index
000 Manifesto
001 Atomic Theory and Wasting Time
002 Recapped: March 2025
003 Health is Wealth – Notes on Pilates
004 Recapped: April 2025
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a passion project by theia gabatan.
Health is Wealth – Notes on Pilates
If old forms of status, largely centred around consumption and attainment, no longer confer the cultural capital that they once did – what are the new status symbols?
We live in a hypervisual world. Everywhere we turn we are bombarded with images. These images may be AI-generated content, it might be ads,
Status used to be contingent on your ability to project a certain image of yourself, or how well you could adopt a certain style or aesthetic. This is still largely true, but today has perhaps taken a more nefarious twist. With the rise of dupe culture, the availability of weight loss drugs, the cost of living crisis, and the oversaturation of these symbols, status has shifted away from mere consumption and rather towards consumption and visual aesthetics tied to behaviour.
Status is not just about what you own, it’s about how you behave.
In Thorstein Veblen’s essay, Conspicuous Consumption, the author presents a shallow and materialistic leisure class obsessed by clothes, cars and consumption as a means for elevating one’s social status.
“The best measure of cultural capital is undoubtedly the amount of time devoted to acquiring it.” (i.e. “I have the means and the time to acquite these esoteric ideas.”)
The same is true in an aesthetic sense. In our world, we present an idealised image of ourselves in the digital sphere. In these digital spaces, attention and admiration is won and lost through visual means first, and ideas second. In this world, our world, the human body is the new battle ground for conveying one’s status – it is the one thing that can transcend the divide between the digital and the real.
The new signifier of class is drinking ceremonial grade matcha prepared the traditional way instead of mere coffee. It’s eating organic because you believe there’s less toxins in your food. It’s not enough to wear the latest Lululemon or Alo yoga sets and post it on social media. Now, you also have to go to a wellness retreat in Bali, do hot reformer pilates, and drink copious vitamin supplements.
“Luxury beliefs have, to a large extent, replaced luxury goods. Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.”
Rather than consumption conferring social capital, it’s our behaviours and the resulting aesthetic consequence of these behaviours that imply where we place on the social strata.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the context of Ozempic and the rise of ‘the pilates body’. When ozempic first took the world by storm, it was only available to people who had the means, or the necessity, for it. Suddenly, celebrities and public figures looked ‘snatched’ and seemingly miraculously lost pounds of weight overnight.
Most denied the use of ozempic or other similar products and credited exercise, diet and consistency as the cause of their weight loss.
Before ozempic, being skinny was seen as something aspirational. Being skinny implied you had access to good food, had good fitness and consistent exercise and generally had the moral restraint to keep yourself at a certain weight. Being skinny meant that you could buy from any brand and look good in clothing – which translated well on social media. Thereby giving you social capital by form of attention.
As ozempic began to become more easily accessible, the drug trickled down to mainstream consumers (at least in the context of the US and other markets). More and more people were becoming skinny. Being skinny no longer implied you exercised or ate well – it just meant you probably had access to ozempic (or if we want to get bleak, just couldn’t eat enough because of the cost of living).
So how did the affluent class react? Enter, the pilates body.
In 2024, Miley Cyrus performed at the Grammy’s in a gold dress made of safety pins.
You would expect for most of the coverage to be about her performance. But it wasn’t. Instead most of the coverage was about her body – or rather, how toned her arms and legs were. Soon after, people found out that Miley had been a longtime pilates fan, and so enter the ‘pilates body’.
Since 2022, there has been a 250% rise in popularity for pilates. In Australia alone, pilates and yoga studios contributed $630.3million to the economy across 3,722 studios and business that employed 11,411 people. On TikTok and other platforms, people vlog about their (hot, reformer, etc etc) pilates classes.
None of this is a surprise. The key marker of affluent classes is their desire to diverge from lower classes. As Bourdieu put it: “Distance from necessity [characterises] the affluent classes. In a highly visual world, the pendulum was bound to swing towards the intangible behaviours.
My problem with all of this is that many people have conflated these behaviours with morality. This is a dangerous and sure road towards the alt-right and fascism. This wasn’t caused by pilates – this started long before during the pandemic.
Most of us are familiar with the term ‘heatlh is wealth’ – but now health is also apparently linked to morality. There are a great many reasons why someone may look a certain way, and it is not always attributed to bad habits. There are countless unseen maladies that affect the way someone looks. But in a highly visual and capitalistic society, we have conflated a visual representation of health (someone skinny, toned, ‘fit) with actual health.
This is the consequence of what happens when we place visual aesthetics as the epoch of modern society. And it is precisely one of the reasons many Western societies are waltzing ever closer to fascism. It’s easy to ‘other’ people based on visuals and aesthetics – what they look like. And it’s easier still to make assumptions about someone’s morality based on how they present themselves to the world.
A pilates body is an aesthetic choice. Nothing more. When we start to conflate it with morality, this should give us pause.