice for her feminist comeback

• And George Daniel (The 1975 drummer, fiancé to Charli) kickstarted his own Brat summer with a DJ set in Brixton to launch his new electronic music label, dh2

This week, Serena Smith popped into Capsule to share what’s 🔥hot🔥 and what’s not 🙅‍♀️ …

Serena is deputy editor at Dazed Digital and a freelancer writer for publications including The i, The Guardian, and Prospect. She regularly writes about culture, lifestyle, and politics, and is currently based in London.

📺 Watching: Kinds of Kindness in the cinema and Sabrina Carpenter on Hot Ones.

📖 Reading: Two music pieces: this Rolling Stone article about why Hannah Montana might be the reason the pop girlies of today are so fun, and this Clairo profile in Crack magazine.

🎧 Listening to: Two new releases we’ve been waiting for: Charm by Clairo and God Said No by Omar Apollo. And in songs: ‘Lithonia,’ the great new Childish Gambino single, ‘Tough’ by Quavo and Lana Del Rey song, and ‘After Hours’ by Christian Lee Hutson.

Tango believes that fun drinks are having a renaissance, and it’s not just because of his name. According to Google, search interest in electrolytes is higher than ever before, and other fun drinks like Pepsi pineapple and wild blueberry juice are also trending. Staying hydrated is essential… embrace doing it in an interesting way.

If you’d like to adopt Tango or one of his friends, click here to learn more.

Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear how you’re finding Capsule - let me know here. And if you have a friend who might like it, please forward on 🥺

See you next week 💋