Luxury Fashion Beauty Standards Don't Happen by Accident

In 2004, Chanel spent $33 million making a short film about Nicole Kidman. She's famous, beautiful, and briefly escaping her glamorous life for an ordinary love affair before returning to it, with the No.5 bottle closing the film. The woman is blonde, slim, and built from every marker of traditional Western attractiveness. The fragrance is presented as part of the identity of a very particular kind of woman.

That is how luxury advertising has worked for about 150 years. The product arrives attached to a body, and the body does most of the work. Dior's J'adore campaign has run with Charlize Theron since 2004. Guerlain cast Angelina Jolie for Notes of a Woman. The faces change; the body type is remarkably consistent: tall, slim, and usually white, the same template that haute couture was built around in the late 19th century for wealthy European women, preserved more or less intact ever since.

The logic is simple and the industry is not particularly shy about it. Luxury only works because most people can't have it, and part of what makes the product worth the price is the image of who it belongs to. Research from 2023 found that 70% of luxury brands have no mid or plus-size looks on their runways at all, and that is not an oversight. Keeping the room small is the whole point.

Why Luxury Fashion Beauty Standards Work on Most of Us

What makes this so effective is that it never needs to say anything directly. No luxury campaign tells most people the product isn't for them. It just shows, consistently and expensively, who it is for. Eventually, after enough campaigns, enough runways, enough magazine covers, the body type stops reading as a casting choice and starts reading as a fact about who beautiful things belong to. The message lands without ever being stated, which makes it easier to internalise and harder to push back against.

For people outside that frame, the result is a combination of comparison and the quiet sense that certain things are simply not for them, not because of the price but because of the appearance. The luxury industry calls this aspiration— it is also, depending on who you ask, a decades-long exercise in telling most of its potential customers that they do not qualify.

When Versace Changed Who Was in the Room

In 2021, Versace put Precious Lee— a Black plus-size model— at the centre of the La Medusa campaign alongside other curvy models. Donatella Versace said she wanted to show that "every woman can actually be Medusa." Vogue covered it, Fashionista covered it, and the response was broadly positive rather than the brand-destroying controversy the industry always quietly implies diversity will produce.

What it proved is that luxury fashion beauty standards are a choice. The bags stayed the same price, the brand stayed prestigious, and the world did not end. Most luxury brands are still doing what Chanel was doing in 2004. Versace showed there's no good reason they have to be; it's just a long-standing preference for keeping the room small.

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Index:MH sets measurable standards for how the beauty and fashion industry affects consumer mental health. To find out more about our work, visit indexmh.org.