New Year, New You: Fashion's Narrative of Self-improvement, Wellness & Dieting

By Chloe McDonald

Every year on the first day of January, many of us make a commitment to change. Be that to take on Dry January or Veganuary, make a promise to do something that scares us, or (in an ideal world!) to travel more. We’ve all made new year resolutions in the past, and successful or not, many continue to do so. It’s a practice that has become engrained in our culture and endorsed by many of the media platforms we consume everyday. While some of this content will simply aim to help us maintain and achieve our goals, within the fashion industry much of this focus has been embedded in diet culture. A ‘New You’ has long been synonymous with a slimmer version of yourself — one that befits fashion’s historically rigid body standards.

In the last few years the fashion industry (both the media and brands) has tasked itself to become more inclusive and diverse. A task that, admittedly, still has a long way to go before the industry can ever truly be considered fully inclusive. Changes have therefore been made when it comes to the promotion of diet culture in fashion, giving consumers hope for a more positive future. But is the pivot to ‘wellness’ and ‘fitness’ just the same old promotion of weight loss wrapped up in a different package?

A quick scroll through the websites of many glossy magazines will find a significant increase of content focusing on how to ‘tone’ or ‘sculpt’ your body, how to get into running and the best apps for at-home fitness. The British Vogue website published eight varying articles in the first week of 2021 that focus on these topics. Although there are less direct mentions of new year ‘diets’ as there perhaps were in the early 2000s — when fad diets such as that of Atkins or the Cambridge diet where at their most popular — it’s important to note that the articles being published each January push similar ideals. The fashion industry hasn’t simply gotten over its desire to ‘help’ us get thin, it has simply rebranded. And that new brand name is wellness.

Avoiding the language of an often-toxic diet culture in favour of the more positively framed ‘wellness’ movement, the fashion media has found new ways to promote its yearly infatuation with our new years resolutions. The wellness movement began gaining popularity in the 2010s and is now considered a global movement. And rightly so. When we look at the definition of wellness, its goals are for better physical and mental well-being – it is a general consciousness of one’s health. Yet the movement has become a sort of buzzword within the fashion media. The term has been thrown around and used to as a way to gain clicks on a website.

It is not just the fashion media that does this, of course, fashion brands also rely on this yearly trend to up sales – with subscriber emails containing discounts on activewear and editorials sharing the best pieces to help with different types of workouts.

To be clear, this is not to say that looking after your well-being and incorporating fitness into your routine is a bad thing. The positive effects of a healthy and balanced life are undeniable, but we must acknowledge the approach the fashion industry takes towards these topics. True wellness is not a trend or a buzzword to be used by the fashion media to feed off of our personal insecurities or goals. And yet, every January it is treated like one. We must consider the affects that this blurring of the definition of wellness has on its consumers, in the same way in which we had to acknowledge the effects the continual promotion of fad diets had years before. Has wellness simply become fashion’s new way to promote its continual obsession with thinness? And is it merely a way to continue its regressive association between thinness with beauty? 

It is interesting to note how this might affect different generations in varying ways — with the more traditional glossy magazines such as British Vogue and ELLE UK promoting this kind of new year dialogue, yet there appears no mention of such ideals on the websites of magazines like Dazed & Confused or i-D magazine. A study found that teenagers born in 2000-2002 (“Generation Z”) are more concerned about their weight and weight loss than previous generations; it also found that Gen Z teenagers who dieted had greater symptoms of depression than those who did in previous generations.

At a time when many are facing the extreme challenges of lockdown, the prioritisation of mental well-being must take precedent over pushing a narrative of self-improvement, wellness or dieting. This year serves as a reminder of how the fashion industry must take greater responsibility with its ‘new year, new you’ content. Perhaps until it does, individuals must reconsider where and how they consume their wellbeing content.