No, we are not pulling any punches here because I. Have. Had. ENOUGH.
We’re all (too) familiar with the classic influencer trope of “don’t worry, fatties! I have rolls too!” that’s been doing the rounds ever since IG was founded by a pair of entrepreneurial tech bros in 2010. (Do you think they knew what it was going to do to us all? Forgive me but I suspect two thin white dudes didn’t give much thought to how this photo sharing app was going to affect the body images of women and girls – and, latterly, men and boys, too – all over the world.)
You know the one, anyway: your fave thinfluencer, known for sharing her gut healthy smoothie recipes and the 20-minute workouts that’ll “get you glowing” takes a picture of herself, usually sitting down, often hunched over (girl, we all know you have the world’s best posture so give it a rest), to show us plebeians that she, too, is a hideous fatty sometimes.
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We’ve long known, now, that this is not the inclusive flex they think it is; there are hundreds, thousands, millions of us who are hideous fatties 24/7 and can’t just, oh, I don’t know, stand up straight, or hoik up our leggings, to make ourselves look like a fitness model.
And, to be fair, they’ve largely stopped doing it (although honourable mention for the “IBS girlies” – I count myself among them – who frequently post photographs of their “bloat” as if it’s somehow comforting to fat people to know that thin people occasionally look… less thin?), because the message has finally sunk in that sharing your belly rolls with the world doesn’t make you brave or (puke) “authentic”.
But just as the influencers have hopped off a trend, the fashion world – cheers, guys! – has given them a new and exciting way to show us fatties that they’re fine with looking fat (it’s fun! and funny! and fashionable!) as long as it’s super clear to everyone involved that they’re, you know, not actually fat.
I first came across this exciting new trend on TikTok, where @venswifestyle was “styling” Acne’s cartoon jeans, a kind of structured, padded denim jean with a floral lining, available to buy for a cool $1,550.
To get this out of the way: the jeans are disgusting. Truly, we have reached new sartorial lows – between these and the resurgence of low rise, it’s hard to see any hope for us.
But back to brass tacks: it’s worth noting that the jeans only go up to a UK size 14, a 31.5-inch waist, more than five inches smaller than the average woman, so these “fat” jeans – “Are people cosplaying lipedema?” asks one Facebook commenter – aren’t designed to fit actual fat people. (The size 14, by the way, is designed with a 30-inch inseam, so you’d better be a tall size 14 if you want to wear them.)
If the TikTok videos are anything to go by, though, the “joy” of these jeans seems to be in the sheer “ridiculousness” of them; the women pulling these up over their very slim legs are delirious with happiness. Look how silly I look with these big fat roundy legs! they seem to be saying. Lol I love the trick mirror effect of these trousers! They are the sartorial equivalent of the funhouse mirror, hilarious only because you get to go back to normal once you walk out the door (or step out of the jeans).
Acne’s not the only designer toying with faux-fatness-as-fashion-trend; Ukrainian designer Ksenia Schnaider’s made-to-measure jeans feature a double-wide frame – all the better to showcase the diminutive size of your waist, floating within their structured waistband. It’s giving weightloss transformation, the $750 designer jeans serving to show just how tiny the wearer is compared to the jeans they’re wearing.
It feels a lot like the 2025 version of the fat suit; remember the gleeful paparazzi photos of Gwyneth Paltrow as Rosemary (GOD!) in Shallow Hal, Fat Monica in Friends, Tyra Banks’ 2005 experiment which resulted in her being “shocked” by people’s behaviour towards the 350-pound version of herself (evidence, if we needed it, that thin people don’t pay attention when fat people tell them what it’s like to be fat).
The thing is, we get it: for a lot of thin, fashionable, subjectively “beautiful” – by whatever standards are in place at the time of their social media presence – people, the very notion of being fat is ridiculous, farcical, or, a lot of the time, terrifying.
A follower recently shared with me an exchange she’d had with a friend who was recently diagnosed with cancer. Somehow, the conversation came around to fatness.
“Would you rather have cancer, or be fat?” she asked her friend. (They’re still friends – is that a spoiler alert? – so I can only assume this conversation came up somehow organically, and was less offensive in reality than it seems on paper.)
“How fat?” her friend asked.
“Fat like me,” was the response.
“Oh,” said the friend with cancer to the fat friend. “I’d rather have cancer.”
I do often wonder what life would be like if there was no stigma, no shame, around fatness. If airplane seats were designed to accommodate all bodies; if fashion designers didn’t get away with designing for the thinnest 20% of us; if no one had ever used the word “fat” pejoratively; if fatness had never been associated with slovenliness, or gluttony, or any and all other negative words.
I doubt these jeans would exist, for starters. They don’t look good; the “joke” is that they kind of give this little hint of “imagine if I looked like this!” but then, coupled with the skintight tops each of the influencers above is wearing, emphasise the fact that their wearers are (phew!) slim.
What else would we be missing? Weight Watchers? Slimming World? Ozempic and Wegovy might exist as medications for type 2 diabetes sufferers only; surely they wouldn’t be in massive demand, which means the cost would be marginally more reasonable, and the maker of Ozempic, Novo Nordisk, wouldn’t be worth more than the entire GDP of Denmark.
It’s interesting to think about how fashion might be different, more broadly; would corsets ever have been designed? Sure, you can argue that it’s about a silhouette, but the silhouette is one of a narrow waist, something that simply does not come naturally to the fatties among us. Push-up bras? Compressive leggings? Peplums, cap sleeves, A-line skirts, all of which, we are told, serve to emphasise our “good” (thin) parts and conceal our “bad” (fat) ones.
Fat people know that these jeans are disgustingly ugly precisely because they look like our bodies, bodies we have been told, over and over again, in person and in print and in TV and in movies, are disgustingly ugly.
There is no way the thin women laughing their way into their Acne bubble jeans, or doing their best blue steel in their Ksenia Schnaiders, don’t know what life is like for people whose jeans are actually the size their jeans are pretending to be; they just don’t care.
So please, don’t give me the “we’re just like you”, ever again. We know you’re not. (And thank God, says you. For if there’s one thing worse than looking fat – when you sit down, bend over, push your stomach out or put on your “cubic” jeans – it’s actually being fat. Like us.)
