To preface, I came across a video talking about how a character from the show Bridgerton (yeah, I know, very historically accurate) would have been seen as beautiful due to the beauty standards at the time. This character is Penelope, who is overweight and kind of the butt of jokes, and generally seen as very ugly. So, would someone that was naturally skinny due to metabolism or something else be perceived during these beauty standards? Even if the person was known to be wealthy, would they still be seen as poor and ugly?
I am mainly asking about the Western European (I hope this is the right region) beauty standards of fat being beautiful and the implications of that beauty standard on thin people. However, if a different region, or time period, had similar beauty standards, please add them into your answer :)
Also, if my question would be better suited in a different subreddit, please let me know...
Hi, so while there is always more to be said on any subject check out these previous answers to similar questions.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8044k7/is_it_true_that_the_beauty_ideal_in_medieval/
I will add about the idea of thin = poor and rich = fat. It doesn't play with how wealth was displayed in any time. Today, goods are incredibly cheap but for all history prior to the last 100 years or so material goods were expensive so just simply owning a bunch of stuff and keeping it clean was in itself a sign of wealth, one that was much more visible than difference in weight. Cleanliness especially was a big one. Poverty was often associated with dirt and being unkempt, two things that happen much faster than any notable weight gain or loss. Something else to consider, Abby Cox when talking about her experience as a historical interpreter mentions how differently clothing was constructed historically compared to today. Today our clothing tends to be tight, to stretch around our bodies, and to reveal everything forcing us to change our bodies in order to fit the currently popular shape. This is opposite to how clothing in Europe worked for a very long time. Traditionally you would create the popular silhouette out of the clothing and then stick your body into it, more or less. So if a person was too skinny they would pad. Just add extra stuffing to round out the look. Or if they were fat then they would simply make larger clothing that fit the silhouette which was the most important thing.
So I actually wrote two of the answers linked by /u/esokolova (under a previous account), but they're old and not highly specific, and I'd like to revisit the topic because there's stuff to say here.
There are two things that are true here: one, the standards for what counted as thin and what counted as overweight were different than they are today; and two, it was possible for people to be considered underweight and overweight.
As I discussed in this previous answer on tuberculosis, in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, there was an increased interest in refinement in women, particularly women of the upper classes: the idea that they were particularly dainty in a way that lower-class women and all men were not, feeling emotions keenly, requiring delicate food and soft furniture, etc. Another aspect of this refinement was being thin and pale, rather than hearty and having embonpoint, which was vulgar. (You can kind of see this reflected in Pride and Prejudice, where countrified Elizabeth Bennet is accustomed to long walks in the fresh air, which Bingley's sisters find alarming and inappropriate, though they also note that her face is thin.) This could be positive, a show of status, beauty, and taste; it could also be negative, being eaten up with nerves and susceptible to or showing evidence of disease (like consumption). At the same time, fat was coming to be seen as not just a potential medical condition to be dealt with, but something tied to one's identity and personality - the association of obesity to laziness, weakness, and indulgence began in the eighteenth century and became cemented in the nineteenth.
A cartoon of the era, "Following the Fashion" (1794), illustrates the common view perfectly. The caption reads "St James's giving the Ton, a Soul without a Body" beneath the very thin woman on the left, and "Cheapside aping the Mode, a Body without a Soul" beneath the fat, short woman on the right. The geographical references show the class status of each character - St. James's Palace was to the Georgian monarchy what Buckingham Palace is today and St. James's Park, where it sat, was highly fashionable, showing that the woman on the left is a member of the aristocracy; Cheapside was (and is) in the City, the small portion of London within the medieval city walls, which was at this point a center for financial and mercantile interests, so the woman on the right is a striving, upwardly-mobile member of the middle classes, the wife of a successful tradesman. Thus the underlying meaning is that upper-class women are unattractive because they waste away their bodies while their minds become hyper-refined, but rising middle-class women are physically distasteful and/because they lack the refinement of mind of true ladies.
Thinness to the point of looking ill was to be avoided - and I think it's clear from portraiture of the period that the bodies and faces of modern movie and tv stars would be considered "too thin". However, it was quite possible to also be too fat, and just as Penelope reads as "fat" to a modern audience, she would have also been viewed as overweight in the Regency period.