Every Era Invented a Different Ideal Body and Sold Women Products to Achieve It
Quick Answer
The ideal female body has changed dramatically in every generation. The Venus of Willendorf, carved roughly 25,000 years ago, depicts a woman with a large belly, wide hips, and heavy breasts. By the 1920s, that body was the deficiency being corrected. The BMI was invented in 1832 by a Belgian mathematician studying population averages, not individual health. It is still used to evaluate individual women's bodies today.
The Venus of Willendorf is 25,000 years old and 4.4 inches tall. She has a large belly, heavy breasts, and wide hips. By every standard applied to women's bodies in the last hundred years, she is wrong.
No one told the person who carved her.
The oldest known human sculpture has wide hips and a large belly
She is carved from oolitic limestone. She is 25,000 years old. She depicts a woman with heavy breasts, wide hips, and a rounded belly. She has been called a fertility idol, a goddess, and possibly a self-portrait. Nobody knows which. What we know is that someone made her, kept her, and she survived.
The limestone she was carved from was not local to where she was found. She was moved. Someone transported or traded her across a significant distance before she ended up in the ground.
There was no diet industry when she was made. No shapewear. No garments sold to correct the body's natural form. The body they chose to preserve in stone was one built for survival: for famine, for bearing children, for making it through winter. The thin ideal is a recent invention. It requires food to be abundant enough that not eating becomes a choice.
The corset required internal organs to shift
The corset was not fashion. It was a structural intervention. It forced the body into a shape it did not naturally take. The Victorian wasp waist required the floating ribs to compress and the internal organs to rearrange. Women wore corsets that reduced their waists by 2 to 4 inches. Sometimes more.
Girls began wearing them at age 4.
Some Victorian women had their lowest ribs surgically removed to reduce their waist measurement further. Surgeons performed the procedure by request.
Doctors objected to corsets for decades. Fashion kept winning. Muscles weakened from decades of external support could not hold posture without the garment. The product designed to achieve the ideal made the body permanently less capable of achieving it on its own.
The same era was selling arsenic face powder and lead-based creams to women who wanted to look pale and perfect. The beauty industry's record with women's health is not good.
The 1920s decided curves were the deficiency
The same women who had been sold corsets to achieve curves were told, one generation later, that curves were the problem. The 1920s flapper ideal was flat-chested, narrow-hipped, boyish. Women bound their breasts to achieve it. The previous generation's ideal body became the new generation's deficiency.
The first diet book to become a bestseller in the United States was published in 1918. It sold two million copies. The author told readers to think of their food in terms of calories because, she wrote, "we must fight fat with fire."
The word "calorie" entered the American popular vocabulary in the 1910s. "Reducing" products flooded the market: powders, pills, rubberized garments designed to make you sweat. The diet industry, as we now know it, was invented in this window. The ideal changed completely. The premise, that women's bodies required correction, did not.
The BMI was invented by a mathematician who was not a doctor
Adolphe Quetelet invented the BMI formula in 1832. He was a Belgian mathematician and statistician. He was studying how human characteristics were distributed across populations. He was not a doctor. He never intended his formula to assess individual health.
You'd think a tool used to classify millions of people's bodies as healthy or not would have been designed by someone in medicine. Turns out no.
His formula sat in academic papers for about 140 years. In 1972, Ancel Keys proposed using it as a population health screening tool and renamed it the Body Mass Index. The NIH adopted it.
In 1998, the NIH revised the cutoff numbers. The definition of "overweight" was lowered. The revision took effect overnight: roughly 29 million Americans who had been classified as "normal" became "overweight" by morning. The cutoffs were set using actuarial data from the insurance industry. A statistical formula invented by a mathematician to describe population averages is still used today to evaluate individual women's health.
Heroin chic to Ozempic: the ideal keeps moving
The 1990s produced the heroin chic ideal. Skeletal. Sunken-cheeked. Explicitly unhealthy-looking. Kate Moss. Calvin Klein. A whole aesthetic built on extreme thinness. In 1997, President Clinton addressed it by name in a speech.
The era coincided with diet culture reaching full commercial saturation. Low-fat everything. Meal replacements for lunch. Calorie counting before there were smartphones to count on.
The word "plus-size" was coined by the fashion industry in the 1980s to describe anything above a size 12. By the 2010s it was being reclaimed as part of a body positivity movement that announced curves were back.
Then the 2020s brought Ozempic. The global weight loss market is now worth over 300 billion dollars. The ideal keeps changing. The industry that sells women the solution to not meeting it never shrinks.
Body standards are one version of a longer pattern. The rules for women's faces have the same history.
Thick thighs have been a deficiency, a selling point, and a standard, depending on the decade. The Thick Thighs T-Shirt and the Don't Tell Me To Smile T-Shirt exist because some things deserve to be said out loud. Browse the full t-shirts collection.
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Frequently asked questions
How has the ideal female body changed throughout history?
The ideal female body has shifted in every era. Prehistoric figurines like the Venus of Willendorf celebrated wide hips and heavy breasts. The Victorian era demanded a corseted wasp waist. The 1920s flapper ideal was flat-chested and narrow-hipped. The 1990s heroin chic era treated extreme thinness as aspirational. Each shift came with products designed to help women achieve the new standard, and make money off the distance between where women were and where they were supposed to be.
Who invented the BMI?
The BMI formula was invented in 1832 by Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian mathematician and statistician. He was studying population averages, not individual health. He was not a doctor. His formula sat in academic papers for 140 years before Ancel Keys proposed using it as a health screening tool in 1972 and renamed it the Body Mass Index. The NIH adopted it. In 1998, the NIH revised the cutoff numbers, and roughly 29 million Americans who had been classified as "normal" became "overweight" overnight. The cutoffs were based on actuarial data from the insurance industry.
Were corsets dangerous?
Yes. Corsets compressed the floating ribs and caused internal organs to shift position. Women wore them from as young as age 4. Decades of wearing a corset weakened the core muscles to the point where the body could not maintain posture without it. Some Victorian women had their lowest ribs surgically removed to reduce their waist measurement further. Doctors objected for decades. Fashion kept winning.
What was the heroin chic era?
The heroin chic era was a 1990s aesthetic, associated most prominently with Kate Moss and Calvin Klein advertising, that treated extreme thinness and a gaunt, sunken-cheeked appearance as the beauty standard. It was explicitly unhealthy-looking. President Clinton referenced it by name in a 1997 speech. The era coincided with the commercial peak of diet culture: low-fat products, meal replacement shakes, and calorie counting before there were apps to assist.
Why do beauty standards for women keep changing?
Each new standard creates a new market. When curves became the ideal, products were sold to create them. When thinness became the ideal, products were sold to eliminate curves. The standard changes. The industry selling the solution does not go away. It pivots.
What is the history of diet culture?
The word "calorie" entered the American popular vocabulary in the 1910s. The 1920s produced the first mass-market "reducing" products: powders, pills, and rubberized garments designed to make you sweat. The first diet book to become a US bestseller was published in 1918 and sold two million copies. The diet industry grew from there through the low-fat craze of the 1980s and 1990s, the calorie-counting app era of the 2010s, and the weight loss drug market of the 2020s. The global weight loss market is now worth over 300 billion dollars.
