Fashion’s Diversity Era Is a Mirage: The ‘Ideal’ Body Hasn’t Budged in 25 Years

For years, the fashion industry has patted itself on the back for getting more inclusive. Bigger bodies on runways. More skin tones in magazines. A broader definition of beautiful. But a sweeping new study suggests that much of what the industry calls progress is more symbolic than structural, and now there are nearly 800,000 data points to back that up.

Researchers analyzed close to 800,000 model work records spanning a quarter century of runway shows, magazine covers, advertisements, and editorial shoots. What they found was a stark contradiction: while the fashion world has grown more diverse in certain visible ways, the average model body has remained essentially frozen in time. The so-called “body ideal,” lean, low in body fat, and dramatically different from real American women, hasn’t moved in two decades.

This matters well beyond the pages of a glossy magazine. Decades of research have linked repeated exposure to these narrow body ideals with body dissatisfaction, psychological distress, and disordered eating. Those effects show up across genders and age groups. Beauty standards set by fashion and media shape how ordinary people feel about themselves every day.

Nearly 800,000 Records, One Uncomfortable Truth About the Fashion Body Ideal

Researchers pulled data from two professional modeling industry platforms, covering work records from 2000 through 2024. The final dataset included 793,199 records spanning runway shows, advertisements, magazine covers, and editorial shoots, along with model measurements, visible physical traits, and country of origin. When self-reported identity data wasn’t available (roughly 23% of records), researchers used photo-based software tools to estimate gender and ethnicity. The authors acknowledge this method is imperfect and cannot capture the full complexity of a person’s identity.

To measure body composition without relying on weight, which the modeling industry has historically been reluctant to disclose, the team used a metric called Relative Fat Mass, or RFM. Unlike the more familiar Body Mass Index, RFM uses a person’s height, waist measurement, and sex to estimate body fat levels, and has been shown to be a more accurate measure of actual fat content. This let researchers compare model bodies to those of real American women, using data from a large, long-running federal health survey.

The gap they found was enormous. Female models in the dataset clustered around an average RFM of about 18%, while American women between the ages of 17 and 30 averaged around 38.5% in the federal health data. That’s a gap of roughly 20 percentage points, and it hasn’t narrowed or widened over the entire 25-year study period. Bodies that fashion presents as aspirational are, statistically speaking, almost entirely absent from the general population.

Diversity Grew, But Only at the Edges

So where does the appearance of progress come from? According to the study, published in PNAS, it’s real, but it’s happening at the fringes of the industry rather than at its center.

Over the study period, the range of body sizes represented in fashion media did expand. Standard measurements like waist, hips, and bust showed roughly double the variability by the end of the study compared to the early 2000s. On the surface, that sounds meaningful. But when researchers looked more closely at where that variability was coming from, they found it was almost entirely driven by the addition of a small number of plus-size models, defined by the industry as a U.S. dress size 12 or higher, at the high end of the size range. The middle of the distribution, meaning the most common type of model body, barely changed at all.

“[B]ody-size diversity reflects the inclusion of a few outliers rather than a recentering of the typical model body,” the researchers wrote (p. 4).

Much like a restaurant that adds one extra-large option to the menu while keeping every other item identical, the menu looks more inclusive. The default hasn’t changed.

Meanwhile, diversity in appearance and origin genuinely did grow. Blonde hair and blue eyes became less dominant over time, while darker hair and eye colors gained ground. The share of models from Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, and South Asia increased. Eastern European models, who dominated in the early 2000s, declined in representation. These are real, measurable shifts.

The Fashion Industry’s Diversity Math Has a Problem

Size diversity has been limited to outliers, and it has been disproportionately concentrated on non-White models, a pattern the study describes as “showcase inclusion rather than systemic change.”

Non-White models rose from 13% of the industry in 2011 to 44% in 2024. Plus-size models, meanwhile, grew from nearly zero to about 1% over the same period. But those two trends are far from independent. Starting around 2017, researchers found that non-White models were, on average, 4.5 times more likely to be plus-size models than their White counterparts. That ratio held through 2024.

Researchers describe this pattern as “intersectional concentration,” a situation where the work of representing diversity falls disproportionately on people who are already underrepresented. Rather than broadening the overall model pool, the data suggests body-size diversity is being absorbed by the same individuals who are already carrying racial diversity.

Prestige amplifies the pattern. Researchers ranked fashion brands and magazines based on how connected they were within the industry. At the most prestigious tier, the share of extremely thin models was highest. Plus-size appearances were most common at both the very top and very bottom tiers, but nearly absent in the middle. Mid-tier brands were neither as focused on extreme thinness as elite brands, nor as willing to cast plus-size models as those at the top and bottom of the prestige scale.

Rules With Numbers Work Better Than Rules Without Them

One of the more policy-relevant findings in the study involves a comparison of two regulatory approaches to addressing extremely thin models on the runway.

In 2006, Milan Fashion Week implemented a rule barring female models with a body mass index below 18.5, a specific, numerical threshold. In 2017, France introduced a law requiring models to carry a health certificate from a doctor, but set no specific cutoff for body size. Researchers compared what happened at those cities’ fashion weeks before and after each rule took effect, using other major fashion cities as a reference point.

After Milan’s rule went into effect, average body fat levels among models at that city’s fashion week shifted measurably upward compared to other cities, a pattern consistent with the rule having reduced the presence of the thinnest models on the runway. Those effects held through 2010, the end of the post-intervention tracking window used for that specific comparison.

Paris showed no such pattern after France’s 2017 law. Average body composition at Paris Fashion Week continued to track in line with broader industry trends, with no visible change following the new requirement. When rules are specific and enforceable, they tend to produce results. When they leave room for interpretation, they may be easier to satisfy on paper without changing actual practice.

Beyond fashion magazines and runways, the study’s authors close with a warning about what comes next. Narrow body standards documented over 25 years are now being built into artificial intelligence systems used to generate advertising images. As AI-generated models enter commercial media, researchers caution that those tools risk locking in existing biases rather than correcting them. Without deliberate auditing and transparency standards, the body ideals documented in this study could be embedded into the next generation of visual media at a scale the fashion industry itself has never reached.

Fashion’s diversity era has produced more varied faces and a broader range of origins in its imagery, but the body the industry presents as the standard of beauty remains as narrow, and as distant from ordinary Americans, as it has ever been.

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