When did we stop being sexy? di assaporareIn a sea of lean, trained and healthy bodies, we have lost sight of the desire to savor
Looking around, one would think that we couldn’t be more beautiful than this. Slim and fit bodies. Faces sculpted and smoothed by aesthetic medicine that has made giant leaps. Ever more performing make-up and skincare products. Can we do more to achieve the best version of ourselves? Probably not, but in this perpetual tension towards perfection we have lost sight of an essential detail: we can be stunning, yet we have stopped being desirable (and perhaps even desiring).
From the Nineties to today: the neutralization of desire
It’s hard to pinpoint when it happened. It feels like just yesterday when, in the Nineties, Sharon Stone crossed her legs in Basic Instinct and Kate Moss walked the runway for Gucci in the Tom Ford era. Today, thirty years later, that same concentration of sex appeal seems to have vanished. Puff. Yet on red carpets, runways, or in cinema, toned bodies, tight dresses, and deep necklines are still everywhere. The codes of sensuality are all there, perfectly recognizable. But one difference remains: it’s as if desire has progressively dissolved. Sex appeal has become performative, displayed; and it has ended up disappearing. Perhaps, in trying to perfect the body, we have neutralized what made it desirable.
@secondhelpings_vintage Emily Ratajkowski and Kate Moss star in Gucci’s bag campaign showcasing the new Giglio and Borsetto bag silhouettes. Senna has been heavy on the Tom Ford Gucci references in his newest collection #gucci #tomford #katemoss #runway #fashiontiktok original sound - clara
Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny
This transformation has not gone unnoticed. Already in 2021, the essay Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny attempted to pinpoint this shift: increasingly perfect bodies, ever more absent desire. Not because sex has disappeared, but because eroticism, the one made of ambiguity, risk, and imperfection, has been progressively neutralized. Today the body has become a project: something to optimize, improve, and discipline. No longer the place where desire happens, but a set of elements to perfect and then maintain. A performative body, more than an experiential one. And like everything that becomes performative, even sexiness has begun to increasingly resemble a copy of itself.
Gucci by Demna: a citation of sex appeal
A recent example? The new direction of Gucci under Demna Gvasalia, which debuted at the latest Milan Fashion Week. The reference to the erotic imagery built by Tom Ford in the Nineties is evident. Same codes: exposed bodies, tight silhouettes, a declared, almost aggressive sensuality, yet the feeling is that what appeared on the runway was not sex appeal, but a citation of it. Where aesthetics are impeccable, tension is completely missing. Fashion analyst Mandy Lee explains it well in a comment reel referring to both the runway and the Oscars red carpet: "Today everyone tries to look sexy, but there’s a vacancy in the eyes that is unsettling. You can wear a tight dress or show a lot of skin, but I don’t think sexiness in 2026 resides in any of these things".
@oldloserinbrooklyn As culture shifts not everything can be tom ford era Gucci. Demna’s runway debut for Gucci fw26 was a mixed bag of virality, fame, personality walks and world building. #gucci #guccifw26 #demna #milanfashionweek #greenscreen original sound - Mandy Lee
Kim Kardashian, Ozempic, and appetite-less bodies
The perfect embodiment of this paradox - appearing sexy without actually being so - is represented by Kim Kardashian and the entire Kardashian-Jenner ecosystem. Perhaps for the first time, the U.S. influencer and entrepreneur promoted an aesthetic that redefined the codes of sensuality (or its imitation), making it immediately recognizable and thus replicable. Accentuated curves, hyper-aware poses, always-calibrated gazes: everything is explicit and under control. In this artificial dimension, there is no space for ambiguity or the unexpected, and with them disappears all tension. The body exists solely to be looked at; not to desire, nor to be desired. A metamorphosis that runs in parallel with the spread, first in the United States, then worldwide, of GLP-1 hormone antagonist drugs (Ozempic, par excellence), which have contributed to redefining the ideal body towards ever more extreme and disciplined thinness. What changes, however, is not just the shape, but the energy these bodies convey: less excess, less chaos, and less appetite, in every sense. They are bodies that seem to no longer hunger for food or experiences, and precisely for this reason struggle to generate desire.
Little to get excited about
Adding to all this is another, not secondary element: we live in an era with very little to get excited about. That vacancy in the gaze that Mandy Lee talks about, beyond Ozempic or performance at all costs, could also be traced back to the world we live in, far from those Nineties when everything still seemed possible. A world where over a billion people, in Europe one in six, suffer from mental health issues, with a prevalence of anxiety and depression. A world where rights are threatened that we once took for granted, where women and minorities do not yet feel safe, where freedom is confused with total lack of responsibility. We are a more aware, careful, protected generation, but also more tired, more controlled, more worried. And desire, to exist, needs exactly the opposite. Will we be able to reclaim it? Or will we simply end up desiring nothing and being desired no more?
