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The Perfect Woman Body Type Throughout History

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The “perfect” female body has never actually been perfect — it’s just been whatever era happened to be selling it.

TheThings Celebrity’s video “The Ideal Body Type Throughout History” traces how the definition of an attractive woman’s physique has flipped, reversed, and flipped again for centuries, often within a single lifetime. The presentation moves from Renaissance portraiture to Victorian corsetry to Marilyn Monroe’s curves to today’s Kim Kardashian-shaped Instagram feed, showing that the “ideal” was never fixed — it was a moving target dictated by wealth, fashion, and whoever happened to be famous at the time.

• During the Italian Renaissance, fuller, curvier figures signaled wealth and proper nourishment, while thinness was read as a sign of poverty.
• The Victorian Era pushed women into extreme waist-cinching corsets that created an exaggerated hourglass silhouette — a look that carried real physical danger.
• The hourglass returned in the 1950s with icons like Marilyn Monroe before giving way to the leaner-but-curvier standard modern celebrities like Kim Kardashian now represent.

Curves as Currency in the Renaissance

Long before diet culture, being soft and full-figured was the flex. The video lays out how, during the Italian Renaissance, a fuller body wasn’t just tolerated — it was the goal, because it visibly announced that a woman had enough money to eat well and avoid manual hardship. Thinness, by contrast, read as deprivation. Painters of the period reinforced that standard by filling their canvases with rounded, fleshy female forms as the visual shorthand for beauty and status, the exact opposite of the thin-equals-desirable logic that would eventually take over centuries later.

The Corset Era’s Deadly Silhouette

The Victorian Era is where the video’s argument turns genuinely grim. To hit the period’s ideal — a severely cinched waist paired with an exaggerated bust and hip line — women wore corsets pulled tight enough to reshape their ribcages and restrict their breathing. It wasn’t a fashion inconvenience; it was a health risk, the kind of extreme most modern women would never accept as a beauty requirement, yet it was standard practice for an entire generation trying to match the day’s silhouette.

Thin meant poor in the Renaissance. A century and a half later, women were lacing themselves into corsets tight enough to threaten their own breathing to get the opposite look.

Marilyn Monroe and the Return of the Hourglass

By the 1950s, the pendulum swung back toward curves, this time embodied by Marilyn Monroe, whose voluptuous hourglass shape became the era’s blueprint for desirability. Unlike the Renaissance version of curvy, though, this ideal came with its own set of shaping garments and expectations about exactly where those curves needed to sit. It’s the version of “ideal” most people picture first when they think of vintage glamour, and the video uses it as the hinge point between old-world beauty standards and the modern celebrity-driven ones that followed.

From Monroe’s Curves to Kim Kardashian’s Silhouette

The video closes its historical sweep by landing on modern celebrity culture, using Kim Kardashian as the current-day reference point for the body type now held up as ideal. The throughline the video draws is that each era’s standard, however different it looked, put women through some version of physical or psychological strain to chase it — corsets then, extreme dieting and cosmetic pressure now. That pressure has been well documented in coverage of body image struggles and eating disorders tied to increasingly narrow, and often surgically assisted, beauty benchmarks.

The video’s real point isn’t which era got it “right” — it’s that every era thought it did, right up until the next one changed the rules. Coverage of how modern celebrities like Kim Kardashian shape today’s standard, or how contestants from shows built entirely around physical ideals, like America’s Next Top Model, have fared since, makes the same case the video does: whatever’s considered “perfect” right now is just the current stop on a list that’s already centuries long.