I will never forget seeing Titanic for the first time. It was 1997, I was 10, and a friend’s mother had snuck us, underage, into the cinema attached to a holiday park in North Wales. Like any ’90s preteen girl, I had come for Leonardo DiCaprio’s curtains, but what really made an impression on me was Kate Winslet as Rose, the first-class aristocrat who falls for third-class artist Jack. From the moment we see her arrive at Southampton to board the ship and she looks up from beneath her giant Edwardian hat, I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. That impression was only confirmed over the next three-odd hours, including the famous nude scene that has shaped Winslet’s experience of fame ever since.
This week, in a 60 Minutes interview to promote her film Lee, she spoke at length about the body shaming she endured in Titanic’s wake. “I hope this haunts you,” she recalls telling one of the people who bullied her. “It was horrific,” she continues, welling up for a moment. “It was really bad.” You see, while I thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, and was thrilled to see a female body on screen that had actual curves, the ruthless media of the 1990s was not so kind. This was the era of heroin chic, and simply by having breasts, Winslet’s body type went against the grain.
The fat shaming that Winslet had to endure from that point onwards was both vicious and personal. She had already been told by a drama teacher that she would have to “settle for the fat-girl parts”, but the collective obsession with her weight increased exponentially after Titanic came out. At one point during the 60 Minutes interview, a clip is played of a red-carpet commentator telling Kate that she had been “melted and poured” into her dress, and that she should have worn one two sizes larger.
Such offhand cruelty is hard to fathom now, in an era of increased body positivity. It’s difficult for a young girl in 2024 to really understand what it was like back then, how acceptable it was to comment publicly and ruthlessly on someone’s size, not to mention how fetishized extreme skinniness was – especially in the pages of fashion magazines. As someone who, in the 2010s, set up satirical blog The Vagenda to critique media sexism, it’s astonishing to me the journey that so many publications have been on, and how different a climate the next generation of girls is being raised in. That’s not to say that they aren’t facing their own challenges, of course, but the media environment today is barely recognisable, and I call that progress.
