(9) When Christianity was adopted rather superficially, the larger bbws and ssbbws preferencing could be widespread even in the lands with not very rich harvests. For example, in Russia in the 15th - 17th centuries, the optimal weight of a beautiful woman who could afford it, according to the most popular preferences variant then in circulation, was considered to be from 7 to 7.5+ poods, that is, from 250 to 270 pounds. The average height of a woman then was 152 cm (5 ft 1 inch), so this weight on her looked like the average modern woman (168-169 cm) weighing 335 - 365 pounds.
This ideal was then shared equally by the people and the elites. Moreover, they were so widespread that the very word of Russian language which means "thin", "hudoy" in Russian has the literal meaning "bad, unconvenient". And the word meaning "to gain weight, "popravitsya" in Russian, means literally "to get yourself in the right condition, to make yourself better".
(10) By the end of the 18th century, due to deteriorating of living conditions and increasing repressivenesx if culture, in Russia this standard dropped to a range of 5.5 - 6 pounds, 200 - 215 pounds for the same height, which with a modern average height would give a weight range of 270 -290 lbs. And in the 18th century Russia, this ideal was already shared only by wealthy peasants, merchants and the simplest nobles. According to the adopted European fashion, the elitary ideals were already different.
By the end of the 19th century, this ideal was already shared onky by a minority of the population in Russia, primarily among the merchants and wealthy peasants, not to say of course about individual fat admirers, that exist in any time and any society.
(11) In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, throughout the developed world, the needs of the clothing industry began to have the strongest additional negative impact on the situation. Sewing clothes for a full figure not only requires more fabric consumption, but it also requires much more labor-intensive fitting work. The objective ideal for the clothing industry would be just a stick; its cover is the easiest to produce. Of course, mass production of clothing implies that standardization is desirable for the manufacturer, too.
At the same time, the physical labour of working and housekeeping women still remained high. Thus, the 20th century turned out to be the time of greatest suppression of attraction to overweight and very overweight women.
Now, at least in the United States, major changes are afoot. The culture has become somewhat less repressive and standardizing. But most importantly, for the first time in history, a huge mass of the population has the opportunity to receive a huge amount of high-calorie food, without spending a lot of calories on its production and on living. Water no longer needs to be carried from a well, cooking does not require kindling, vacuuming requires significantly fewer calories than hand cleaning, washing in a washing machine requires immeasurably less calories than hand washing.
In this situation, a lot of people give themselves free rein, and the number of overweight and very overweight women becomes such that even a repressive culture is forced to take this into account and begins to retreat under the pressure of changing reality. This is what we are seeing in the United States, but we can talk about making the decisive pass only when, e.g., the Hollywood films show plump and very fat women as attractive, successful, sexy and beautiful characters.
I think that this time is not far off.