There’s just one thing that makes me more furious than the fashion industry promoting an unachievable thin body as the “ideal woman’s shape”. And that is when they use plus-size models. Why? Because they always photograph them nude, or in seriously stupid novelty pretend clothes, while claiming great swathes of moral high ground on the “Look, we use plus-size models too!” ticket.
But before people start sending hate mail, let me recap: I don’t have a problem with having larger-sized women in fashion magazines, being a larger sized woman myself. What I object to is that they’re always nude – because then they are not large people looking lovely in the new styles and fashions – they are large people being used in a tokenistic manner in magazines.
There are three reasons this happens:
1) fashion designers don’t make samples – or even the finished retail product – in sizes large enough for plus-sized women. Solution: if you want to make a feature of a properly big girl, make an effort and get the clothes sampled up specially okay?
2) plus-sized women often look better with no clothes on, when you can see the pleasing, sensual curves naturally formed by their unencumbered flesh, so it’s easier to get a good picture. Solution: again, make the effort! Get the big sizes made in designs that will suit her, and style her up so that she looks great instead of frumpy and uncomfortable, because the clothes options available right now were obviously not made with larger women in mind with those ghastly ruffles, and garish and vulgar patterns that leave women looking like side show freaks in a circus.
3) having the plus-sized woman nude has a shock value that balances out the other shock – that there is a plus-sized woman in a fashion magazine. Solution: if you can’t sincerely embrace the idea that a plus-sized woman can look good in fashionable clothes, then don’t put one in your magazine!
The latest addition to this hypocritical canon comes courtesy of Mr Karl Lagerfeld. I have been previously impressed with the honesty of his statements on the high-fashion, skeletal-body controversy. He has been known to make outrageously un-PC remarks along the lines of: “You’ve got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the TV and saying that thin models are ugly…” It’s a provocative standpoint, but at least he was honest, plus he’s got something of a right to say it, because he used to be a large man himself and slimmed down to a tiny thinnifer – and he’s kept it off for years now.
He’s living proof that in most cases – not all, but way most – the difference between being a size 10 and a size 18 comes down to two things: self-control and giving a shit. In other words, having “being slim and healthy” on top of your priority list. Because in my own bitter experience, unless you have a God-given fast metabolism, that’s the only way to keep your weight down. It has to be the main thing that you think about, requiring constant planning and effort. Anyway, so wherever you stand on that spectrum of caring about being skinny enough to work at it, you have to give credit to Kaiser Karl for being real.
But now he’s done a fashion spread for V magazine, featuring an obese “burlesque performer” (and how I feel about that retrogressive crap is a whole other story), Miss Dirty Martini, modelling next to a Coco Chanel lookalike on the iconic staircase at the fashion house’s Paris headquarters. The skinny-minnie Coco model is wearing a classic Chanel suit and hat, while Miss Martini is wearing – guess what? – Camellia accessories as nipple tassels! RUBBISH!
Because how hard would it have been for Karl Lagerfeld to have had a fabulous Chanel suit made up in size 20? Now THAT would have impressed me as a fashion picture…..
