Plus-size models are all the rage, but is fashion really ready to embrace them?

Posted by mija on Dec 28, 2009 in News | 0 comments

Yet another year draws to a close, flicking through the pages of our glossy fashion magazines you might be forgiven for thinking we are at the dawn of a more enlightened age.
On the cover of December Vogue is Lara Stone, a model with breasts, hips and famously yellow teeth.
Or Glamour, with its fashion shoot featuring a plus-size model, and a feature on bikinis modelled by ‘real’ women of all shapes and sizes.
Also in Glamour was the now infamous photo of the plus-size model Lizzie Miller’s spare tyre, a roll of fat most of us are used to seeing every morning, but a sight as rare between the pages of a glossy as a stray grey hair or a facial whisker.
‘This spare tyre has blown fashion apart,’ and ‘Finally! A real woman!’ screamed newspaper headlines as far afield as India.
And now, in the January issue of American magazine V comes the most ground-breaking shoot of all: Crystal Renn, a plus-size model, photographed alongside a ‘normal’ model (ie, one with the vital statistics of an umbrella spoke) in identical designer clothes with the mantra: ‘This proves fashion can flatter any figure.’
Crystal Renn didn’t always have curves. As a model, she suffered from anorexia. She had palpitations. She fainted if she walked too far. She was afraid she might die, and so she decided to get better and to eat, becoming America’s highest paid plus-size model.
Her career took off when Anna Wintour put her in the pages of American Vogue, albeit in the ‘shape’ issue; remember that Wintour is the woman who in the documentary about her magazine took one look at a slight curve on a model’s stomach and snapped: ‘She looks pregnant’.
Renn has gone on to star in Italian Vogue and on Jean Paul Gaultier’s catwalk. She is undeniably curvy: a size 16, with the vital statistics 36-31-41.
In the shoot for V, where she is poured into the same designer outfits as the model Jacquelyn Jablonksi, she looks like a Forties pin-up. Above all, Renn looks healthy: surely far more important than looking beautiful.
The tide has turned, I hear you rejoicing. The dictatorial dingbats of the fashion industry have finally acknowledged that we want to know how that jacket looks when buttoned over a pair of big breasts, or how those high-waisted trousers will fit over an ample bottom.
What other evidence is there that the industry, perhaps mindful of the fact that the recession means we are all making far more careful choices when it comes to clothes, has come to its senses?
How about the letter Alexandra Shulman, the editor of British Vogue, sent to all the leading designers, pleading with them to stop demanding ever-smaller models in shoots and on the catwalk?
Or the fact the American designer Michael Kors told me when I asked whether a woman in her 40s can be a sex symbol, or a woman with curves can wear high fashion: ‘Of course she can! Look at Michelle Obama: the fashion world is at her feet.’
But is it really different this time? Are we really at the dawn of an enlightened new age, when women will not be required to conform to a ridiculous one size fits all?
While Lara Stone is described in Vogue as having ‘the face and body of a Seventies Playboy bunny’, the reality is she is barely an inch bigger than what passes for a ‘normal’ model: her vital statistics are 33-24-35.
When I asked one of the most female-friendly designers in the business, Alberta Ferretti, why on earth she uses 16-year-old girls on the catwalk when surely only those in their 40s can possibly afford them, her excuse was that: ‘There is a recession. We use young girls because they’re cheaper.’
Look at the latest ad campaign for Ralph Lauren jeans, featuring a model who has been airbrushed so radically her head is now far wider than her hips. If you cover her head, you could be looking at the torso of a ten-year-old child.
And we are not just talking airbrushed ads for high fashion here, but about the images used to sell more mainstream products.
You might think Twiggy is pretty bloody perfect, the best she can possibly be for a woman in her 60s, but in the fashion and beauty industries it seems nature and good genes can always be improved upon.
For the new Olay ad she is portrayed as impossibly porcelain skinned. When I challenged her about the level of airbrushing in the ad (which, after 700 complaints, has since been censured by advertising regulators) she merely shrugged: ‘I had no say over the end result, but all the beauty ads look like that. They are like paintings, not real at all. They are meant to look like paintings.’
The problem is that the women who look at these advertisements and fashion spreads and magazine covers do not realise they are meant to be art, although I have to say the model in the Ralph Lauren ad does, as the excellent feminist website Jezebel points out, uncannily resemble a Giacometti sculpture.
We believe the woman in the photograph actually looks like that, and that we should look that way, too. And if we don’t, then we are just not trying hard enough.
The reason most commonly given by the fashion industry for its addiction to the very young and the very emaciated is that women don’t want to see themselves reflected on the catwalk and in our glossy magazines.
‘No one wants to see curvy women,’ Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld once famously proclaimed.
If we really want the industry to change and not to pacify us with tokenism, with one-off gimmicky shoots, and to use curvier women, shorter women, older women in issues that aren’t about ‘shape’ or ‘age’, then we need to force it to change, not with model health inquiries or hand wringing but by voting with the only method it will listen to: our wallets.
Read more: dailymail.co.uk