Have we still not evolved beyond Size Zero?

KATE Moss famously said that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. The model recently told Desert Island Discs that the comment was a joke and that was she was simply quoting a fridge magnet. But her words carried more weight than she did, and underpinned an entire era of the fashion industry.

Now, trends are cyclical and the resurgence of 90s and 00s fashion is being felt. But, among the revival of the slip dress, butterfly clips and a brown Mac lipstick, one US tabloid seemed to the return of something else, leading with the tagline: “Bye-bye booty: Heroin chic is back”.

Moss was the poster girl for so-called “heroin chic”, trademarked by pale skin, hollowed eyes and exaggerated features. Some have gone as far as to draw a link between the movement and the prominence of disordered eating amongst young women in the millennium: statistics show that girls aged

15-19 in the UK had the highest incidence of eating disorders between 2000 and 2009.

Then, from the ashes of Size Zero, the body confidence movement was born. Spearheaded by celebrities like Jameela Jamil, who had been the target of 00s gossip magazines when she gained weight, it focused on putting mid-size and plus-size bodies in the mainstream. Cosmopolitan contributed by putting plus-size Tess Holiday on the cover and

The challenge is to separate the clothes from the bodies wearing them. Can we do it?

giving daytime TV talk show hosts a heart attack.

In recent years, the movement has attempted to neutralise: a long overdue nod to the fact that some bodies are bigger, some bodies are smaller, neither are better than the other, and almost all of them have stretch marks and cellulite to be found somewhere. But the industry is fickle and, for every ad campaign that rejects airbrushing, there is still a Kardashian on Instagram making increasingly unconvincing edits to photos in order to make their waistlines appear even smaller.

In fact, it is a Kardashian partially responsible for this latest lurch back to the potentially problematic movement of runways past. Kim Kardashian drew headlines for her dramatic weight loss at this year’s Met Gala: the reality TV star lost around 16lbs to fit into one of Marilyn

Monroe’s dresses for the event.

The question is, have we left the heyday of Size Zero far enough behind? A slightly cynical eyeing up of fashion’s current moguls would suggest not. Next year the Met Gala will honour the late Karl Lagerfeld, who famously called Adele “a little too fat” and dismissed those who criticised fashion’s thin-obsession as “fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television”. What do the Met Gala bosses have to say to that? Well, its chair Anna Wintour is the same Vogue editor who told Oprah to lose 20lb before her cover shoot.

No-one quotes Moss any more, but the mantra lives on in the back of the minds of every woman who grew up in the 90s and 00s. The challenge is to separate the clothes from the bodies wearing them. Can we do it? I hope so.