Heroin chic

Heroin chic was a look popularized in mid-1990s fashion and characterized by pale skin, dark circles underneath the eyes, dark red lipstick and angular bone structure. The look, characterised by emaciated features and androgyny, was a reaction against the "healthy" and vibrant look of models such as Cindy Crawford and Claudia Schiffer. A 1996 article in the Los Angeles Times stated that the fashion industry had "a nihilistic vision of beauty" that was reflective of drug addiction and the U.S. News and World Report called the movement a "cynical trend".

At the time during which heroin chic emerged, the popular image of heroin was changing for several reasons. The price of heroin had decreased, and its purity had increased dramatically. In the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic had made injecting heroin with unclean needles increasingly risky. Available heroin had become more pure, and snorting became a more common mode of heroin use. These changes decreased the stigma surrounding the drug, allowing heroin to find a new market among the middle-class and the wealthy, in contrast to its previous base of the poor and marginalized. Heroin infiltrated pop culture through attention brought to addictions in the early 1990s. In film, the heroin chic trend in fashion coincided with a string of movies in the mid‑1990s—such as The Basketball Diaries, Trainspotting, Kids, Permanent Midnight, and Pulp Fiction—that examined heroin use and drug culture.

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