
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the most famous women in the world were disappearing before our eyes.
On television, in movies, in the pages of magazines (a Big Thing, then), the actresses, models and socialites we obsessed over were teeny-tiny, with as flat a chest as possible, collar bones you could slice cheese on, and shoulder blades that protruded like tiny, demonic wings.
In a sit-com, on a red carpet, in a paparazzi shot taken outside a club, the most-desired female aesthetic of the time was the "lollipop" - very, very thin arms and legs, and a head that looked too big for your neck to support.
Watch: Where are they now? Our celeb crushes from the 90s. Post continues below.
Shocking, isn't it? To talk about a woman's body in that way. Like she's not a real thing. Like she's an object.
We don't do that anymore. Not in polite company, anyway.
Now, when I'm watching re-runs of Will And Grace on Stan and seeing Debra Messing shrink away to almost nothing as the seasons wind back in time, I'm not meant to say anything at all. Women come in all sizes, anyway, right? Maybe Messing was just naturally thin when she was super-famous on TV. Lots of women are.
And there were plenty of them all over our TV screens at that time. Jennifer Aniston and Courtney Cox in Friends, Calista Flockhart and Portia de Rossi in Ally McBeal. Sarah Jessica Parker in Sex And The City. Soon enough, the Desperate Housewives.
It was the age of the Size Zero fetish. Over in the LA nightclubs and the shiny back gossip pages of the magazines there was Rachel Zoe, Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton, Mischa Barton. Every one of them smaller than the other.
By those noughtie days, I worked in gossip mags, and picking out frames where the bones looked particularly spiky was stock in trade. SCARY SKINNY we would type into the cover template. The next image over? LOSE 5KG FAST, next to one of the same women, looking slightly less unwell, in a bikini.
Lose, lose.
But, surprise. It turns out, women weren't just naturally thinner in the 1990s. Tiny wrists weren't a by-product of acting talent. These women were starving themselves, en masse.
This week, Debra Messing appeared on Jameela Jamil's I Weigh podcast and addressed that version of herself, the 90s one in the handkerchief tops, no bra, no hips and no bum.
Top Comments
At least these days we are starting to see diversity in who models stuff and who is cast in tv shows. It really is changing.