‘Grande has shocked observers with her rail-thin frame.’ (Christopher Polk/2026GG/Penske Media/Getty)
All around us, famous women are shrinking. The age of GLP-1s — or “lifestyle changes”, as PR people call them — has taken out a league of formerly large ladies. It’s given us Lizzo Lite, skinny Adele, and a positively willowy Rebel Wilson (though Lizzo is the only one of these women to cop to using weight-loss drugs). Many once suckled on the teat of the body-positivity movement: Lizzo found fame singing about being “not a snack… [but] the whole damn meal”, while fellow former “curvy girl” and jab-fan Meghan Trainor wrote, in the fat-acceptance anthem “All About That Bass”, that “I won’t be no stick-figure, silicone Barbie doll”, though in truth these days she resembles just that. Body positivity isn’t worth mourning — its messages were a garbled mess of junk 2010s individualism anyway — but even its icons transforming into waifs shows us how dramatically weight-loss drugs have transformed public life.
With all the mystery around Ozempic in pop culture, old-school anorexia seems strangely simple. Perhaps this explains the internet’s fixation with both Ariana Grande and Bella Hadid, the singer and model who have become the unintended public faces of pernicious (alleged) eating disorders in recent years. Grande has become noticeably less grande since the pandemic; she shocked observers with her rail-thin frame during the promotional junket for the film Wicked, and in the past few weeks has appeared on stage, incredibly thin, during live shows. “She literally looks emaciated,” said one fan on X; others accused her of having “choreographed sitting” into her dance routine, presumably to avoid lightheadedness.
Hadid, for her part, has been posting again about her Lyme disease diagnosis. The supermodel was diagnosed in 2012 at the age of 16, along with her mother and brother. Intermittently since then, she has shared pictures of herself stripped to the waist in a hospital bed, covered in electrodes or on a drip. One fan says it’s really because she “doesn’t eat”. Others scour the contents of her fridge, finding only “juice, yoghurt and berries”. “It’s heartbreaking to see her battling with an ED [eating disorder] and Yolanda is all to blame,” reads one comment, with reference to Hadid’s former-model mother who is known for encouraging her other daughter Gigi only to “have a couple of almonds” when the then-teenager complained of feeling faint and hungry. Bella Hadid may well be debilitated by Lyme disease, but her physical frailty is hard to ignore. As with Grande, her disappearing body is viral catnip.
Why is skinny “back” in celebrity culture? We must not forget the specific glamour of anorexia, glamour which is most intoxicating to teen girls. The literary critic Elaine Showalter memorably described melancholia in the Romantic period as a “prestigious disorder of upper-class and intellectual men”. You can see why it was thought of in this way: plumbing one’s own misery required both depth and leisure. Happiness is for oiks. Of course, this perception had no bearing on real incidence, save for the crazy-making nature of idleness which may have brought the black dog unto a few sad squires. Sighing was probably just as common in the scullery as in the library. Nevertheless many illnesses have their mythologies, and if male depression was conferred an elite status in the past then the female cognate today is without doubt anorexia and bulimia.
The virtuous connotations of female eating disorders are that sufferers are meticulous, intelligent, disciplined and detached — coolly incorporeal, pensive and stylishly sad. The prototype of the chic contemporary anorexic is Marya Hornbacher, whose 1997 memoir Wasted, published when she was just 23, detailed her teen years in recovery wards, culminating in a brush with death when she weighed just 52 pounds. In the book, Hornbacher describes her illness with borderline cinematic sumptuousness: “I brought a stack of books and a notebook, packs of cigarettes, and sat coiled in a chair in the corner, rubbing my eyes… swallowing coffee… reading Bertrand Russell and John Stuart Mill and Marx.”
Here is this sophisticated teenager, swapping food (lame) for philosophy (rad!) while going through coffee and cigs like a Parisian poseur. Are we meant to interpret her starvation as cool or awful? The ambiguity is deliberate. While Wasted won huge acclaim and became the archetypal anorexia memoir, Hornbacher’s barely restrained sense of her own emaciated glamour compromised its function as a “warning” for sufferers and their families. Instead, it spurned imitation. Another eating-disorder memoirist, Nicole Johns, author of bulimia tome Purge, says fellow patients would try to “smuggle” copies of Wasted into treatment facilities, treating it as a manual. Hornbacher’s tendency to brag, and her undisguised nostalgia for the allure of her illness — as well as the instructional nature of the account, much of which is in the second person (“you will lift the toilet seat, carefully slide your fingers inside your mouth and down your throat, and puke until you see orange”) — made it premium reading material for the aspiring anorexic.
Today, this mechanism has become part of the very wiring of social media. Since the early days of blogging sites — Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram — eating-disorder pages have been as depressingly constant as pornography. “Pro-ana” (anorexia) posters compete with one another for the lowest BMIs; TikTok content creators get around guardrails by pretending that the calorie-counts which accompany images of their meals are “prices”. Bloggers share “thinspo” (thin inspiration) — pictures of themselves or celebrities; they “body check”, meaning that they show off hollow stomachs or wrist-thin thighs for other girls to use as motivation. Because they are famished, they also post obsessively about food. In this they resemble the subjects of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment in the Forties, in which healthy men were put on extreme diets. Over 24 weeks, the men were found to hoard and obsessively read cookbooks. Had these men been given access to Instagram, they too would surely have gorged on images of food.
Celebrities are also part of the eating-disorder internet. Many super-thin stars, most notably Ariana Grande, have asked people not to comment on their bodies — Grande called speculation about the looks and health of others “dangerous”. But asking fans — the source of your income — to pay attention to only the “comfortable” facets of your persona breaks the contract of fame: celebrity means sacrificing privacy, and exposure is part of the bargain. Commenters diagnosing stars from a distance — or even “concern trolling” (posting skeletal pictures of women they’re “worried about”) — may be distasteful, but it is inevitable. These celebrities are, after all, the ultimate beneficiaries of the attention economy and stand to gain even when this attention is negative; Grande’s secrecy around her alleged condition has in fact only increased the intrigue and therefore the coverage.
I have little doubt that Grande’s thinness is, to some vulnerable fans, aspirational. And there is no denying that pictures of these celebrities are being used as “thinspo”. Grande posting body-checking pictures of herself fitting inside a guitar case means an X user called “Skinny B4 Death” will inevitably add her to their starvation moodboard. Hadid, for her part, has often posed in a way which emphasises a starved ribcage; this could well lead to users glamourising emaciation, in a grisly echo of Nineties “heroin chic”. To those quick to dismiss this as a feminist fuss over nothing, use your imagination: you may not give a sod about seeing one too many jutting bones, but then you may not be a teenage girl. For them, such images can alter the course of a life.
The public spectacle of Grande’s and Hadid’s emaciation is functioning, in the age of the internet, like a virtual eating-disorder ward: hypercompetitive and dishonest, bragging and furtive. Particularly since their fans are primarily those most vulnerable to eating-disorder content: namely, girls. The result of all this blog-worthy boniness is that the troubled years of these stick-thin celebrities may end up just like copies of Wasted: tucked under inpatients’ pillows, bookmarked at the bad bits, treasured as a guide for how to disappear.
