This practice-based investigation brings together two iconic body images to look at their shared visual qualities, affective capacity and contextual associations. The research is used to interpret and generate a series of wearable textile forms. The selected body images represent distinct cultural genres: the 12th-15th century, late medieval crucified Christ and fashion’s heroin chic supermodel from 1990-97. The link between them is perceived as an overt and stylized state of emaciation. Multiple theories are used to describe the emaciated body image’s aesthetic impact mainly, Sara Ahmed’s concepts of cultural information transmission from body to body, Julia Kristeva’s writings on the abject and sublime, and Bracha Ettinger’s mixture of psychoanalysis and artistic practice. As well, the work of textile and fashion scholars Catherine Harper and Otto von Busch are referenced to model a symbiotic relationship between criticality, the body and material expression. The theoretical engagement is used as a source of descriptive vocabulary to define the emotional resonance emitted by these bodies and their aestheticized emaciation. The terminology and associated concepts are then used as creative prompts in the textiles studio to respond using weaving, knitting, and embroidery. The techniques employed are then treated, washed, stained, brushed and mended. The materials include mono-filament invisible, mohair, horsehair, and merino yarns, with tulle and organza fabrics to portray the embodied condition in texture, opacity and weight. Applying intertextuality as the methodology informed by Jacques Derrida allows a webbing together of emergent and multiple meanings. This enables the terms and concepts studied to be freely defined and redefined in the search for new material language. The final collection of artefacts is made by assembling the textile experimentation to somehow create the wanted impression of emaciation in cloth forms.