From the outside, fashion looks like a different industry. The faces on the covers are more diverse, the campaigns more inclusive, the language more body-positive. But according to a new study, the body ideal at the heart of the industry has barely shifted.
THE STUDY IN A NUTSHELL
- A research team analyzed nearly 800,000 fashion images (2000 – 2024).
- The variation of body types has increased. But this increase is driven by outliers, while the standard of the industry hasn’t changed
- Even the so-called plus-size models are below the average US body size
- The distance between the images people see and the bodies they live in is still very alarming, says co-author Katharina Ledebur from CSH.
For their study published in PNAS, a team of researchers including Katharina Ledebur from the Complexity Science Hub (CSH) looked at 793,199 fashion images from 2000 to 2024, drawn from fashion shows, advertisements, magazine covers, and editorial. 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.
“We all know that for quite some time there is a large movement of demanding to include more body sizes and many brands have responded by casting more diverse models”, says Ledebur. “Checking the data, we do actually see that the variation of body types increases but when we look at the average, it doesn’t change. This means that the increase in more diverse body types is only driven by outliers and the industry, the standard, actually didn’t change.” Louis Boucherie, a researcher at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and lead author of the paper, explains: “When we look how that variation is distributed, we can see that the middle stays stable.”
EVEN PLUS-SIZE BELOW THE AVERAGE
To see how far the industry standard sits from real bodies, the researchers compared US-based models to NHANES, the US government’s large-scale health survey. They used the relative fat mass index, a body-fat estimator derived from height, waist, and sex, similar to the Body Mass Index (BMI). “We find that there is almost no overlap between the models and the population. Even the so-called plus-size models are still below the average US body size”, says Ledebur. “So, what the fashion industry calls plus-size corresponds much more closely to the average American woman,” adds Boucherie.
That gap matters. Decades of research have shown that exposure to narrow body ideals shapes how people – across genders and age groups – feel about their own bodies, their eating behavior, and their overall psychological wellbeing. When even plus-size models fall below the average American woman’s body size, the distance between the images people see and the bodies they live in is, as Ledebur puts it, very alarming.
CONCENTRATED DIVERSITY
The study also examines how different dimensions of diversity intersect. Over the same period, ethnic representation in fashion imagery changed markedly. 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 essentially have to work with a White versus non-White distinction, which is coarse, but it’s the only way to analyze the full dataset consistently over time” says 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.
This study originated at the 2024 Complex Systems Summer School at the Santa Fe Institute, where a group of researchers connected over a shared interest in fashion and trend evolution. Starting from a large dataset, the project gradually shifted focus — from the clothes to the people wearing them. This study is the result of that pivot.
“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 Boucherie.
Fashion institutions can therefore increase visible diversity without altering the central aesthetic standard, however, not all parts of the 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 less prestigious peers do.
What this shows is that the industry’s evolution is heterogeneous: aggregate measures of diversity hide 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 BMI floor of 18.5 introduced at Milan Fashion Week in 2006, and a softer medical-certification system introduced in France in 2017. The researchers compare how these differing regulatory designs coincided with changes in the prevalence of extremely thin models over time.
“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,” says Boucherie.
The researchers emphasize that the analysis is descriptive rather than causal, and they note that the two policies are separated by more than a decade and occurred in different cultural contexts. 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.
The study also includes male models, and the analysis shows that patterns differ from those observed for women. While male fashion imagery likewise exhibits very narrow and idealized body standards, changes over time are less pronounced, both in terms of body size and diversity. The researchers found no comparable expansion in variation among male models and noted that the fashion industry’s male body ideal appears more stable and less contested over the period studied. Statistically, however, the male sample is smaller and less consistent year to year, giving the researchers less to work with. As a result, the authors focus primarily on women’s fashion imagery, where both the scale of change and its social implications are more clearly detectable in the data.
About the study
The study “Cultural evolution of beauty standards” by L. Boucherie, S. Kumar, K. Ledebur, A. Lohse, and K. Sliwa was published in PNAS (doi: 10.1073/pnas.2602380123)
This article is based on a press release originally published by the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
