The fashion industry has a lot to answer for. I may have posted on this before. In fact I did from the perspective of the fashion designer who used “plus-size” models for a show. Those supposed plus sizes were between size 8 and 12, hardly plus at all and normal for most women.
Well, I also came across the following article by a writer. who dressed in a fat suit to attend several fashion shows. The attitudes about skeletal models and towards overweight people that she experienced just highlights the unrealistic world of fashion. The writer, Kate Faithtfull, is normally a size 10-12 and that would be too fat for being a model. Yet, if you look at her picture, beside one of her in the fat suit, she looks perfectly healthy.
As a child with an eating disorder and therefore a pudgy exterior, I have well experienced the attitudes of people to those not of normal size. Interestingly, when I look back on those pictures of me as a teenager I was pretty near normal size. I have a European, peasant body and will never be stick thin without serious surgery to remove calf muscle from my large, overdeveloped calves (finding high boots is nearly impossible and women with smaller calves than me have problems too), as well as trimming the hips and thighs down to a size I’ve never seen on my body. I’m sturdy, I have childbearing hips and I will always be curvy. I wear between a size 8 and a size 10, even with this shape.
Now Faithfull padded her body out to size 22 and found some clothes to wear, commenting that it was a good thing her breasts were foam because she’d have trouble finding a bra otherwise. Her male friends were more intrigued by the curves and yes, men often like more curvy women. Black men especially seem to like a woman with some “junk in her trunk.”
Now in recent years that crept up. I was no longer a small in my tops, going to a medium. My size 10 pants were too tight to do up. I should say here that there are a whole host of pants/jeans, which could be size 14 and I would still not be able to get them over my calves. Many jeans that I can get over my hips are then far too big in the waist, because, yes, I’m curvy. It’s not easy for many women whose proportions are not the 36-24-36 proportions to get clothes, though I would argue these days the measurements are more like 36-28-32. At my smallest I 34-22-38.
The fashion industry was never selling to me and I’m not sure who they sell to with their stick thin models in size 2, which a very small majority of any population can wear. Most women are between size 8-14. Many wear larger than that. Just by dint of being tall, can pop you up a size or too.
When I got into watching the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show I was made even more uncomfortably aware of my size by all the teeny women. Willow and Buffy were diminutive, yet Tara was more of a normal size. I’m sure some people thought she was fat but she wasn’t and I bet she wore a size 8 or smaller. After all, she said she weighed around 118 lbs and is around 5.5″. That’s not much weight for that height. Between Hollywood and the fashion world, people are freaked out about being 120 or 150 lbs when those are more natural ranges for people from 5.4 to 5.8. I don’t have the national average in front of me but I know many women who weigh 140-150 who don’t look fat at all.
What hit me over the year or two was that my clothes weren’t fitting. With a great deal of effort (a natural, balanced diet and working out 3-4 times a week) I’ve lost around 20 lbs this year. I think I could lose another 20 though the doctor says 10 maybe 15. We’ll see but I can say now that even if I lose that weight I’ll still have hips and big calves. It’s the way I’m built and it would take a truly anorexic frame to eliminate this and I’d be getting rid of muscle mass.
It’s hard being in a culture that ridicules people for being fat yet seems to reward those who starve themselves. Marilyn Monroe would be fat by today’s standards and she’s still a sex symbol. Oddly the model Twiggy, presenting an anorexic shape in the 60s that took the fashion world by storm (why, I still don’t know) started a trend that doesn’t seem to have ended. I’ll work always at being healthy but give me the Selma Hayeks and Sophia Lorens over Callista Flockhart and Twiggy. Curvy is healthier.
Colleen Anderson 