Body image and the fixation on slimming

Body image and the fixation on slimming recur in Andy Warhol’s diary as more than a concern with appearance: the body is measured, judged, and made into an image, even as it resists control. His changing weight brings brief satisfaction and alarm by turns, while his portrait practice shows how readily appearance could be altered for public consumption. The diary preserves the tension between those impulses rather than resolving it into a single explanation.

Weight, numbers, and self-assessment

In 1981, Warhol’s reports make the scale a recurring measure of how he felt about his body. In May, after the pope was shot, he became angry at the possibility of losing another portrait subject, and then noted that he was down to 119 pounds and frightened by how small his stomach had become. The number was not simply a goal: it registered a physical change that could unsettle him even as thinness remained desirable.

In June, he connected further weight loss to several possible causes. He had stopped drinking and felt good about that change, but worried that the loss might also be related to antibiotics and noted that his resistance was lower. At the same time, he admitted that he liked being thin and thought any further loss should happen gradually. His entry holds concern and approval together: the body’s apparent improvement could not be separated from uncertainty about what was happening to it.

By August, the preference had become more forceful. At 115 pounds, Warhol described his nerves as grating against his bones. After his weight rose to 119, he preferred how he looked at 115 and decided not to eat. The number therefore works in the diary both as a record of physical condition and as an aesthetic verdict. What he wanted was not merely a lower figure, but the appearance he associated with that figure, even when the bodily sensation he recorded sounded painful.

The tension surfaces again after a screening of Mommie Dearest. Warhol recorded being at 115 pounds and feeling depressed and miserable, while insisting that his weight was not the problem and that he looked better thin. His reflections on appearance move quickly between denial, assertion, and self-correction: he said he should think less about looks, then protested that he did not think about them too much. Thinness remains a preferred look, but the entry refuses to make it a complete explanation for his distress.

By 1982, his weight had reached 120 pounds. He said he was no longer anorexic but wanted to be, while also reporting Lidija’s explanation that muscle accounted for the increase. The entry does not settle the question of how he understood his body; instead, it records competing interpretations—his wish to lose weight, the number on the scale, and another person’s account of what the number meant. The repeated return to specific weights gives the concern a daily, almost administrative form without making it emotionally simple.

Beauty as a made image

Warhol’s attention to appearance also belonged to his work. His commissioned portraits began with about sixty Polaroid photographs taken with a Polaroid Big Shot camera. He selected a small group of images, chose one, set its crop, and cosmetically altered it before enlarging it for the silkscreen. He might lengthen a neck, narrow a nose, enlarge lips, or clear a complexion to make the subject more attractive. In this procedure, beauty was not simply captured by the camera; it was selected and constructed through successive acts of adjustment.

The finished portraits extended that construction into painting. Assistants prepared canvas in different flesh-tone backgrounds for male and female subjects. Warhol transferred the image, painted areas such as hair, eyes, lips, ties, and jackets, and then aligned the silkscreen with those colors. Slight shifts between the printed image and the painted areas gave the portraits their characteristic unsettled appearance. A process built around careful retouching and alignment could therefore produce an image whose surface visibly wavered rather than becoming perfectly fixed.

This practice sits beside Warhol’s own recurring judgments about his weight without proving that one caused the other. It does, however, make a suggestive contrast: portrait subjects could be cosmetically improved according to his eye, while his own body remained subject to numbers and sensations that could not be edited away. His image-making offered a technical means of changing how a face appeared; his diary’s reports of appetite, weight, and weakness register the limits of such control.

Public appearance and performance

The diary also shows how appearance was negotiated in encounters shaped by photography and celebrity. During an Interview assignment involving Shaun Cassidy, Warhol noticed the singer’s dark circles and speculated that he might have a secret life. Cassidy gave clean, conventional answers in the interview, but Warhol observed him change as he passed through a lobby crowded with screaming girls and later entered a photographic session. In front of the camera, Cassidy seemed to fall in love with himself. The account distinguishes a public performance from the transformation produced by being photographed: the camera did not merely document the star but helped call forth another version of him.

That scene broadens the meaning of the diary’s attention to bodies and looks. Appearance is neither purely private nor simply imposed from outside. It is watched, interpreted, photographed, and adjusted in company with an audience. Interview’s glamorous presentation of people, including its retouching practices, and Warhol’s own portrait procedures belong to a culture in which the visible body could be actively remade. The diary records that culture through small observations as well as through the more intimate admissions about weight.

A diary of bodily uncertainty

The form of the record matters to this subject. Before 1976, Pat Hackett kept a sketchy Factory log based chiefly on business visitors, events, and expenses. After she told Warhol she no longer wanted to work at the office, they agreed that he would supply the daily account himself. Their weekday morning calls began as a way to record his activities and cash expenses, including very small costs, while also becoming a diary in which ordinary details could be preserved. The entries about weight appear within this daily accounting rather than as a separate, retrospective explanation of his body.

The routine gave the record a specific rhythm. The diary was taken over the phone Monday through Friday; on Monday, Warhol recounted the activities of the weekend together. Hackett took notes and typed them soon after each call, while receipts were attached to the resulting pages. That method helps explain the entries’ close attention to numbers, incidental observations, and changing impressions. It also means that the published text is not an untouched transcript: Hackett reduced an original twenty thousand pages, sometimes cutting whole days or weeks, and removed personal exchanges that would have addressed her directly. The published diary preserves immediacy, but it is also an edited selection.

The body that emerges from those entries is therefore recorded in fragments: a weight, a shrinking stomach, nerves against bones, a concern about medication or illness, a preference for a thinner appearance. Elsewhere, Warhol’s fear of cancer and his account of a 1977 neck biopsy show how bodily signs could also provoke medical anxiety and uncertainty. These strands should not be collapsed into a diagnosis. Their significance lies in the diary’s unresolved contrast: the body is at once an object to slim, a surface to beautify, and a vulnerable presence whose changes cannot be fully explained or controlled.