Unlike the popular belief that the body image is a recent marketing ploy, the history of the body image probably runs parallel to the human evolution.  

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I believe that the advertising influence is short term, like the flavor of the month.  For example, the concept of zero size model lasted for few decades in the west. This concept was totally rejected in Latin America and South Asia, when it was introduced in last decade. Instead, the western world has now accepted healthy body model.

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On the other hand The larger and the longer trend in the body image changes is very visible in human evolution as shown in adjoining figure.  The reduction in hair and straightening pasture over hundreds of thousands of years, clearly indicates a more longer term body image change. This means beauty is in some way a product of human biology. And as the image adjoining shows that our body image and therefore our ideas of beauty have played an important role in human evolution. 

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The classical human evolution history chart shows two key body image changes: 1. initial crouching stance evolving to standing tall, and 2. grooming of hairs. 

After the body stance and grooming, focus of body image became body proportions. Written in about 1497 and published in 1509, Luca Pacioli's book “De Divina Proportione” talks about the Golden ratios or the Divine Proportion of the human body. It used illustrations by the master Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519).  DaVinci featured these divine proportions in many of his paintings. Rather his subsequence paintings He did entire explorations of the human body & the ratio of lengths of various body parts.

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Compared to this history of body image, the advertising trying to influence our body image perception is recent. In that respect, advertisers are leveraging  human preferences for body types and facial structures -features,  preferences that appear to appeal across cultures and over millenniums.

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