Twiggy and the magazines featuring her image were criticized as promoting an "unhealthy" body ideal for women.

"They are ego ideals and body ideals for consumers," he said.

One of the show's anchors is an icon of the body ideal from which we seem to have departed, a 1966 work by Richard Diebenkorn, best known as a landscapist.

In the United States, the ideal body image and dimensions have changed for both women and men, with the body ideal female body shape becoming progressively slimmer and the body ideal for men becoming progressively larger.

Her boyishly thin image was criticised as, and is still blamed for, promoting an "unhealthy" body ideal for women.

The media and tobacco advertising play an increasing role in perpetuating the thin body ideal.

The roles of body fat, body perception, and body ideal.

She lives in southern California, where the western body ideal is especially prized, "and there's a lot of pressure not to age", she says.

"Superimposed on these wrong assumptions is the highly unrealistic body ideal," he said.

None of this would particularly shock women, who are accustomed to negotiating a reasonable self-image against body ideals that might include such implausible models as Barbie and Calista Flockhart.