When Hannah Einbinder was asked for her fashion hot take, she didn’t name a designer or a trend. She offered a theory: that the shrinking of women’s bodies tracks the rise of fascism.
Einbinder didn’t invent the idea. It’s been circulating online for over a year, and she put language to it in a magazine interview. What she did was give a diffuse internet argument a name and a bigger stage.
The theory pulls from two books written decades apart. Susan Sontag’s 1975 essay “Fascinating Fascism” argued that Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda films used fit, muscular bodies to sell the regime’s power. Sabrina Strings’ 2019 book “Fearing the Black Body” traced fatphobia and thin supremacy to the twin goals of disciplining white women into an ideal and punishing Black women for not meeting it.
Those ideas merged online into a single claim: as fascism takes hold, women get thinner, and the current political climate in the US is driving a thinness epidemic in the culture.
Einbinder gave the idea a wider audience in an interview with Cosmopolitan, framing it as her fashion hot take. Search “skinniness and fascism” on Substack or TikTok and dozens of creators turn up making the same argument.
The commentary emerges in an environment where several stars — Ariana Grande, Jenna Ortega, Olivia Wilde — have appeared concerningly underweight recently.
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