UH Student News

The 90s are back and they’re hungry for blood. Anyone who remembers heroin chic’ will think of supermodels with smudged sunken eyes and protruding pale cheeks – a decade of eating disorders wrapped in glamour and cigarettes. Is the aesthetic Kate Moss once embodied now passing the crown to today’s celebrities such as Jenna Ortega, corrupting the minds of impressionable Gen Zs? Ortega has one of the most recognizable and influential young faces of our generation. On August 5, she attended the premiere of Wednesday Season 2, sporting a bold smoky eye, messy hair and all-black attire. Her poses on the carpet accentuated the bones in her back, and her sharp cheekbones caught the light. The similarity to Moss was eerie. Whether or not it was intentional, returning to this aesthetic of grungy, bony thinness creates a dangerous model for impressionable Gen Zs to emulate.

Do belter, Ortega.

With this in mind, it has become horrifyingly normalized for teens to skip a meal for a cigarette. It’s been found that only 29.1% of adolescent smokers eat breakfast, but who can blame them? Teenagers aspire to be like their idols, and celebrities associating themselves with damaging beauty trends only normalizes the idea that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. The skeletal silhouettes that I see every time I open my phone serve as our inspiration.

So, what are brands doing to tackle this resurgence? Nothing. In fact, they are actually promoting it, destroying Gen Z’s body confidence for company profit. It’s been hard to ignore the scandal circulating around Zara and their promotion of “unhealthily thin’ models. They’ve been deemed irresponsible, and I agree. But the idea that ‘thin is in’ is not just in advertising – it’s in high street stores. Brandy Melville, an ‘all-american’ brand popular amongst teen girls, exclusively sells clothing with a ‘one size fits all” label. The girls who don’t fit into these clothes feel humiliated in the dressing room.

I spoke to my friend and fellow journalist Samantha Stimpson, who has struggled with these pressures first-hand. She confessed, “In my own experience, social media taught me from the beginning that what in fact is healthy – like eating foods I enjoy and resting – was unhealthy.”

She described feeling led to believe that she should fit into this mould, and became consumed by these same ideals that high street brands promote. Samantha is not alone: four in ten teenagers have said that images online have caused them to worry about their body image. One size does not and should not fit all. Desperate corporate greed is not worth damaging the minds of a generation. 

What makes this aesthetic completely inescapable is the lack of regulation on social media. Gen Z spends an average of 9 hours a day glued to their phones. With statistics like these, it comes as no surprise that the pictures of gaunt bodies, stripped down to the bone appear every once in a while – everybody knows the algorithms aren’t perfect.

Although apps have made efforts to regulate this content, they simply aren’t doing a good enough job. Samantha commented on this, arguing that “Gen Z are probably the best generation at figuring out loopholes online to access forbidden content”. On Tumblr, although an account can be banned for engaging with ED content, users bypass these restrictions with ease. After all, 40% of Tumblr’s userbase are Gen Z. Even if you do want to steer clear of such content, it’s unavoidable. “Thinspo’ has appeared on my feed without ever searching for it.

Images of bodies verging on death should not be splattered all over Pinterest, even if they’re deemed iconic. The grim reality of living with an eating disorder should not be romanticised

Now I know these problems aren’t entirely fixable. A lot of the damage has already been done. But Gen Z needs to be aware that the ‘ozempic bodies’ they see online are not the norm – a healthy body is the norm. Heroin chic’s increasing role in advertising and on social media is the problem. Not every trend needs to resurface. 91 percent of people with an eating disorder blame harmful images they’ve seen online. It’s not nostalgia, it’s fuel for self-hatred.

We should have left this baggage in the 90s.