Fashion – and by extension, clothing – is created for skinny people.

Our world is built on the assumption that everyone is a certain size (that size being small) and that while some variety is allowable, the range of “acceptable” is even smaller than the jeans they expect us to fit into. Social media influencers flood their pages with images of them in a variety of outfits made by a variety of fashion sponsors, but the question posed here is simple: is the “Look” actually cute, or do we just view smaller bodies as more pleasing?

A recent TikTok trend involves users taking photos of fashion influencers and celebrities and styling themselves in similar outfits to try to answer this question. One note on this: While I have purposefully chosen a video of someone who is not skinny doing this challenge, I also found a lot of videos made by users who could be argued are skinny themselves, just not as skinny as an 18-year-old runway model.

The commonly-reached conclusion most creators have come to is two-fold. First, that the outfits themselves are often excruciatingly basic and boring. They lack color, interesting silhouettes and texture. The majority of these outfits are a pair of jeans or athletic pants and a t-shirt or sweatshirt – the sort of outfit that is typically classified as athleisure or “going to the grocery store.” The people wearing them look good, certainly, but they are not breaking new ground in the realm of fashion and won’t be found on the runways of New York fashion week. The commentary on these photos typically ignores the lack of originality, or even fails to notice it; the comments sections are flooded with people praising them for their beauty and their outfits.

Second, these outfits only look good because the person wearing them is skinny. When placed on a larger body they often look absurd. It’s worth noting that the absurdity is created largely because the challenger is not modifying the outfit or silhouette to more aesthetically suit their body type, as one would typically do when actually buying clothes or creating outfits for themselves; they are purposefully taking the outfit in its original form and simply scaling it up, precisely like modern-day jeans manufacturers. This conclusion only serves to enhance the first one: if the outfit itself is boring or even straight-up bad, why are we applauding anyone for wearing it?

The answer I, and many TikTok users, have come to is that skinny bodies are put on a pedestal of beauty. They are seen as the original, the default, and the gold-standard. They are afforded privilege that larger bodies are denied. They are given beauty labels that are unattainable for those around them, and in some cases like this, may also be completely inaccurate. Even worse, skinny bodies are also seen as the standard in medicine, which can leave massive gaps and inadequate care for those in larger bodies.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and I’m not here to reach any conclusions for you on whether or not you think these influencers and their outfits are pretty, but I would have you start to ask yourself this question every time you see yet another model wearing the same thing your dad wears to mow the lawn: Is it a fit, or are they just skinny?