It’s strict over at Cannes! The film festival is known for its famous dress code: black-tie only for red-carpet gala screenings, meaning evening gowns for women and tuxedos for men. Last year, the conversation was all about how Cannes introduced bans on both “naked dresses,” which we can probably thank Bella Hadid for after she wore a suggestion of a sheath by Saint Laurent on the red carpet back in 2024, and overly voluminous gowns for simple logistics: There are a lot of steps! This year, the ban on naked dresses and too-big frocks remains, and attendees are now asked to wear “elegant shoes” rather than heels.
Yet dress codes are not the topic du jour. The talk surrounding red carpets this year is a far thornier one: the state of celebrity bodies. Namely, everyone’s too thin. This isn’t news—the big, ongoing GLP-1 wave hit Hollywood early—but, if at first the chatter was about who was taking “the stab” and who wasn’t, nowadays it’s about the size of everyone’s waist and how visible their sternums are, Ozempic or not.
Plainly, this new standard look makes us uncomfortable, and I would dare say that it’s a big reason why many people on the internet seem to be rebelling against celebrity culture. Take some of the backlash around this year’s Met Gala as an example—sure, part of it was Jeff Bezos’s involvement and sponsorship, but a lot of it comes from our collective anxiety around the state of the world and the way in which some pockets of culture seem eager to look the other way. And yet the benefit raised $42 million, the most ever. It was also the most watched, per Vogue, with 1.7 billion global video views across all markets and platforms, a 57% year-on-year increase.
Visit the comment section under the image of a svelte celeb, and you’ll find a variety of denouncements, often a version of: “Why are you promoting this [unhealthy] look?”
A few weeks ago, I was on the phone with a family member who wanted to talk about some Oscar looks. When she got to two movie stars of her generation who seemed to have lost a significant amount of weight, she stopped herself. She said she knew that we don’t talk about people’s bodies anymore, but that it did concern her to see thinness back en vogue, and in a new way. Our conversation then quickly shifted to a pricklier topic altogether: Where do we draw the line on body positivity?
Yes, everyone’s bodies are their own bodies, and therefore none of our business. And yet when it comes to the cult of celebrity, the remit of this conversation inevitably expands to power, influence, and aspiration. Their bodies are not just their bodies; they are, theoretically, the embodiments of what we should want to be.
Consider our collective obsession with protein intake, or how a generation has delved into the dangerous territory of looksmaxxing, and why young men, whether part of this subculture or not, are taking peptides and are obsessed with the gym.
Why do teenagers on TikTok look like Marvel superheroes? Because for the entirety of their formative years, the real-life embodiments of Thor and Superman and Captain America on screen—Chris Hemsworth, Henry Cavill, and Chris Evans, respectively—looked like flesh-and-blood action figures, not like the silver screen actors of yore that were fit, but not jacked.