In the eternal battle between our bodies, our self-esteem and our sanity, is a line in the sand being drawn? It may be faint, it could be erased if Thin Lindsay Lohan makes a hit movie, but for the moment it’s there and defiantly visible. I’m not talking about the so-called rise of the pneumatic Hollywood prototype because, while Christina Hendricks, who plays the pillowy Joan in Mad Men, is palpably not a size zero, and J-Lo and Scarlett Johansson undeniably have curves, in the toned flesh they are eerily flawless.

But the seeds of salvation could lie in the kind of pin-ups currently engaging younger women. Lily Allen, Peaches Geldof, Kelly Osborne, Daisy Lowe, Kate Nash and Adele represent a (relative) warts-and-all honesty that is giving them as great an appeal as that of their more airbrushed predecessors — and not just in the Sturm und Drang world of celebrity magazine covers, where every weight loss is portrayed as a triumph before it turns into the inevitable “cause for acute concern”.

These girls shift aspirational merchandise — unlike Kerry Katona, whose influence over slightly older generations of women leads them only as far as Iceland. Allen sells Chanel to a new age demographic. Lowe does the same for Westwood and Dolce & Gabbana (let’s not overstress it, by the way: she is still slim by normal standards, though not emaciated — and that’s progress). Meanwhile, last weekend, Ultimo, the lingerie company that brought the world max cleavage, gel sacks, the backless bra, the frontless bra and the backless-frontless bra, launched Miss Ultimo, a new, “edgier” line of underwear aimed at girls in their teens and early twenties with Peaches Geldof as its frontwoman.

Whatever your views on Geldof and her ubiquity, she has a “real” body and, so far, she has stuck to it. It’s so real that Michelle Mone, Ultimo’s straight-talking founder and co-owner and a woman not known for her squeamishness on these matters, was initially wary — mainly because of Geldof’s abundant body art. But Rebecca, Mone’s 17-year-old daughter who conceived and designed the range (Mone began inculcating her into the art of cantilevering when she was 8), insisted. “I was nervous about Peaches’s tattoos,”confesses Mone, “but since the campaign appeared we have received hundreds of e-mails thanking us for not using a stick-thin model — and we did the minimal amount of airbrushing, basically just getting rid of small skin blemishes.”

Sceptics will point out that Geldof’s newsworthiness overrides any ghostly outlines of a rounded tummy, and that using “real women”(aka the Dove effect) always generates a degree of consumer goodwill. But newsworthiness doesn’t always translate into sales. Mone is a tough businesswoman. Geldof needs to sell as well as to engender right-on feelings about the brand (as the Dove women did). And, according to Mone, she does.

“The 500 17 to 25-year-olds Ultimo questioned about their ideal body shape prior to launching Miss Ultimo categorically said that it wasn’t thin, ”she says. “They don’t want mega-cleavage, either.”

In other words, the impossibly bouncy paradigm of birdlike frame supporting implausibly big breasts that originated with porn stars — and Barbie — may be on the way out, at least among teenagers. Mind you, what women tell market researchers doesn’t always reflect what they really think. Do women, especially young women, even always understand the fraught cross-currents of reaction that their own — and other women’s — bodies elicit?

Maria Janssen, Global Managing Editor for Youth, Street and Sport at WGSN, an industry trend forecaster, thinks that Mone is on to something. “We’re seeing a new mood coming through, which is more realistic and confident,” she says. “Youth today is very aware of the economic crisis and other big issues that we’re facing. Body issues aren’t seen as so important as they were.”

On British streets you’ll see no shortage of fashion-conscious girls who seem much more relaxed than my generation did about wearing teeny skirts and skimpy tops even when their bodies don’t look like those of Lady Gaga, Fearne Cotton or Alexa Chung. Equally, given that the ultra-skinny Desperate Housewives aesthetic is a trophy look among older women, along with immobile, slightly puffy faces, perhaps young women will eventually reject the half-starved, unlined ideal as something quaintly primitive that appealed to their middle-aged mothers.

In the meantime, the latest data (from 2007) suggests that anorexia among teenagers may have risen slightly from its 1 per cent rate, and that children as young as 5 talk about diets. The psychologist Dr Linda Papadopoulos, who is researching the sexualisation of young women as part of a Home Office study of violence against women, says: “We live in a society where we sexualise our bodies more and from a younger age. If you want attention, you wear revealing clothes. Our value lies in the sex-appeal factor, regardless of our size.”

That sounds depressingly like one negative being replaced by another. But, taking a rosier long-term view, perhaps it will just take time to see the positive impact of today’s more realistic role models.

The web of contradictory emotions that women experience in relation to their bodies evolved over several thousand years — so it’s not likely to be undone by a few pictures of Kate Moss looking 6oz heavier than she did ten years ago. Perhaps Peaches is a good start. Bet you never thought you’d read that.

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