Fashioning Fat: Inside Plus-Size Modeling (8 page)

After Dana, a size sixteen runway and showroom model, gave birth to her son, she questioned whether she could continue modeling after the pregnancy; however, her fellow model friends encouraged her to carry on:

My friend told me, “What’s your problem? Put on a great bra and Spanx and you’re ready to go.” She’s right . . . When I came back [after the pregnancy], it was like a family reunion. Everyone wanted to see pictures of my son. Everyone has been so supportive. I love these girls.

It took the support of other similarly motivated and bodied women for Dana to be at ease with her changed body. When all else failed, she was able to find relief in shapewear.

For these women, a reactionary process—of experiencing shame to attempting to cover up their bodies to final acceptance—that involved the actions of an outside force, such as the boutique owner, another plus-size model, or “friending” someone on Facebook, shifted their understanding of fat and beauty. Like Stephanie and the makeup artist or Joelle and her plus-size model friend, these women responded to positive encouragement from the authoritative voice of a fashion insider. Without this encouragement, most of these women would never have imagined modeling as a career option. Thankful to the usher who convinced her that she could be a plus-size model, Janice acknowledged, “It’s nice to be paid for having this body of curves. Too many girls have eating disorders. I want to be another type of example.” These models began as women who entered the field of modeling as part of a larger reactionary process that hinged on an active break with conventional interpretations of the social identity of a fat woman.

Black and Latina plus-size models who differed from the normative white body in fashion faced additional pressures to be role models in their ethnic communities, whose embrace of larger bodies may be waning. Size sixteen/eighteen model Yvonne, who was black, saw young black women trying to emulate the body types of high-fashion models through dieting:

They want to look like [straight-size] models but they’re genetic anomalies. I don’t want them [the young girls] to blindly change their bodies to match a picture in a magazine and suffer the consequences.

This shift in bodily ideals that Yvonne witnessed matches what anthropologist Anne E. Becker found in the island nation of Fiji, which traditionally idealized a large, robust body. In her book,
Body, Self, and Society: The View from Fiji
, Becker noticed a shift in bodily ideals with the introduction of western television. In a culture centered on food, within a few years after exposure to western images of beauty, young girls began, for the first time, to think of themselves as fat and purged to
achieve a thinner body. The thin ideal espoused by the fashion industry is spreading across the globe.

Likewise, Ella, a Latina size sixteen/eighteen model, felt determined to make a name for herself as a Latina plus-size model:

This is a Caucasian-dominated industry. When I first started modeling a few years ago, there weren’t really any Latina plus-size models. Now, there are a lot more of us, like a huge boom. It’s time to represent!

As a Latina, Ella embraced her ethnic culture and strove to diversify the industry. She not only aimed for increased size diversity but also racial diversity in fashion. For models like Yvonne and Ella, their work as plus-size models offers young girls and women from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds a counter-image of beauty that is largely absent from fashion.

These plus-size models attempted to overhaul the image of the fat woman as homely and unattractive and replace it with one that they believed was, indeed, sexy and desirable. They attempted to break with conventional stereotype because they accepted their fat. They shed the layers of shame and guilt and demanded that others saw them the way they saw themselves—beautiful, gorgeous, and “curvilicious.” Wendy, for example, had recently lost a significant amount of weight and felt more confident about her size eighteen body, so much in fact that she used modeling as an excuse to flaunt her body in form-fitting outfits. “I was unhappy [with] how I looked,” Wendy admitted. “I covered up. Now, I wear the tightest, shortest skirts because I look good.” Working as models empowered these women, like Wendy, to boldly celebrate their bodies.

Having discovered this community, their decision to become models involved stepping out from the murky waters of a cultural discourse rife with weight bias and prejudicial stereotypes concerning the fat body to become the new faces of plus-size modeling. These plus-size models did not hide their bodies. They became part of a niche in the fashion industry that sought to expose the flesh in a more positive light and aimed to create a new discourse on fat.

This work presents the changing nature of the plus-size model as produced by the cultural producers of the fashion industry. A major complication that needs to be addressed, though, is the existence of a vast range in meaning inscribed in the physical presence of “plus size.” Let us first examine the case of photographer and plus-size model, Velvet D’Amour. How is it that I, barely considered plus size by contemporary standards, fit into a plus-size category inhabited by a nearly three hundred-pound, size twenty-eight model? Was Velvet an outlier, or were the bodies of plus-size models dangerously “out of control”?

During the thin model controversy of 2006 in which, within a span of a few months, two high-fashion models—Luisel Ramos and Ana Carolina Reston—died as a result of complications from anorexia,
¹
Velvet made a splash in Paris with her appearances on the runway in Jean Paul Gaultier’s 2007 Spring/Summer collection and John Galliano’s showing entitled “Everybody is Beautiful.” Velvet was cast in these shows because both designers, known for their use of unconventional models, were looking for character types with a strong stage presence. In particular, Gaultier was casting for his thirty-year retrospective and wanted a “big” woman to represent the one he had used in a show back in the 1980s.

The presence of a plus-size model on his runway was not a new occurrence and, yet, the critics were shocked. In a phone interview, Velvet recalled:

They [the designers] got a lot of negative press for using me . . . It was unfortunate. I felt there were a lot of people who were dissing him for not doing even more, when I don’t think there are even other designers who could have taken that risk.

While Velvet admitted that she, at almost three hundred pounds, was beyond what is technically considered plus size, she attributed her standout performance on the runway to a long journey of self-discovery that made her comfortable and confident in her fat body.

During the casting for Gaultier, Velvet showed him her book, which was full of photos exuding positive attitude and confidence. One shot in particular was of Velvet in a wet T-shirt that said, “I love me.” Her photos and her confidence struck the designer, who then believed that he could take a risk and cast Velvet in his show:

I think that [confidence] lets the designer go out on a limb and take me because if there is any hesitation whatsoever, it would be a catastrophe if you were to go out and flip out or fall or whatever else. It would become a total farce.

Her level of confidence to walk on that runway without hesitation was the product of a long journey of self-awareness and self-acceptance. After years of trying and failing to adhere to a specific notion of beauty, Velvet, at thirty-nine years of age and nearly three hundred pounds, succeeded and walked down the runway of the best couturiers:

For me it was just sort of like an extra added, like, cherry on top. You know, and just to me, it really served to say when you come to truly accept yourself, there’s great rewards . . . I think that having gone through that struggle, it just sort of shows you that once you make it through that, there’s so much kudos you get after that journey.

This journey involved severe calorie restriction, taking the weight-loss drug Fen-phen, working behind the camera as a fashion photographer, and finally coming to peace with her body in front of the camera.

As a teenager, Velvet considered modeling only after continually being asked by others if she was, indeed, a model. When she finally approached an agency at a scouting event at a local, suburban mall, the agent told her that she, who weighed 135–140 pounds at the time, was “way too big.” Soon after this incident, Velvet moved to Manhattan to attend the School for Visual Arts, went on a restrictive, five hundred calorie diet, and lost more than twenty pounds:

I got down to 117 pounds and went back to the agency, thinking like, “woo hoo, I’ve done it.” They were just like, “hmmm, wow, you are still just too fat.” At that point there was just no possibility, you know because I had been restrictive dieting to such an extent that I totally backfired and I would eat like crazy and then I would diet. So it was the whole yo-yo dieting thing that got me fatter and got me sort of more of into trying to accept myself versus worrying about being a model or not.

When Velvet later moved to France to pursue a career in photography, she applied to a plus-size agency as a photographer, thinking that she would have an edge as a fat woman. She sent in her pictures, and the agency presented her with the chance to model:

When she [the agent] said, “Well, I would like to sign you,” I was like, “you have to be kidding me. I am like thirty-eight and going to start modeling?” But I thought, “Okay, cool. Why not? I have nothing to lose.”

In a relatively short time, Velvet accomplished what many aspiring models can only hope to achieve, namely international recognition and professional relationships with top designers.

Velvet D’Amour.

Many of the models with whom I spoke gushed about Velvet. As one model praised, “She is my plus-size superhero.” After the media storm, Velvet received hundreds of emails from women inspired by her work, as well as from those who demonstrated a strong aversion to her fat. While the subsequent years presented Velvet with a variety of opportunities, including the lead, title role in a French film,
Avida
, which screened at both the Cannes and Tribeca Film Festivals, she still experienced difficulty in further advancing her modeling career because of her size and age:

You know, I have gone down the runway twice for two great people, but the reality is there is not a massive amount of work for three hundred pound women who are forty years old . . . I try to create opportunity for other people because I know that that opportunity is very limited, not
only for bigger women but older women . . . I think that the reason people admire me is because I give them that sense of possibility. I was able to do it. I was able to break through that barrier.

Given Velvet’s iconic runway walk and mixed media reception, “larger” plus-size models faced hurdles in establishing themselves as legitimate models. Velvet’s presence in the fashion industry was a statement and not the norm. If the industry considered Velvet a “larger than plus-size” plus-size model, where was the lower bound of plus size?

Struggling with these questions myself while I went through the modeling process, I mentioned this project to my close-knit group of fellow academics from non–social science fields. While I stuttered to explain my position within the field of modeling and fashion and the difficulties I faced in conducting my fieldwork due to my “smaller” size, my friend explained matter-of-factly, “So, you are somewhere between a fat chick and a skinny bitch.” While everyone’s chin hit the table, I understood that this summation aptly described the cultural climate that I was investigating and unveiled the stereotypes that underlie the everyday existence of my subjects. In a society where fat is undesirable and carries with it connotations of sloth and unattractiveness, the expression “plus size” is either misunderstood or unknown. What is “plus size” and how is this term understood among different groups within the fashion industry? Is plus size equivalent to fat?

To elucidate this general confusion with the term plus size, I point to the example of Whitney Thompson, the declared first plus-size model to win the coveted title of
America’s Next Top Model
in the television series’ tenth cycle in 2008. Since her appearance on the show, viewers debated throughout the blogosphere whether she should really be referred to as a plus-size model since she did not embody their image of a fat woman. Yes, viewers agreed that she was larger than the typical fashion model,
but, when comparing her body to their own, they considered Whitney “average” and “normal.” Whitney was tall at a height of five feet ten inches and possessed a well-toned physique, but, on the show, she was the “big” one amidst, as she described it, a house full of “skinny little toothpicks.”

If the visual image of Whitney’s body did not seem to fit the plus-size label given to her by the show’s producers, what about using a more objective, quantifiable measure such as clothing size and body measurements? While on the show, Whitney herself stated that she wore a size eight or ten, depending on the clothing designer. In her
Seventeen
magazine editorial spread, part of her prize for winning the modeling competition, the accompanying article noted that Whitney wore a size fourteen. On Elite Model Management’s website, Whitney’s profile page posted her measurements as 36-inch chest, 32-inch waist, and 43-inch hips. Was Whitney plus size?