Kate Moss famously said in 2009 that her motto was “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. It caused an uproar, and throughout the 2010s, “skinny” was a dirty word. Victoria’s Secret Angels like Candice Swanepoel identified as “strong, not skinny”, while the body positivity movement came to the fore.
Wanting to be thin was problematic and taboo. Yet on dark corners of Tumblr, Moss’s mantra was picked up with gusto and pasted onto many a black and white image of thigh gaps and protruding ribs.
