"Heroin chic suggested a kind of thinness, frailness, emaciatedness…sickliness as desirable," says Brumberg.

Quinn agrees that advertising plays a role in establishing beauty standards.

"Everybody wants to be perceived as beautiful in some way," she says. "We look at the pages of magazines and we see beautiful faces, and you see people who look great in that makeup, or great in that dress, and you want to feel that way."

Brumberg says that the media not only presented an ideal, it obliged women to mimic it.

"People expect their bodies to be perfect these days," she says. "Women are judged too often by their appearance and young girls get the idea that appearance is the source of female power."

Despite the popularity of heroin chic, the negative publicity surrounding it sparked a backlash, says Barbara Moffatt, a senior editor at Women.com.

"A lot of women realized that it was a ridiculous look and an ideal that women didn't want to achieve," Moffatt says.

Calvin Klein responded to the criticism in a February 1998 New York Times article.

"Clearly people were upset by heroin chic, and people accused me of it," said Klein. "We thought it was creative, but it was perceived as drug-related and messy. People don't want that now."