TW// talk of eating disorders and dieting
A couple of months have passed since Kate Moss was named the latest creative director of Diet Coke and I still can’t help but flinch every time I see the British supermodel’s signature plastered over the drink can.
The first time I saw this advertisement, my mind wandered back to a phrase uttered by Moss that I haven’t thought of in years – “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”
It was a quote I remembered seeing plastered on hundreds of 'thinspo' and 'pro-ana' Tumblr posts alongside images of Kate Moss and other nineties models drinking diet cokes and smoking cigarettes as appetite suppressers - as well as gifs from Cassie’s character in the TV series Skins, showing how to hide an eating disorder. Want to know what it was like being a teenager online in 2014? This was literally what I had to see on my timeline almost every single day.
I’m aware that I can’t blame Kate Moss for my personal issues with this new 'rebranding' of Diet Coke and that she has also moved on from her old image, starting a wellness journey with her new brand – COSMOSS – and promoting a self-care and 'restorative' lifestyle.
Yet, the reality is that Kate Moss was the face of the fashion industry in the nineties - an era that glamorised the provocative term ‘heroin chic’, characterised by certain physical attributions made to look like someone with a drug addiction such as a super skinny body, dark eye bags, dishevelled hair and pale skin.
The movement was made popular by fashion campaigns that embraced this aesthetic such as Calvin Klein. Other models that were associated with this aesthetic include Jaime King and Gia Carangi, who is said to be the originator of the trend.
Although Gen Z didn’t necessarily grow up during this era, its effects have lingered on two decades later. Eating disorders, drug addictions, and self-harm have been glamorised across online forums like Tumblr and Reddit. Teenagers at that time were obsessed with the thought of being as skinny as the models were in the 1990s. In the 2010s though, curves started to become a trend again thankfully, largely due to the Kardashians with people having a new body type to aspire to.
However, some would argue that despite how far we've come with the body positivity movement, the effects of the ‘heroin chic’ aesthetic are still impacting us today. Let’s be honest, eating disorders are now disguised under fancy new terms like 'intermittent fasting' or 'intuitive eating' but it’s all the same and it never really went away in my opinion.
The problem is that now we are entering into dangerous territory and there’s a genuine fear that the look of ‘heroin chic’ might be coming back. Not long ago, I was scrolling through TikTok and had to witness a user promoting a 'What I eat in a day' video under 800 calories, ironically followed by a body positivity plus-size bikini body post.
It shouldn’t be all that surprising - we saw how people reacted when Euphoria first came out in 2019 and how some kids said they wanted to look like Rue, the character who just came out of rehab for drug addiction. It’s all there and people aren’t even trying to hide it anymore. With the Kardashians dissolving their BBL surgeries, the rise of micro skirts, and the ‘messy girl aesthetic’ becoming a trend, do I need to go on?
As someone who has dealt with disordered eating before and who was very active on Tumblr in my teenage years, I try very hard to stay away from this type of content today. The fact that it has somehow slipped onto my For You page without me actively searching for it, is needless to say, very triggering.
There’s an immense fear that we will have to experience the toxic culture of dieting and wanting to be skinny again all because it’s coming back into style, despite all the progress we’ve made with the body positivity movement.
The best way to combat any of the negative effects this will surely have on younger generations (and to avoid triggering older generations) is there to be more awareness and effort to stop this now. Block terms like 'pro-ana' across your social media if you’re easily triggered and report any similar content you might see to protect others from seeing it.
To parents, even though it may be an invasion of privacy, I would encourage you to keep an eye out for this type of content on your children's electronics and to see if they’re engaging with it because it’s mostly young teens that do.
The glamorization of eating disorders has always been present and never really went away, but just disguised. There’s still a vast amount of work that needs to be done to combat this so please stay cautious of this type of content, even if Kate Moss’s signature on a diet coke can 'looks cute'.