Barbie’s makeover might seem revolutionary, but there is nothing new about shifts in body image ideals. Throughout history, the image of the ‘perfect’ woman has been shaped by her role in society. For the Victorians, who believed that physical appetite was linked to sexual desire, a tiny, corsetted waist was a sign of a woman’s chastity and self-control. Meanwhile, wide hips and a full bust denoted fertility.

Today, the corset is largely seen as a symbol of patriarchal oppression. But one paradox of the rise of Feminism is that it led to body image trends which are, for the majority of women, harder to achieve than the hourglass model they replaced. A rejection of the ‘traditional’ feminine roles produced an emphasis on slenderness and muscularity over voluptuousness. Women moved closer to the image of the men whose world they inhabited for the first time. However, this model is becoming more and more extreme, despite the fact that the slim-hipped, long-legged ideal is natural to only around 4 per cent of women. ‘Normal’ Barbie - if ‘normal’ isn’t a slightly dangerous adjective to slap onto a hyper-sexualised toy - has become progressively slimmer over her lifetime.

However, the most major shift in the 20th-century was that the consumer market, for the first time, took control of women’s self-image. Western women rarely shaved until a 1915 advertisement in Harper’s Bazaar promoted the removal of “objectionable” underarm hair. By the 1970s, the diet was marketed as the yellow-brick road to the woman you’ve always wanted to be. The invention of airbrushing ensured our continued thralldom by placing the objective tantalisingly and eternally out of reach. Naomi Wolf, in her wonderful book The Beauty Myth, sums it up perfectly: “Somehow, somewhere, someone must have figured out that [women] will buy more things if they are kept in the self-hating, ever-failing, hungry and sexually insecure state of being aspiring ‘beauties’.”

But we might be seeing the beginnings of a body image backlash. In the last few years, campaigns like ‘This Girl Can’ have celebrated all body types, emphasising not only their beauty, but also their strength and endurance. Even as customers criticised Topshop’s unrealistically slender mannequins, and Urban Outfitters was slammed by the eating disorder community for selling a t-shirt with the slogan “Eat Less”, consumer surveys discovered that women are more likely to spend money when retailers present them with a body ideal which more closely reflects their own. Mattel, the company which makes Barbie, present their new model, ‘Average Barbie’, as a response to the evolution of American beauty ideals. A cynical translation of this might be that Mattel have realised that there is profit to be made out of making women feel good about themselves.

This is not to say that body image issues are disappearing. But the 21st-century is at last giving us a platform to fight against them, and we ought to seize it with both hands.