Ex-Practice bone rack Lara Flynn Boyle makes Calista Flockhart look chunky. Her skin-and-bones bod, clad in a black string bikini -- all jutting elbows and skeletal knocking knees -- was splashed across the tabloids this week. In its exposé of the star, the Globe quoted New York weight-loss expert Stanley Title as saying, "I'm concerned that she may have an eating disorder."

No kidding, doc.

Toronto-based makeup artist Diana Carreiro caught Boyle's recent appearance on Entertainment Tonight'. "I like skinny, but when you can see the two bones in your upper arms, then that's too much. She's a real lollipop. Now, she's the epitome of what you don't want: She's too skinny, too tanned and there's too much collagen in those lips."

Boyle may be pushing the limits -- consider her distended belly and concave thighs, the telltale sign of malnourishment -- but thin is still in. And with North American obesity rates expanding faster than you can say "I'll have a Big Mac combo to go," being thin has new status.

Not that thin has ever really been out. It's just that with the shrinkage of high-profile celebrities, the anorexic ideal is back in the limelight. Of course, there's the ever-leaner Demi Moore gracing front pages everywhere these days with her young beau, not to mention Victoria Beckham -- a recent report had it that hubby David presented her with a tabloid headline declaring her "skeletal spice." And don't forget fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld. His recent jump onto the low-carb bandwagon and subsequent drop of 90 pounds is helping give the extra lithe and lean added cachet.

There's no doubt that in the skewed realities of Hollywood and the fashion runways, shaving off pounds ups one's star power. Just look at Kate Winslet, and Renée Zellwegger, whose bird-like, post-Bridget Jones figure landed her a multipage feature in Vogue, plus reams of international press.

As high-profile fashion journalist Kate Betts has said, "I've heard people saying I don't buy Vogue to look at fat people. And as harsh and horrible a comment as that is, it is true. People buy Vogue for fantasy, and one of the fantasies of women in our culture is to be thin and young."

Anthropologically, today's slender ideal traces back to Victorian times. Then, alongside the corpulent ideal of the Queen, there was the waify, feminine icon, says Carla Rice, clinical program specialist of the Body Image Project at Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto.

It wasn't until the early 1900s that the foundation for today's fantasy woman was set.

The lean androgynous look that inspired Lagerfeld's dieting harkens to the 1920s. It's no coincidence that home scales were introduced at the time of the flat-chested flappers. One fashion chronicler of that period described the ideal woman as "tubular, like a section of a boa constrictor."

In the 1940s and 1950s, think bombshell Marilyn Monroe. At 36-24-34, she was the ultimate. Members of the pro-zaftig public like to proclaim her the first of the plus-size starlets -- reportedly she wore a size 12. Kelly Smith, design assistant and pattern-maker for the Toronto-based Misura label, estimates that by today's standards, with those dimensions, Monroe would be a size 6 -- with alterations. "We'd likely have to take out the bust and take in the hip a bit," he says.

The infamous 31-24-33 stick Twiggy, who was described in Newsweek as "four straight limbs in search of a woman's body," was the fantasy figures of the sixties.

That ideal evolved from the frail to the fit, just in time for the fitness revolution of the early 1980s and the supermodel era of the nineties. But the Naomi Campbell supermodel ideal is becoming passé. By Lara Flynn Boyle's standards, of course, Cindy Crawford is downright plump.

In 1965, the average fashion model weighed in at 8 per cent less than the average woman. Twenty-two years later, that divide increased to 23 per cent. Today, the average North American woman is 5-foot-4 and tips the scales at 142 pounds, whereas runway mannequins measure in at 5-foot-9 and 110 pounds and wear a size 0 or 2. The good news is that, today, most are alarmed at Boyle's emaciated frame.

It's the sculpted and buxom figure that is coveted -- think Christina Aguilera in her raunchy video Dirty as an example. "You can have hips," Sunnybrook's Rice says. "But the emphasis is on perfection. There can be no rolls. You can have breasts, but they have to be firm. No sagging. It's a curvy figure, not a stick. But it's still a really thin ideal. It's a womanly body, but it's a fat-free body -- no cellulite, no bulges. There's got to be muscle under those curves."