Fashion and media have become visibly more diverse over the past quarter-century. Yet beneath that surface change, a new study suggests that the industry's central female body ideal has barely shifted.
A large-scale analysis of nearly 800,000 fashion images finds that while representation has broadened, the typical female model body has remained remarkably stable, with non-white models 4.5 times more likely to also be plus size.
In the paper Cultural evolution of beauty standards, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers analyzed 793,199 images from 2000 to 2024, drawn from fashion shows, advertisements, magazine covers, and editorial fashion coverage. Using computer vision, network analysis, and clinical population health data, they tracked how model body size has evolved over time, across regions, and within segments of the fashion industry. The primary focus of the research is on female models (see fact box).
Their main findings are unexpectedly simple. While a wider range of body types now appears in fashion imagery, the typical model's body has not changed. Diversity has increased through the inclusion of a small number of models at the extremes, rather than through a shift in that norm itself.
"On the mean, nothing happens. Everything is super stable," says Louis Boucherie, a researcher at DTU (the Technical University of Denmark), and lead author of the paper, co-authored with researchers in Denmark, the United States, and Austria (see fact box).
"When we then look at the change in variation, we find what you'd expect: body size diversity has grown. But when we look at how that variation is distributed, we can see that the middle stays stable. So, the change is happening at the outliers."
Plus size models and the population gap
To benchmark fashion against reality, the researchers compared US-based models with the US government's large-scale health survey (NHANES). The contrast is stark.
"When we compare the US models to the general US population, there is almost no overlap between the two. And if you look carefully, you see that even the plus size models are still below the average US body size. So, what the fashion industry calls plus size corresponds much more closely to the average American woman," Louis Boucherie.
In other words, even the models labeled as "plus size" are, on average, smaller than the typical adult woman in the general population. The overlap between fashion imagery and body sizes in the population remains extremely limited.
The researchers highlight that exposure to narrow body ideals has been repeatedly linked, in meta-analyses across genders and age groups, to body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and psychological distress.
Intersectionality: the burden of representing diversity
The study also examines how different dimensions of diversity intersect. As it turns out, ethnic representation in fashion imagery has changed markedly in the same 25-year period. The share of models identified as non white rose from roughly 13 percent in 2011 to more than 40 percent in recent years, according to the analysis.
"We don't have very fine grained racial categories in the data. We essentially must work with a white versus non white distinction, which is obviously a coarse way of doing it. But it's the only way to do the analysis consistently across the full dataset and over time," says Louis Boucherie.
The study finds that these two dimensions of diversity, body size and ethnicity, intersect rather than expand independently. And thus, a plus size model is 4.5 times more likely to be non-white, suggesting that multiple markers of difference are often concentrated in the same individuals. This means the industry's gains in diversity are intersectionally concentrated on the same individuals rather than broadly distributed.
"What these patterns of representation end up meaning is that the burden of representing diversity often falls on a relatively small group of non white models," says Louis Boucherie.
Fashion institutions can therefore increase visible diversity without altering the central aesthetic standard. However, not all parts of the fashion industry shape norms to the same degree. To examine whether these patterns differ across the industry, the researchers built a data-driven hierarchy of brands and magazines from the collaboration network, measuring status by which brands book the same models as other high-status players.
A distinctive pattern emerges at the top. High-prestige brands feature both the thinnest models and a higher share of visibly plus-size models than their less prestigious peers. This shows that the industry's evolution is heterogeneous: aggregate measures of diversity mask significant variation across prestige tiers.
Regulation: what has already been tried
The paper also explores whether formal regulation has influenced model selection. It examines two contrasting European interventions: a hard, numerical minimum body mass index requirement enforced at Milan Fashion Week, and a softer, certification-based system implemented in France.
The researchers compare how these differing regulatory designs coincided with changes in the prevalence of extremely thin models over time, explains Louis Boucherie:
"What we see is that in Milan, where there was a hard numerical threshold, there is a clear reduction in the number of extremely thin models after the regulation was introduced. In France, however, where the regulation was much softer and based on doctor certification, we don't see the same kind of effect. We're very careful not to claim causality here, but descriptively the difference between a hard threshold and a flexible system is quite striking."
The researchers emphasize that the analysis identifies correlations rather than causal effects. Still, the contrast suggests that the design of regulatory interventions may matter for how body ideals are expressed in fashion imagery.
Progress with limits
Taken together, the findings point to a paradox at the heart of contemporary fashion culture. Representation has broadened, and diversity has increased in visible ways. Yet the core definition of what counts as a normative or aspirational body has proven far more resistant to change, which suggests that inclusion alone does not necessarily reshape standards.
Shifting cultural norms may require change not just at the margins, but at the center of the industry itself.
"I think people already knew there was a problem, which has been debated repeatedly. What we've done is to quantify it. And I think that's the new part. We're just here to say that there is this problem, and then it's the responsibility of the advertisers and the people organizing fashion shows and editing magazines to decide what to do with that information," says Louis Boucherie.
