If you’ve read a fashion magazine lately, you may have noticed that ‘thin’ is once again ‘in’. What you may not have realised, however, is the influence the far right has had in promoting this dangerous trend.
Size inclusivity is regressing across the industry, leading to a “worrying” rise in “extremely thin” models on the runway at the ‘big four’ fashion weeks – New York, London, Milan and Paris – according to Vogue Business’s latest annual size inclusivity report, which was published after the spring/summer 2025 looks were showcased last autumn.
“One doomscroll down your FYP [‘for you page’, TikTok’s home screen] and it’s hard not to see how every major fashion, lifestyle, and culture trend has connections to the reemerging supremacy of thinness,” wrote digital culture reporter Michelle Santiago Cortés for The Cut weeks after the Vogue report was released.
As someone who spent 18 months monitoring digital communities of far-right women, I was less surprised by the return of thinness as the body ideal. Over the last few years, the far right has made huge strides in normalising its ideology within mainstream politics and culture, and women in these communities have played an important role in that.
“White nationalist and identitarian movements have strategically used women in their public-facing campaigns to make their ideas seem less dangerous and more legitimate,” Julia Ebner, author of Going Mainstream: How Extremists Are Taking Over, told me.
She continues: “Fascist ideologies – in the past and today – tend to paint an idealised vision of the human body and women’s bodies in particular are seen as vessels for producing the next generation of ‘pure’ and strong children. With the rise of far-right movements, we also see a return of narrow-minded beauty ideals and body shaming.”
For far-right women, there is no such thing as body positivity or body neutrality. Thinness is a moral imperative; it shows dominance over the body and aligns oneself with European beauty standards.
Santiago’s use of the word ‘supremacy’ cuts to the heart of this: the far-right places all bodies into a series of hierarchies – some supreme over others. White bodies over Black and Brown bodies. Cis bodies over trans bodies. Able bodies over disabled bodies. And thin bodies over fat bodies.
The far-right, then, is a thin supremacist movement. This is known as ‘body fascism’, a term coined by Professor Brian Pronger.
These hierarchies are also linked. Thin bodies are seen as being more likely to be abled, and therefore more likely to be strong enough to fight for, or birth, the nation/race. Thin supremacy also feeds into white supremacy: the type of slenderness that is privileged is one modelled on the bodies of white women.
In Fearing the Black Body, the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, Sabrina Strings, professor and North Hall Chair of Black Studies at the University of California, outlines how during the trans-Atlantic slave trade colonists associated ‘heaviness’ with Africans not having the ‘intellectual capacity’ for self-discipline, which in turn was used to justify beliefs that Africans were morally weaker.
“To the extent that people were linking indulgence in the oral appetite to an animalistic inability to control oneself, fatness became linked to the racial group adjudged to lack the capacity for self-government: Black people,” Stings told the Daily Kos blog in 2020. She explained that this type of race science was used to instruct people, particularly white women, about the proper ways to present in public. It is here that thin supremacy began to be used to police the borders of white womanhood, positioning it as demure, delicate, and self-sacrificing.
There are clear examples of this being perpetuated by the far-right today. Taking a cursory glance at the ‘Body Positivity’ page on Evie magazine, the alt-right’s answer to Cosmopolitan, presents us with no less than seven articles denouncing the body positivity movement.
“At some point, we have to ask ourselves whether we really want to promote healthy, realistic images to young women or if we want to simply appease the progressive mob and their ever-changing standards of tolerance and acceptance,’ writes Gina Florio in one. Florio, who is responsible for five out of the seven Evie articles, is the author of Fat & Unhappy: How Body Positivity Is Killing Us.
The ‘far-right to thin-is-in’ pipeline appears to flow both ways. While researching my book Pink-Pilled, I noticed that the imagery shared by young women in these communities often resembles and even overlaps with imagery from pro-dieting and even eating-disorder forums and groups.
“If I was trying to radicalise a young girl, I would incite an eating disorder, because your capacity of critical thought is kneecapped by starvation, and it would be easy to introduce a racialised aspect to it,” says Hazel Woodrow, a researcher at Anti-Hate Canada who focuses on digital subcultures of teenage girls, including pro-anorexia and far-right extremist communities. When I first contacted Woodrow for an interview for Pink-Pilled, she said that she too had noticed the overlap, and says now that the issue is becoming more acute.
Woodrow also points out the rise in the so-called ‘crunchy’ far-right, and how strict diets such as all meat, all raw vegan, or anti-seed oils have become ways for members of these communities to show their in-group status, and link their beliefs to their diet. “They never talk about it overtly as being a restrictive diet, but in some ways similar to orthorexia which historically, we would have more so associated with athletes because these diets are obsessed with food purity,” Woodrow says.
While there has been some research and investigation into how fitness has been used to radicalise young men, particularly via so-called ‘fascist fitness groups’, much less attention has been paid to how fitness and dieting communities online might be radicalising women. This strikes me as odd, given how pervasive, insidious and targeted the messaging is around diet and thinness.
Kristina Lerman, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, was part of a group of researchers who used the 3N model of radicalisation (Need, Narrative, and Network) to explain how pro-ana communities could be described as radicalising people into extreme disordered eating. While their research did not suggest that pro-ana communities could be radicalising people into far-right beliefs, Lerman did explain to me that: “[these communities] endorse traditional norms of femininity and traditional gender roles. In a recent paper we wrote we showed that muscular ideal and thin ideal communities have very gendered emotional expressions. They cling to masculine/feminine stereotypes.”
In 2022, the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, a British-American non-profit, set up TikTok accounts for fake users aged 13, the minimum age the platform allows. The app promoted disordered eating content to these users within eight minutes and went on to present content about disordered eating and mental health every 39 seconds. Given how unavoidable the pressure to pursue thinness at all costs has become, the far-right’s subtle promise that aligning with their politics means being a delicate, beautiful, feminine and thin woman is a powerful one.
Source: opendemocracy.net
