Every year, things at the Cannes film festival seem to get bigger - the gowns, the production budgets, the bottles of champagne. All things expand except for one: the waistlines of the women walking down the red carpet.

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In the hazy early days of cinema, cinephiles everywhere yearned for the curves of Marilyn Monroe and Sophia Loren, international stars who enchanted our screens with their larger-than-life personalities and full, natural figures.

These stars are still crowned Hollywood icons, but in the increasingly internet-addled collective psyche of the modern film festival, which has determined that “thick” is out and “skinny” is back in, stars are left with no choice but to comply. With the rising popularity of GLP-1’s like Ozempic and Mounjaro, it’s easier than ever to achieve the previously unattainable levels of skinny brought into the mainstream by Kate Moss in the 1990’s.

And as the film festival kicks off on the French Riviera, women everywhere brace themselves for the slew of images they prepare to hit their social media feeds, readily accepting that in 2026, a new leader reigns true: skinny.

This is what I call the Ozempic Overton Window, and it’s changing all of our perceptions of “healthy”.

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The Overton Window is a political term coined in the 1990’s by Joseph Overton, and it refers to the way that politics usually sits across a spectrum, from left to right, and what’s considered “centrist” is always moving depending on what is politically........

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