In early September of 2010—prior to the start of New York Fashion Week—I wrote an article for Fashionista.com, called “XXL: How BBW Became Fashion’s Latest Prey,” as a response to an article published in July called “Plus-Size Wars,” written by Ginia Bellafante, in The New York Times Magazine. The article talks about how “recherché” V magazine was for featuring a size-16 model named Tara Lynn in a fashion story.
So, I wrote the article, explaining how long before Tara Lynn exposed herself in V, and way earlier than when Beth Ditto, the lead singer of the band Gossip, landed on the cover of LOVE magazine and captured the Parisian fashion world by storm (spring/summer 2009), and prior to Jean-Paul Gaultier’s Spring 2011 show, “XXL,” I did a fashion story featuring two size-14 models for the December 2003 issue of Flaunt. Then, as now, it was impossible to get any designer clothes in this size range. Fortunately, I was able to pull clothes from the Hugo Boss store, as the merchandise available from Bloomingdale’s plus-size department was awful. In the end, I had to use several fur coats and close-up shots of fabulous diamond and pearl necklaces. Due to this lack of great looking clothes, I have never attempted a second effort in featuring plus-size models.
My argument, however, in the article for Fashionista.com, was that more magazines and designers should cater to the plus-size woman. I know now that I was naïve to think that this could be the case. The fashion industry simply isn’t built to accommodate for the bigger women of the world.
Case in point: more than anyone over the last five years, the once size-14 super-plus-size model Crystal Renn brought attention to plus-size women in fashion with her various gigs on the runways of Jean-Paul Gaultier and Chanel. But a few months ago, The New York Post reported that Ms. Renn’s agent at Ford Models cited her rediscovered enthusiasm for rigorous exercise and dieting as reasons for her migration from a size 12 two years ago to a size 6-8 today. “Because of my size currently, I straddle this line between the two worlds—I guess you could say I’m a straight-size model. I am four inches smaller than a plus-size model and four inches bigger than a straight-size model,” she said, ever more sounding like a presidential candidate. Either explanation can’t be more disingenuous.
If Ms. Renn’s body has been the battleground for the acceptance of weight in fashion, then surely even a casual observer would have to admit total defeat. Clearly the reward she currently reaps is a result of her weight loss: a Jimmy Choo and a Dsquared2 ad campaign this spring are only possible with her shrunken size.
Outside of fashion in the culture at large, fat is definitely out. “Losing is their only hope,” is the caption to advertise the A&E show Heavy on a giant billboard at the corner of Lafayette and Houston in New York depicting a very large woman photographed from above standing on a tiny scale. A commercial for NBC’s The Biggest Loser starkly states that last season’s participants lost a total of 1406 lbs. The Academy Award-winning actress-singer Jennifer Hudson, a spokeswoman for Weight Watchers, is now a size 6-8. For every new fashion season, there’s a concurring season of new diet plans promising yet another scientific methodology to stymy and banish fat. And how long has Kirstie Alley been a professional dieter?
Well, fat is out for the masses, but it’s definitely in for the erotic consumer. “Don’t call it ‘fat porn.’ It’s been ‘BBW’ for nearly a decade now,” extorts Steve Javors, the managing editor of Adult Video News (AVN) in an email from Las Vegas. It is a response to my inquiry about the current size of the Big Beautiful Women business. While Mr. Javors indicates that a ballpark figure on the size of the market would be tough to estimate, BBW has surely grown exponentially from a very small niche market to a major category of the porn business. BBW becomes the nomenclature of choice because, as Javors says, “There’s a new acceptance of full size women at least in porn.” Some of the industry’s stars (April Flores, Karla Lane, etc.) have become household names even beyond the cognoscenti of BBW films. Big studios like Vivid, Adam & Eve, and HeartCore Films have been producing lavish titles like Waist Watchers, Curvaceous, and Tippin’ Tha Scales with ever growing budgets.
In the Fashionista article, I wrote about “Life in the Fat Lane,” a chapter of Northwestern University Media Studies professor Laura Kipnis’ 1996 book Bound and Gagged, which juxtaposes the dilemma of overweight “fetish” pornography and how popular culture confronts the issue of weight and desire. On one hand, BBW, a niche in the vast porn business, is an absolute revolt against the dictatorial and incessant aesthetic of thinness. On the other, the images of these chubby women—often 45-36-45 or size 16-18—entice desires that contradict and challenge prevailing cultural norms, particularly the rigid beauty norms adopted by the fashion industry, which I now realize are impentrable.
As a business driven to create desires, fashion has lagged far behind pornography in espousing a diverse range in the aesthetics of beauty and pleasure. The seasonal ad campaigns reach for the ultimate goal of crafting and concocting fantastic scenarios using top models, actresses, and pop stars as backdrops to elevate handbags, pairs of sunglasses, bottles of perfume, and commercial garments to mythical levels. There isn’t much diversity in these images; it’s still breaking news to see black or Asian models among the cast.
Fashion can easily breach the race or gender barrier. Witness how crossdressing and androgyny of both sexes has become the latest cause among trendy design houses. The designer Riccardo Tisci used transgender model Lea T for Givenchy’s Fall 2010 advertising campaigns, while Candy, the bi-annual magazine devoted to high fashion “transversal style” (crossdressing, transvestism, transexuality, and androgyny), launched in late 2009. Crossdressing is currently the de rigueur subject for fashion’s insiders.
The weight barrier, however, remains impenetrable.
In Bellafante’s New York Times Magazine article, she details the difficulty for fashion companies to enter the market to make larger clothes. While thin bodies are on the whole more uniform, fat bodies are strikingly different, which means standardized sizing is nearly impossible. Beyond size 14, there is less uniformity on what the body silhouette looks like, meaning the body becomes more amorphous and variable as size increases, thus posing a significant problem for fashion design.
Created in the tumultuous postwar year of 1947, Christian Dior’s “New Look”—sharp A-line hourglass shaped jackets over tight knee length skirts that contour the woman’s curvy body—inaugurated modern fashion. Since then, the brief history of fashion has been about shapes and silhouettes and how clothes function to contain a specific body type—particularly the slim and curvy female body reminiscent of late 19th century’s corseted and constricted style. Since 1947, there was the pantsuit revolution, and the return to femininity through bias-cut dresses. There were the seasonal changes in hemlines and ornamentations, but fashion designers have not veered far from the construct of fashion originating from Mr. Dior’s rigid silhouette. Despite changes in our cultural consumer consciousness, bigger is still often paraded as better.
Fashion isn’t so malleable. Its fleeting embrace of plus size is just that: a fad that will melt quickly when another trend competes for attention.