The Body Issue: Optimization and Dissolution
Hypebae’s The Body Issue explores how optimization is infiltrating fashion imagery, and traces why body reconstruction is turning into a fashion reference.
In 2024, independent designer Namilia sent a simple white tank down its Berlin Fashion Week runway, emblazoned with a less than simple statement: “I <3 Ozempic.” Some observers criticized the brand’s careless glorification of the weight-loss product while others saw it as a refreshing, satirical stance. Either way, it captured fashion’s current relationship with body optimization; unresolved and impossible to look away from.
Over the last decade, we’ve seen a rise in body optimization in fashion through technology partnerships, particularly.
In 2022, Gucci‘s Oura Ring turned a luxury wearable into a performance tracker. In 2025, Coperni‘s collaboration with Meta turned glasses into an extension of the wearer’s senses. Through these partnerships, the body has been reframed as a data source, quantified and extended through the objects worn on it. Simultaneously, campaign and retail aesthetics from the likes of Gentle Monster showcase the body as machines and in direct relationship with technology.
Fashion is also steadily drawing inspiration from body reconstruction and surgical enhancement. The trend accelerated during the pandemic, when screen-mediated reflections of our own faces became a daily fixture.
The pandemic’s “Zoom effect” increased demand for cosmetic procedures while FaceTune normalized “Instagram Face” as a physical aspiration rather than a digital filter. Around this time, Balenciaga‘s Spring 2020 show put facial prosthetics on the runway. Elsewhere, French label Marine Serre launched a film for its SS21 collection, titled Amor Fati. The film follows Sevdaliza and Juliet Merie through existentialism and self-discovery, set in a sterile lab. Perhaps unknowingly, Marine Serre captured the rising sentiment of fashion as surgery, the body as a cyborg.
More recently, brands have moved from symbolizing surgery to depicting it directly. Natasha Zinko‘s SS25 collection “PLASTIC” dressed models in surgical gear with one shirt asking “Who’s Your Surgeon?”. Matières Fécales‘ FW26 collection “One Percent” cast Bryan Johnson, arguably today’s most public experiment in self-optimization, alongside models designed with botched cosmetic work. Casting choices like this suggest runways are increasingly functioning as an unfiltered documentary space for optimization culture, spotlighting these aesthetics while also critiquing them.
Now, fashion has met today’s final boss of body enhancement, looksmaxxing; a term shortlisted for Collins Dictionary’s word of the year in 2024. Brands have fueled the hype surrounding this phenomenon, with Clavicular walking the Elena Velez FW26 show and shapewear brand SKIMS launching a face contouring Sculpt Wrap. SKIMS’ move into face contouring suggests that product categories that used to be clearly “clothing” vs. “cosmetic intervention” are blending into a single continuum of body-editing tools.
73% of our respondents say body enhancements such as cosmetic procedures and weight-loss drugs are “significantly” changing beauty and fashion standards, and a lot of this has to do with language.
‘Self-care’ once described almost anything a person did to feel better. ‘Looksmaxxing’ names a specific, gamified pursuit of a measurable result. Once a word like that exists, it invites people to optimize toward it.
In 2009, Rick Owens famously shared: “Working out is modern couture. No outfit is going to make you look or feel as good as having a fit body.” The undercurrents of that statement are reflected in optimization culture today. “Defined and visibly toned” were the second most common words used to describe the body aesthetic that feels most “fashionable” right now.
With GLP-1s making the ultra-thin aesthetic more readily achievable, a muscular aesthetic might soon prevail as fashion’s leading body ideal, since a muscular silhouette lets you physically portray the most important element of optimization: discipline and resource.
Today, the cast of public optimizers is finite, and so is the fashion imagery built around them. Without wider representation, the story thins too, landing on an outcome of longevity and homogeneity.
Mugler‘s Summer 2026 bag campaign offered a different picture of this, starring female bodybuilder Tatiana Horslaville. The campaign honored her strength on her own terms, and put a body rarely seen in fashion at the center of the frame.
This campaign sits alongside others from the likes of Collina Strada‘s FW24 “STRONGER” collection to Tilfi’s 2026 “Becoming” campaign, which both platform strong femme muses on a path to self-actualization that is celebratory and uniquely theirs.
In fashion’s future, these are the types of collections and campaign visuals that we’d like to see pursued; dismantling normative conventions, reconceptualizing strength as an expression of femininity and expanding representation to encompass a broader spectrum of bodily and sartorial forms.
None of this requires fashion to resolve whether Namilia’s “I <3 Ozempic” shirt was satire or an endorsement. What it requires is transparency, and the creative intention to expand what an ‘optimized’ body in fashion can be.
