Naked from the waist down, curled up “like a baby shrimp” on a crooked examination table, Amy Larocca was finally forced to confront her inner workings, and that of a strange new industry called “wellness”.
Larocca had been the high-glamour fashion director of New York magazine for 20 years, her career devoted to covering up the body, expensively and stylishly. But now something had shifted: fashion had been unseated by a new 21st-century industry, and Larocca somehow found herself having a colonic irrigation in a dodgy basement room the opposite of glamour.
Larocca was then just as much a sucker for it as the rest of us. Why? Because “wellness” was now where the money, buzz, influencers and celebrities had flocked, abandoning fashion for an industry parasitic on health that is now worth $2 trillion globally, according to a report by McKinsey consultants.
Every week it seems a new wellness start-up launches from a new celebrity, from an exercise app promoted by Jennifer Aniston to acupressure neck wedges flogged by Kourtney Kardashian, both trailing after the high priestess of wellness, Gwyneth Paltrow. One of Meghan Markle’s post-Megxit ventures was investing in Clevr Blends, selling something called a superlatte with adaptogens. Katy Perry has invested in a business touting the transformative powers of apple cider vinegar and more “adaptogens” (to be big in wellness you must be big into adaptogens — no, don’t bother looking it up: nobody knows what it means). Arianna Huffington sold her eponymous news media business to found Thrive, which aims to help you “build healthy habits”, while Kate Hudson, Jennifer Lopez and Beyoncé all joined the wellness business gold rush.
In “wellness”, perfection of the body is the prize, not clothes. In a symbolic shift, Larocca was only too willing to discard her fashiony trousers that chilly December afternoon. From the mystique of fashion of the 20th century to bum nozzles, it was high to low.
But the promises went in the other direction. While fashion couldn’t do more than make you look a little swishier in your new skirt, its 21st-century incarnation as wellness hinted it could make you immortal. Your body — with the purchase of juices, vitamins, scans, blood tests, meditation apps, meal replacement subscriptions or multiple fitness trackers — could achieve an ideal described in semi-religious terms: strong, cleansed, radiant.
Many products in wellness make untested claims, modern snake oil with the whiff of effluent, from murky food supplements and bastardised yoga to exercise fads. Larocca was promised “cleansing”, yet she realised what she really was: nakedly vulnerable to an industry that preyed on our fears. She lay there enduring the humiliation by counting through her fears like sheep. They ranged from climate change to her late-forties weight gain, but most of all, “the slow and inevitable downhill march to death”.
She vowed then, returning to her pants and senses, to take on the wellness industry and why we have now fallen so hard for it. Her new book, How to Be Well, is an intelligent take-down, but funny too. When she skewers absurdity she does not spare herself: for example on her previous devotion to New York’s finest “spiritual” spin class.
“To my great embarrassment I once, on Martin Luther King Day,” she writes, “rode to a disco remix of King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech.”
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We talk via video from her home in Brooklyn where she has spent several years researching the industry, after leaving New York magazine in 2020. Part of her outsider’s sharp eye comes from being married to a British man. Now 50, she remembers coming to London 20 years ago and being teased for what her new in-laws called her “don’t-get-excited” herbal teas, the fact American women wore exercise clothes as streetwear, “and I couldn’t get over how much everybody drank”.
Once-silly American wellness fads “just aren’t that weird any more” in the UK, she says. The Global Wellness Institute ranked the United Kingdom as the fastest-growing market in the field since 2019. The 2024 McKinsey research study on global wellness trends found that while 82 per cent of Americans say wellness is a “top” priority, the British are not far behind at 73 per cent.
Larocca describes being one of only two women in her Brooklyn social circle not to have Botox injections, a natural face close to extinction. “I get kind of freaked out about that,” she says. “In London it’s not like that.” But for how long?
Of course there have been people hawking miracle cures to the desperate throughout history, but what is new about the “wellness” industry is that it merges aesthetics with quackery. Larocca points out that in the late 20th century an American celebrity doctor called Andrew Weil was getting rich on preventive medicine, but when he graced the cover of Time magazine, his jolly round Santa face and beard looked “like a garden gnome”.
Beyoncé in 2016 modelling her activewear brand, Ivy Park
IVY PARK
Now it is simply not possible for the figurehead of a wellness brand to be anything other than extraordinarily beautiful, ideally a Hollywood star. This is despite the fact it is possible to be very healthy and also ugly according to societal norms. “Wellness” is therefore not health, argues Larocca, but health in a way that is only embodied by hotness. Each brand has as its face a woman who, “is simultaneously ambitious and content, her boundaries and orgasms and poop are all firm and beautifully formed”.
It is also a necessary component of the “wellness” industry to be exclusive and expensive, where “health is sold as a luxury rather than a right”.
“Over the 20 years I worked in fashion at the magazine, it grew more and more democratic and accessible,” Larocca says.
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When she was first covering the shows one needed an affiliation with a prestigious institution to get in the door. Then, suddenly, the runway was being streamed online.
“It instantly became less desirable, less aspirational,” she says. “I always pin it on this one moment.”
This moment came from a beautiful “wellness” entrepreneur called Amanda Chantal Bacon from Montecito, California. Montecito is significant, also being the HQ of Markle, Aniston, Oprah Winfrey, Paltrow, Perry and so on.
“Amanda Chantal Bacon is the celebrity juicer of Los Angeles,” Larocca says. Paltrow is both her devotee and sells her $40 jars of Moon Juice “adaptogen” powders on her Goop website. Bacon gave an interview to Elle in 2015 about her morning routine. It involved ingesting things like “he shou wu”, and not a rasher of bacon.
“I can’t pronounce any of it even now, and I’ve written a book about wellness,” Larocca says. “It was ground-up pearls in a hand-pounded copper cup. A farm girl in Indiana can now get a Valentino gown delivered to her door in 24 hours. So what’s special about that? But where does Amanda Chantal Bacon find her woohoo dust? It created a whole new vocabulary for desire and exclusivity.”
“That was the shifting of power from Milan to Montecito,” she says.
The beautiful Montecito purveyors of woohoo dust met two other cultural currents: a rise in people declaring themselves “spiritual but not religious”, and a genuine concern about rising obesity, sedentary lifestyles, processed food and chronic health conditions often dismissed by the overworked medical mainstream.
When Larocca “is being nice” about wellness, she says she sees some strands of preventive healthcare. But the trouble is, it is targeted at the wealthiest who need this the least, at a “deeply exclusionary price point”. For the very wealthy, these products are a “seductive blend of hypochondria and buying stuff”, she writes.
“What no one wants to say is this: what you really need is to be lucky,” Larocca writes of good health, “and what is often meant by ‘lucky’ is rich.”
The rich already had access to the best medical, diet and exercise support, and no surprise, they also enjoyed the best health on average. But what wellness offered the rich was something extra, that they couldn’t get from the doctor. This was eternal life.
Larocca notes drily that it is only the male wellness entrepreneurs, most famously a tech-tycoon called Bryan Johnson, who explicitly embark on longevity missions. Johnson has had his son’s plasma injected, among other truly strange self-experiments. Why don’t women want to live for ever?
“Maybe women are just tired,” Larocca says. “Maybe men are not so insulted for growing old all the time.”
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But for women the promise is not that you will live for ever, but a looks-based variation. Once you are past what society deems the peak aesthetic for womanhood, ie no older than 35, “you are endlessly sold the idea that this version of yourself has been unfairly taken away”, Larocca writes. Buying wellness products is a pricey Faustian pact to somehow age in reverse. The advertising is about getting you “back” to your pre-baby body, “back” to your pre-menopausal body, “back” in some reversal of the laws of time and physics.
“You endlessly have to be clawing backwards to some version of you,” Larocca tells me. “Everything in the past is good, and everything forward is sad: it’s such a dangerous idea, because you can only fail.”
Meanwhile organised religion was waning, as was membership in most organised groups. Volunteering has fallen in the UK. People were turning inwards, and wellness was a religion devoted to the perfection of self. Larocca has two teenage daughters, the younger of whom was born unwell, an event that made Larocca more vulnerable to the promises of protection against the awful fragility of life, “some control in an uncontrollable world”.
She wrote this book as a “love letter” to her daughters: “I do not want endemic striving to dominate their lives.” This idea that for women, “there’s always a better version of you out there,” she says, “it makes me so sad”.
But business analysts predict the wellness industry will continue to boom and the pressure to partake is, Larocca says, “not letting up”. Even after writing this critique, people still ask her in hushed terms for the exclusive secrets to “what really works”.
In fact, Larocca has become, for a middle-class New Yorker, spartan in her regime. She doesn’t take any supplements. She does some Pilates, keeps up to date on her doctor’s check-ups. She got rid of her fitness tracker. She eats all kinds of food, in a way that is both utterly normal and bizarre in the wellness world: meat, carbs, dairy, including — practically a death wish this — refined sugar. That’s sort of it.
This approach is born from her experience in fashion, where many of the editors famously wear black because they tire of fast-cycling trends. I remember when “bone broth” was a big deal a few years ago, when Paltrow and all her Montecito mates were supping glorified Bovril at a thousand times the price, and now no one talks of it. Larocca reminds me of when coconut oil was deemed a superfood, now it is déclassé.
“It’s like when everything had to be turmeric,” she says. “Now turmeric is out. Watching the cyclical nature of trends and how quickly they come and go, you become numb.” How to be numb is not as catchy as “how to be well” but it sounds quite desirable to me.
How to Be Well by Amy Larocca (Bedford Square £16.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
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