Lana Del Rey Is Adored Again

(50 pounds lighter)

May 25, 2024

5/25/2024

I was a kid on Tumblr in 2016 when I walked into that shady, middle passage between mere admiration and dangerous idolization regarding Lana Del Rey. What ultimately pushed me onto the latter side was the cluster of young women who, very meticulously, managed to create a sort of VIP entrance into Del Rey’s fanbase. Incredibly beautiful, thin, cigarette-smoking, and vulnerable-to-grooming teenage girls liked it when I posted photos of my waifish and prepubescent figure. They liked my collarbones, leather boots, and heart-shaped sunglasses. I was let into circles in which they spoke about how little they ate or how many times they’ve fled the police (topics I’ve never considered to be achievements prior to my exposure to them), and they had these conversations to the tune of Lana Del Rey’s “Ultraviolence.” Female artists have historically joined teenage girls together, standing in as a salve for the pain that is so deeply embedded within our gender. Millennials had Fiona Apple—despite the melancholia that is so profoundly attached to her, they took her poetry and sincere lust for life and emerged as strong, feminist women. Just twenty years later, however, the girls of my generation cannot bear to look at Del Rey as more than a beautiful, skinny girl who succumbs to violence—relishes in it, even. Obviously, Del Rey never intended to create a plague out of herself, but it’s insincere to suggest that her image was completely inapplicable to much of the very particular desired teenage, female misery that ran the 2010s. My run-ins with older men, disordered eating, and suicidal ideations were not concerning; they were “so Lana Del Rey.” That’s what everyone told me then.

What should’ve been the topic of discussion in 2020 was the virus that slaughtered millions of people. Somehow, reaching different gossip forums and even mainstream news, it was actually more of a conversation about how fat Lana Del Rey had gotten.

Much more than tweets like this, what broke my heart as a girl who has grown with Lana Del Rey for more than half my life was witnessing her own fans turn against her. The refusal to post new photos of her, opting instead for older ones that display a much more idealized Del Rey, seemed to have essentially killed her. The death of Lana Del Rey was ever so present amid her weight gain, for the photos that surfaced then were “unrecognizable,” “so out of character,” and “simply couldn’t be her.” What the public loved was a ghost—a forgotten Lana that existed only under glamorous Gatsby-like lights and one-hundred-twenty pounds.

Where did she go during those few years when her waistline expanded? She disappeared from her own fan base’s VIP lounge. They went on starving (truthfully, so did I), favoring other artists, and hoping for the return of the Lana they were so familiar with. But she was still breathing, creating, and releasing whatever she wanted whenever she felt like it. They listened to her new music, ignoring most of the promotional shoots, pretending like she still looked the way she did in 2014. They didn’t like it when she released "Black Bathing Suit," for it was too directly addressing (and admiring) her ever-changing body. I liked it quite a bit.

They created a pariah out of the woman they once worshipped. The only difference? She gained weight. She turned thirty five and they decided they could no longer Lolita-fy her. And what is a woman when she is no longer able to be infantilized or appreciated for her beauty? Apparently, not much. The legend of the worthless spinster never died, it’s only been repackaged in an equally-as-cruel manner.

She wrote:

Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful? Will you still love me when I got nothing but my aching soul? I know you will, I know you will, I know that you will.

But she was wrong, and they did not. Until…

Those photos from the past few months have shifted the conversation. Claiming that it’s really just her style now that is inducing 2012-LDR nostalgia and bringing her lovers back, it’s evident that the only thing that has changed the perspective of her “fans” is the sharper edges of her face, her collarbones, and the pounds of fat that seem as though they’ve never graced her body in the first place.

If I wanted to go on listing links to discussion posts and news articles talking about the mystical and long-awaited return of the skinny, I would be here forever. I have witnessed the latest Lana Del Rey resurgence in the same circles that have corrupted me when I was at my thinnest. I wonder what they would say to me now, writing this while eating ice cream and nowhere near as small as I was a few years back. Do they still adore me?

- s.s

Lana Del Rey Is Adored Again

(50 pounds lighter)

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