Oooh la la. French women might not get fat, but they’re happy to hold up a very curvy woman as the apogee of style.
Pick up a copy of the current issue of French Elle and you’ll find American plus-size model Tara Lynn seductively pouting in a white jumpsuit on the front. Inside, 20 pages are prominently devoted to Lynn, who is a size 16, modelling things like blue chunky knitted capes while causally pretending to ride a bike - your standard fashion fare.
For some, this is just another example of what the New York Times has dubbed “the triumph of the size 12s “, that is, a backlash against the prevailing dictate of exclusively employing the skeletally thin girls previously favoured by designers and editors.
In the last few months, curvier models have started appearing in high-end and mainstream fashion magazines and on catwalks in both the US and Europe, prompting the suggestion that we are witnessing a subtle, but substantive shift in attitudes towards weight and dress-size.
Case in point is the rise and rise of Crystal Renn, reputedly the world’s most successful “plus-size” model. Renn, who battled anorexia while muddling her way through an average at best modelling career, recovered and gained much needed weight only to find herself in hot international demand. Renn, now a size 12, has since strutted down the runways of Paris and London and has been photographed by world-renowned photographer Steven Meisel for Italian Vogue.
Similarly, the meteoric ascension to fashion’s highest reaches of British model Lara Stone, a girl who possess, shock-horror, cleavage, has been taken as another blow to the size zero trend. Stone recently graced the cover of British Vogue, and in the associated profile Stone opined, “It would be nice if I wasn’t the only person with tits and arse”.
Last year, Glamour Magazine in the US sparked a hyperbolic media frenzy when it published a photo of plus-size model Lizzi Miller, tucked away on page 196. In the image, Miller is wearing nothing but a pair of underpants and a wide grin, with a roll of stomach fat on proud display. The reaction to the photo was ecstatic, and overnight Miller was transformed from being an unknown model to being treated like a blonde version of the second coming.
Comments posted on the Glamour website included “the most amazing photograph I’ve ever seen in any women’s magazine,” and “For the first time ever, I looked in a magazine and saw a picture of a woman and actually thought, “She looks exactly like me!”
The magazine’s editor, Cindi Leive said in the wake of the of publishing the shot, “I hope it’s the beginning of a revolution.”
Meanwhile, UK Vogue Editor Alexandra Shulman has put pen to paper, pleading with haute couture designers to make larger sample sizes so the magazine would not be forced to employ the skeletal, practically pre-pubescent girls that were the only models able to fit into them.
Addressing an audience at Harvard, US designer Michael Kors recently lambasted the “army of children” who are the usual runway fodder. “The fashion industry is starting to address real women again,” Kors said, “The emphasis in fashion is shifting toward an emphasis on real women who are women, not girls.’‘
Then, in recent weeks, Italian Vogue has launched a “Vogue Curvy” special section online, devoted to fashion and beauty for larger women. (Why bigger women need different specialised beauty products is a curious question.)
So, has flab become fab?
Are we witnessing a genuine reaction to the terrifyingly thin girls with jutting ribcages and razors of spine who have haunted the catwalks and pages of Vogue et. al. as we forge a way towards a more inclusive vision of womanly beauty?
Or have designers and editors simply cottoned on to the fact that using “big” girls attracts much media hoopla?
After all, the occasional glamorous exception does not a revolution make.
If we were witnessing widespread cultural change, why are larger models relegated to appearing nearly exclusively in “Special editions” or “Body Love” issues. Lynn’s French Elle cover coup was for the “Curvy” issue, while Miller’s now famed image appeared in Glamour’s Body special.
There has most certainly been an increase in the visibility of “plus-size” models (who, it should be noted at size 12-16, are on the smaller side of the national average). But has this necessarily impelled positive change or does it genuinely reflect the beginning of a more inclusive bodily aesthetic?
Employing curvier models serves as a means for the fashion world to fob off criticisms that their continued use of malnourished Eastern European teenagers promotes a terribly skewed vision of “beauty”.
The UK Observer newspaper quoted a Parisian fashion insider as saying of the Elle cover, “It’s a gimmick. Having one edition that you fill with big girls is like world women’s day: one day a year is reserved for them and the rest of the time you go back to normal.”
It’s hard to escape the whiff of self-promotion and publicity grubbing when it comes to designers and magazine editors employing larger models.
Renn makes this point in her autobiography, “Hungry”, discussing what she sees as the “fetishisation of fat”. “When designers and editors choose one fat girl to salivate over, and revel in her avoirdupois, I’m not sure how much it advances the cause of using girls of all sizes in a magazine” Renn writes.
Charlotte Dawson was criticized for stating the obvious when she commented on “bigger” girls auditioning for Australia’s Next Top Model. “There is no market for plus-size models in Australia….” Dawson told ninemsn. “I would like someone to name a plus-size model in Australia because I can’t,” she said. “We could have a plus-size model win the competition and she would end up doing catalogues for Target.”
There remains significant resistance from those at the heart of the fashion world, with Karl Lagerfeld taking aim at the issue, declaring “No one wants to see curvy women” in magazines. Largerfeld agued that Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Elle and their ilk are the stuff of “dreams and illusions”, and thus there is no place for a size 10 reality.
After all, this is a world that has never been interested in normal or average, and so much of which is anathema to the real world.
So long as “fat” is little more than a faddish curiosity or a handy politically correct, self-congratulatory manoeuvre, the wider fashion milieu will remain as regimented and segregated as ever.
If each time a larger model is employed there is such a volume of self-congratulatory fanfare, the prevailing stereotypes are not being substantively challenged or changed.
In this battle for hearts and minds and body-fat percentages perhaps whatever helps sell the most magazines or chunky knitted blue capes wins.
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