On the drink's 40th birthday, it’s time to reconsider the legacy of fashion’s favourite bev.
“I can even drink it in the middle of the night, and I can sleep. I don’t drink coffee, I don’t drink tea, I drink nothing else.”It would be remiss not to mention that the danger of the chic, fashion-led, hedonistic, phoenix rising of Diet Coke is that with it we return to the body standards of the late 90s and early 2000s which prioritised thinness over all else.
Diet culture never went away, it was just co-opted as wellness. Still, there’s no question that our current body standards are in flux – the, reformer pilates is suddenly alarmingly popular – and we can only hope that the changing standards of the past four decades since Diet Coke dropped, one that’s made the fashion and beauty industries slowly but surely more body-positive will temper that flux from becoming irreversibly toxic.
But more importantly: we’ve also learned in the past 40 years that drinking Diet Coke doesn’t actually have anything to do with thinness. The name is a misnomer. We know it’s not good for you either. Neither of these things have necessarily put us off. Instead, we continue to use the silver and red talismans as fashion accessories, post-ironic cultural signifiers of our cringe tastes and foul tastebuds, markers of nostalgia, recyclable fonts of inspiration .