'Fat Acceptance': Women Embrace the F-word

ABC News
85 Pounds Later, Plus-Size Model Crystal Renn Is Happier and Healthier

The annual cavalcade of unattainable fashions modeled by women with even more unattainable bodies began in New York City this month; fashion season is officially in full swing.

Every year, one model dominates headlines, and this year that model is Crystal Renn. Renn has that exotic sort of beauty loved by fashion photographers. She's been photographed by the best of them and has been featured in Vogue magazine, the Bible of high-fashion, six times.



But Crystal Renn is not the typical model. She is several sizes bigger than other top models.

"I'm a size 12," she said proudly. In her timely autobiography, "Hungry," Renn describes her crushing introduction to modeling at just 14 years old.

"I had to lose about 10 inches off of my hips," she said. "Doesn't sound like that much when you are 14 years old. But I realized later that, you know, because of those 10 inches, I almost lost my life."

She struggled with anorexia for two years, losing 85 pounds (over three years) and whittling down her 5-foot-9 inch frame to a perilously thin 95 pounds. "I didn't feel beautiful at all because how can you?" she said. "I was so detached from my body to the point where I would look in the mirror and see something that's not real."

But at 16, with her hair falling out and her skin turning grey, she got a modeling agent. And even after she lost 85 pounds, she didn't become the cover girl the magazine editors had promised she'd be.

"All the promises that were for me didn't come true," she said. "They weren't happening. I was very unsuccessful. Yeah, sure I was doing a lot of editorials but I wasn't doing the American Vogue that I wanted to be."

Renn says her body was so out of whack, the weight started coming back with the tiniest bit of food.

"I had two roads in front of me," said Renn. "I said, 'OK, I can starve myself and continue what I am doing. Or I can probably die.' I decided I am going to be healthy, I am going to be voluptuous because that's what I am supposed to be."

'Fat Acceptance'

It was only when Renn let the diet go that she got her dream back -- a contract with industry leader Ford Models and, in 2004, that elusive American Vogue spread, shot by acclaimed photographer Stephen Meisel.

"I finally did get work with the people I had been aspiring to work with since I was 14," she said.

Renn also models for plus-size brands, such as Lane Bryant, and she has her curves to credit. Without knowing it, her decision to gain the weight back makes her part of a growing movement called "fat acceptance."

"It's trying to argue that we need to accept natural body diversity, that diets don't work, that all of the research shows that trying to lose weight and keep it off is fruitless for most people," said Kate Harding, a blogger and author of "Lessons From the Fat-o-Sphere." "And we need to stop demonizing fat people and start accepting ourselves in the bodies that we have."

While medical research has drawn links between obesity and disease, Harding points out that weight is not always an indicator of health.

The Size Acceptance Movement

"There's a substantial amount of information suggesting that the obesity crisis is not all it's hyped up to be, that the dangers associated with fat itself are, in fact, way overblown. There are fat fitness instructors, there are fat people who do aerobics, who do cycling, who run triathlons," said Harding.

Celebrities from Oprah to former tennis phenomenon Monica Seles have proclaimed the merits of accepting yourself for your size.

The Internet is bulging with blogs and support groups with women boasting that fat is "flabulous." In the size acceptance movement, "fat" has become like the b-word in the feminist movement.

"I grew up learning that fat was a dirty word," said Harding, "that fat was something that I didn't want to be. It's a matter of reclaiming the word from all those negative connotations."

Model Crystal Renn is hardly fat. At size 12, she is still thinner than the average American woman, who wears a size 14.

"I say voluptuous," she said. "That's what I feel comfortable with and that's what I am. Everyone has their different word and if you say it with a positive meaning, more power to you."

The idea is also showing up on television, where the lifetime sitcom "Drop Dead Diva" has become a breakout hit among women.

The show's main character is a former model who died in a car crash and was reincarnated as a smart, likeable, but larger attorney, played by actress Brooke Elliott.

"To me, the message is that everyone is beautiful," said Elliott. "You don't have to be a size 0 to be beautiful, to know your worth, to know how gorgeous you are and to act accordingly, you know."

Women Should 'Know Their Worth'

In the face of shows like "The Biggest Loser" and "Dance Your Ass-off," the "Drop Dead Diva" heroine eventually choose to lose her self-loathing, instead of the pounds.

For Elliott, the lead role is a vast improvement over the days when she was cast as the sugar bowl in Broadway's "Beauty and the Beast." But in Hollywood, being a plus-size actress -- even a great looking one -- can still be cruel.

"It doesn't hurt my feelings as much as it shows me how much further we have to go," said Elliott, "It takes a while to transition and I think our society as a whole is craving a transition."

Or maybe they're just falling in line with reality. More than 60 percent of American women are considered overweight, but are they, perhaps, the new "normal"?

"There are all these stereotypes that fat people are in denial, that we're ignorant, that we just don't know about good nutrition," said Harding. "That's just not the case. I don't think anybody else should get to tell me what is over the natural weight for my body."

Flipping through the September issue of Vogue, Renn says she is starting to see change. "What a perfect person to put on the cover, Charlize Theron. So comfortable in her body," she said.

Renn says she no longer struggles to fit onto the page. In fact, some of the pages are adjusting to fit her.

Crystal Renn and The Triumph of the Size 12s

NY Times

WHEN he met Crystal Renn for the first time last September over lunch at the Royalton in Manhattan, Stephen Gan, the influential creative director of fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Visionaire, had the same reaction as virtually everyone who comes face to face with the industry’s reigning plus-size model.

“You’re not big,” Mr. Gan said.

Ms. Renn — 23 years old, 5 feet 9 inches tall, bra 38C, waist 30, hips 42, hair and eyes brown — is a size 12. Mr. Gan half expected Mae West. Photographs in the international editions of Bazaar and Vogue had so emphasized Ms. Renn’s natural curves, and in some cases exaggerated them with lighting and digital manipulation, that he imagined her to be much larger, with the personality of a vixen, rather than the breathtaking but normal young woman who had come to tell him her story.

Ms. Renn has heard this before. So-called plus-size models are constantly being told by editors and designers that they don’t look fat, which is meant to be a compliment, Ms. Renn said in her recently published memoir, “Hungry.” Still, it does become tiresome for a model who aspires to wrest fragrance and beauty contracts from women who are size 2 or smaller, she said. “It’s simply bizarre that ‘normal’ is the new overweight,” she wrote. “We’ve seen that super-skinny women can be as unhappy as the fattest fat girl. We know how awful it is to obsess about every calorie. We’ve just opted not to make ourselves crazy.”

Three years after the outcry over alarmingly thin fashion models led to an industry reckoning, magazines are making a point to include more diverse body types, especially those with fuller figures. So it has not gone unnoticed by Ms. Renn and the fashion industry that the backlash against skinny models has, in effect, given her career a major boost.

She is, from a high-fashion standpoint, “far and away” the most successful model in the plus-size division of Ford Models, said her agent, Gary Dakin. In the February issue of Glamour, she appears in an eight-page fashion feature on sheer clothes. For the March issue of the Italian edition of Vanity Fair, she was photographed, by Ruven Afanador, in a blond wig as Anna Nicole Smith. And she was described by Mr. Gan as the inspiration for making the new spring preview issue of V Magazine, an offshoot of Visionaire that he also edits — a “size issue,” including several portfolios starring plus-size models.

“It’s going to be a bit hard on the eyes for a lot of fashion people,” Mr. Gan said during an interview in Visionaire’s SoHo offices this week. “It was about dealing with a subject that in my world is such a taboo. In fashion, putting on two pounds is a taboo.”

The issue, whose images were circulated online two weeks ago, ahead of its newsstand appearance this week, has sparked countless discussions about broadening the cast of models in magazine editorial features, runway shows and ad campaigns. One of the V portfolios shows side-by-side images of Ms. Renn and Jacquelyn Jablonski, a size 2, wearing the same-size runway samples from Versace, Proenza Schouler and Dolce & Gabbana.

Some who commented on the Web said that they were pleased to see models with bodies that more women could relate to. But others complained that the images were exploitative, that they glorified obesity or were a publicity stunt. It struck many readers as patronizing to hold up Ms. Renn as an example of a plus-size body, given that the average American woman is a size 14.

Last Friday, Ms. Renn arrived for an interview wearing a cosmic glitter Maison Martin Margiela cat suit, a sleeveless cardigan from Preen, Rick Owen’s floppy boots and what looked like a bicycle lock around her neck. For all the appearance of success, she has had darker days, as chronicled in her book, in which she describes starving herself to be a “straight size” model, the industry term for girls who meet the prevailing standard of beauty, which is to say extremely thin.

It was not until Ms. Renn acknowledged an eating disorder six years ago and began to eat normally that her career took off as a plus-size model. While she embraces that label, she also sees it as a means of changing expectations among designers and magazines — and even the public — that models have to look a certain way.

Ms. Renn was born in Miami. Her mother, who was still a teenager, left her to be raised by her grandmother, Kathy Renn, a successful saleswoman of Mary Kay cosmetics with a pink Cadillac in the driveway. Ms. Renn came to know her grandmother as Mom, while her mother, named Lana in the book, remained largely out of the picture until her teens. When she was 12, Ms. Renn and her grandmother briefly moved in with Lana in Clinton, Miss., but their relationship ended with a violent confrontation.

She never knew her father. “I don’t have a picture,” she said. “I don’t even have a name.”

When a modeling scout told her she had potential provided she lose weight and shrink her hip size from 43 inches to 34, Ms. Renn saw a means of escape from small-town life in Clinton. On a regimen of Diet Coke and sugar-free Jell-O, she began by losing 28 pounds in three months. By 2002, when she moved to New York at age 15, she weighed 95 pounds and had lost more than 42 percent of her body weight. On her first day in the city, she landed a shoot for Seventeen.

Kathy Renn, now living in Riverside, Calif., where she is the executive director of a nonprofit group, Fuel Relief Fund, said she always thought her granddaughter was in control of her diet and weight. “One thing about Crystal,” she said, “is she is very goal-oriented. When she set her mind to going into modeling, that’s what she did.” Although she followed her granddaughter to New York for several months, Mrs. Renn was not fully aware of Crystal’s weight struggles until she read the book.

“It hit home, and hit the heart,” she said. “Basically, when it got down to being too much, she literally turned her life around.”

When the book was published last fall, Crystal Renn said, she felt that she was able to close the door on a period of her life defined by hatred of her body. Ford describes her as the highest paid plus-size model, although Mr. Dakin would not disclose how much she makes in commercial work for stores like Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and her biggest client, Evans, a retailer of plus-size fashion in the United Kingdom. (Her total annual earnings are estimated to be in the high six figures.)

“I’ve always felt, in some ways, like an outsider,” said Ms. Renn, who now weighs about 165. “But that is the fashion industry. You know how that is. The creative one at the school, the outsider, the goth or the gay guy — whatever it is, they always get made fun of. I feel like they all got together and moved to New York City and made the fashion industry.

“And here I am,” she said. “I feel right at home, very much accepted and very happy.”

It is a perverse footnote to the scandal over skinny models that the smallest of changes in a magazine or runway show — the arrival of Lara Stone, a model with recognizable breasts, for example — can be viewed as emblematic of a new moral standard worthy of applause. When Glamour ran a single-page photograph of a voluptuous, unclothed model, Lizzie Miller, in its September issue, positive responses from readers flooded in.

“It was a reminder how much our eyes have become inured to a particular standard,” Cindi Leive, the editor, said in an interview at the time. “There were many readers who said they didn’t know what a quote-unquote normal body looked like anymore.”

THE rub is that many plus-size models complain that their images are often retouched as routinely as celebrity covers — only to make them look bigger. Ms. Renn said that she had seen images in which weight was added to make her appear to be a size 20, to be more appealing to larger customers. Jennie Runk, another size 12 model, admitted to Glamour that she sometimes wears padding for photo shoots.

To make the point of Ms. Renn’s size more provocatively, Mr. Gan said he told her: “I’d like you to flaunt it. I want to pump up the volume, so to speak.”

Asked about this, Ms. Renn said she understood the tendency to focus on her shape.

“Because I am a plus-size model, they like to make an example,” she said. “They see a roll, and they say, ‘Ooh, a roll!’ And they focus on it.”

In her book, she describes this as the fetishization of fat. “When designers and editors choose one fat girl to salivate over, and revel in her avoirdupois, I’m not sure how much it advances the cause of using girls of all sizes in a magazine,” she wrote. What she would like to see, in the interest of fairness, is those photographers and magazines making a point of not showing an image of a model whose ribs are showing.

“I’m fighting for something,” Ms. Renn said. “I believe fashion can be a place of diversity. It’s not going to happen overnight, but do you want it to?”