It is one of the most famous physiques in the world, with high-hoisted breasts, a round, almost cartoonish bottom, and a waist so small it looks as though it has passed through a funhouse mirror.
But whatever you think of Kylie Jenner’s body – and there are lots of thoughts about it – it is one of the most influential ideals of female beauty in the world right now.
To understand how far and how much female beauty has been pushed, prodded and obsessively perfected over the past few decades, you need only look at an image the 27-year-old influencer and businesswoman posted this week on her Instagram account.
She is draped across a sun lounger in a £3,700 vintage Chanel bikini – which just happens to be the same bikini worn by another of the world’s most famous bodies, Claudia Schiffer, back in 1995.
The 30 years spanning Schiffer’s ‘supermodel’ reign and the present Kardashianification of our culture has been one of the most extreme periods in history for the female body.
Not only has it encompassed the heyday of the ‘supers’ and heroin chic, but also the size 0 era of the early 2000s and the body positivity movement of the late 2010s. Not to mention the advent of cheap cosmetic ‘interventions’, from fillers and Botox, to Brazilian butt lifts and body sculpting, and now the widespread use of Ozempic-like drugs.
As someone who was a teenager in the 1990s, became a magazine writer in the early noughties and an editor throughout the late 2010s, I have been both a complicit participant in the evolution of feminine beauty ideals (like many of my peers I had an eating disorder throughout my teens and struggled with disordered eating for much of my 20s) as well as a troubled bystander.
In 2018, I put the size 24 model Tess Holliday on the cover of Cosmopolitan, the magazine I edited, in order to open up a dialogue about women’s bodies.
I wanted to ask why our conceptions of female beauty were so narrow. Of course it caused a ferocious storm at the time, and yet I still think it was easier to celebrate different body types then than it is now.
So what exactly was the female ideal back in 1995 when Claudia was stalking the catwalk in that studded bikini? In Hollywood, it was Julia Roberts, Sharon Stone, Geena Davis and Sandra Bullock – girl-next-door beauties with long limbs, good noses and excellent dentistry. But the early 1990s truly belonged to the supermodels.
This handful of skyscraper-tall, genetically-blessed individuals, including Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell and, of course, Schiffer, dominated beauty standards.
Their bodies were slim and toned, almost Amazonian compared to the aerobically-conditioned slenderness of the 1980s.
There were few surgical enhancements back then. Surgery was costly and hugely invasive and though there were rumours of rhinoplasty within some of the later supermodel cohort (notably Tyra Banks), the most dramatic physical transformations came from Evangelista who had a penchant for changing her hair colour and length every few months.
By the end of 1993, however, change was afoot as a petite, 5ft6in schoolgirl from Croydon started dominating magazine covers, billboards and column inches.
Kate Moss represented a giant shift in the feminine ideal, ushering in a fragile, deeply androgynous body that was all skinny limbs, pale skin and sharp edges – prominent cheek, hip and elbow bones all part of the aesthetic.
It was a female beauty standard that was both punishing and subversive, a way for women to shield themselves from the male gaze through a boyish, quasi-pubescence. Mere mortals like me followed them by eating very little and cursing our breasts and womanly hips.
Thankfully, the obsessive pursuit of ‘thin’ had a small backlash towards the tail end of the ’90s as healthier-looking models such as Heidi Klum and Gisele ‘The Body’ Bündchen came to prominence, while famous faces (and bodies) such as actresses Elizabeth Hurley and Pamela Anderson helped promote a new vogue for ‘curvy’ (read a C-cup or bigger).
For the most part these were bodies crafted by long hours in the gym, the result of the exercise boom of the late 1990s.
Madonna, always one to take a trend to its furthest conclusion, typified this new ‘exercise-honed’ body with defined muscular arms and strong thighs. Demi Moore, meanwhile, transformed her slim 1980s Hollywood body into a hulking military-style physique for her role in G.I. Jane, which by 1997 allowed her to entertain the world with one-armed press-ups on the David Letterman show.
The most seismic change for female beauty, however, would come in 2002 when America’s Food and Drug Administration approved the toxin botulinum – aka Botox – for treating wrinkles.
Before Botox, if someone had a nose job or breast implants, it was usually because of a long-held unhappiness with certain features. Who can forget Dirty Dancing’s Jennifer Grey swapping her strong, Roman nose for a petite Hollywood one some years later – and sadly losing her distinctive look in the process, as well as her career?
Before the turn of this century cosmetic surgery still felt a little transgressive. It was something other people did. Not you.
But Botox changed that. With its approval for widespread cosmetic use it made such procedures more socially acceptable.
Overnight, stars such as Nicole Kidman and Renée Zellweger looked noticeably perkier, while others moved between what was comically called ‘poker face’ and ‘joker face’ to denote the overuse of the ‘miracle’ toxin.
Within a few years another influential ‘non-invasive’ treatment followed – hyaluronic filler. Filler didn’t just lift and freeze, it also smoothed and plumped. Cheeks and lips were most noticeably altered, but nowadays it can be deployed for everything from reshaping jaws to slimming noses.
Price, availability and the lack of permanence made benign-sounding ‘tweakments’ like filler and Botox both highly desirable and easily obtained. In the early 2000s you could get a shot of Botox on Harley Street for around £300. A few years later an amateur advertising on Facebook could dose you up in their garage for £60 a pop.
But if the tools to change the way you look were there, the catalyst to use them ignited with social media and the camera phone. Instagram started life as a photo sharing app, but quickly became a curated dumping ground for people’s faces.
As selfie culture dominated the 2010s, this up close extreme vanity was fed by the growing availability and widespread use of lip filler and ‘baby’ Botox (which uses smaller amounts for a more subtle look). Add to this apps such as Facetune, launched in 2013, which allowed users to do their own photoshopping – slimming down jaws and amending skin tones – as well as Snapchat’s immensely flattering facial filters, and you had another beauty revolution on your hands.
The sheer breadth and availability of cosmetic interventions mean there’s now something for everyone. Unhappy with your bum? Get that Brazilian butt lift. Want to look more contoured like Anya Taylor-Joy or Bella Hadid? Then go for buccal fat removal where fat will be hoovered out of your cheeks to give your face a more sculpted ‘look’. One current vogue is for the ‘fox eye facelift’, a non-surgical procedure using dissolvable threads under the skin, pulled tight to stretch the eyelids into a feline effect.
It’s very popular with young women who probably don’t remember the cautionary tale of the late Jocelyn Wildenstein, aka the Bride of Wildenstein, who over-indulged in cosmetic surgery to mimic her beloved big cat.
It is the Kardashian/Jenners who personify this new cyborgian look in modern culture. And what an intriguing look it is – super feminine with breasts and curves and plump, juicy lips. It’s a little bit manga – Japanese comic book characters – and a little bit porn star.
‘Thick-slim’ is what it’s actually called in the world of social media – which suggests a degree of hard work in the gym, as well as a little help from an obliging surgeon who understands that even a thousand squats a day won’t give you a backside you can literally balance a champagne coupe on (look up that picture of Kim if you can’t remember it).
Compared to the slim-hipped, small-breasted Schiffer of 1995, Kylie Jenner is somewhat cartoon-like. Her impossible body – rounded cheeks, undulating hips, a whittled waist and teeny, rounded shoulders – feels like the Playboy Mansion all over again. Except this time it is paid for and created by women who choose to look this way, rather than by some octogenarian in a velvet suit, providing a fantasy ideal for other men.
And this is the intriguing thing: ask any woman under 25 why they choose to look this way (and choose they do) and the answer is surprising: female emancipation.
This is women choosing to be objectified, paying to look this way – with their own money and on their own terms. It’s full circle feminism: engineering the way you look so completely that you control the male gaze.
But is it really a progressive new way of thinking, or, I wonder, the sort of fanciful tale the young always tell older women like me, to keep us from judging?
The ideal female body – if that is what Kylie Jenner’s is – has clearly changed radically in 30 years, and Jenner’s flaunting of it on social media tells its own story.
Its stereotypical sexiness makes a great deal of money for her, after all, but only if it is constantly exposed online. If Schiffer seems more innocent to us – even as she parades on the catwalk in that same tiny bikini – perhaps it is because she was selling Chanel, rather than herself.
Yet one thing remains very similar, and perhaps always will. Whatever you think of the extraordinary Jenner silhouette, the average young woman today will struggle to get anywhere near it.
Just as we primped, polished and starved ourselves to emulate the beauty idols of the 1990s, the ideal female body shape of the moment always remains just out of reach.