The F Word

NY Times

 

 

Fashion, which has always been as much a narrative about the body as it is about clothes, has rarely taken kindly to the idea of flesh. Much as we may wax nostalgic about the Rubenesque ideal or the buxom, wide-hipped wenches of Restoration comedies, in its modern iteration fashion has steadily downsized the human scale. Flesh suggests messiness, privileging the indiscipline of life over the fierce control of art, the unaerobicized body spilling over the contours of an artificial silhouette, be it Christian Dior’s New Look in 1947 or Marc Jacobs’s New Look for Louis Vuitton this fall. Flesh also suggests the threateningly female, moistness and blood, the hothouse clutches of a heavy-breasted mother — off-putting images for male fashion designers, who are more often than not gay. (Think of Karl Lagerfeld’s withering disdain on hearing that a German magazine would now be using only regular-size women in its fashion spreads: “No one wants to see curvy women. . . . You’ve got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly.”)

Indeed, well before the concept of a size 0 or 2 became ensconced in the clothing racks of Barneys (where you will be hard put to find a size 12) or Bergdorf Goodman (which deigns to include a few 14s), Audrey Hepburn was a designer’s dream — Hubert de Givenchy’s dream, to be specific — in large part because she lacked all curves. Her swanlike neck and wondrous face undoubtedly helped endear her, but from a fashion point of view, she might as well have been an animated hanger. Watching her recently in “Paris When It Sizzles,” it is impossible to take your eyes off her razor-thin presence as she sliced through some of the film’s sillier moments with aplomb. Nothing disturbs the surface of the pastel wardrobe of suits and tailored dresses Givenchy has created for her to wear (although how a typist-for-hire would get within gazing distance of clothes that are clearly a couturier’s vision is conveniently ignored), no sign of breasts or hips strain at the enclosure of fabric.

Still, our current phobia about flesh — not when it comes to showing a sexy glimpse of skin but rather when it comes to revealing wobbly or lumpy parts of the body that have not been toned to a fare-thee-well — is at an all-time high. Our collective fear of fat and idealization of thinness has resulted in a seriously askew notion of the physical self that has produced an epidemic of body-dysmorphic illnesses like anorexia and bulimia, which increasingly have included young men as well as young women among their victims. “In a modern capitalist patriarchy such as the United States,” observes Kathleen Lebesco, author of “Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity,” “fat is seen as repulsive, funny, ugly, unclean, obscene and above all, as something to lose.” One would be hard put to disagree with this assessment, no matter that this unforgiving reality inevitably stirs a cultural response that attempts to rectify the balance by embracing, on one end of the spectrum, the fleshily figurative in art and, on the other, a TV show about fat camp called “Huge.” Over the past three decades a clutch of more radically conceived phenomena has also emerged, including fat studies and fat activists (“body liberationists”) who engage in fat politics, which attempts to fight the anti-fat stigma head-on by positing the big body in all its perceived abjection as an option to be accepted and even celebrated. “I’ll take my naked body to the streets in protest,” writes one such defiant revolutionary named Mariko Tamaki. “I’ll pummel the public with what it insists on denying and avoiding: tons of mountainous, sexy flesh. I’ll bare my bare boobs and squish my sweaty bum at strangers. . . . I’ll gather an army of fat angry naked soldiers and we’ll take to the streets.” Into the fray, Beth Ditto!

This season’s fashion narrative, ever mindful of populist sentiment, has tipped its hat in the direction of size diversity by featuring some curvier styles replete with circle skirts and cantilevered breasts among the usual array of pared-down ones, clothes for “real women” instead of starved models. Clothes, that is, made for the amply endowed Christina Hendricks of “Mad Men” instead of for the bevy of skinny lovelies on just about every other TV show. Be this as it may, it’s safe to say that flesh isn’t going to become the new black anytime soon. The days when Sarah Bernhardt was the object of derision because of her thinness are irrevocably gone. According to a new biography of the actress by Robert Gottlieb, jokes about Bernhardt’s ostensibly skeletal physique once abounded: “She’s so thin that when she swallows a pill, she looks pregnant.” “When she takes a bath, the level of the water goes down.”

In their place is a perspective that looks upon Marilyn Monroe as suspiciously full-figured instead of pleasingly zaftig and insists on an undeviatingly lean aesthetic as the beauty ideal. “It doesn’t matter that whole human epochs have celebrated big men and women,” Sallie Tisdale writes in her essay “A Weight That Women Carry,” “because the brief period in which I live does not; since I was born, even the voluptuous calendar girl has gone. Today’s models, the women whose pictures I see constantly, unavoidably, grow more minimal by the day.” For confirmation, one need look no further than the example of Filippa Hamilton, the Ralph Lauren model who, at 5 feet 10 inches and 120 pounds, was pink-slipped last year and claims it was because she was regarded as overweight. Or to the non-model extras that Miuccia Prada reportedly fired last December while she was designing the costumes for the Metropolitan Opera’s recent production of Verdi’s “Attila,” deeming them impossible to dress. “I need models!” this reputedly open-minded, deep-thinking fashion star is supposed to have said.

How, one might well wonder, did we manage to come to such a pass? How, in an age that seeks to empower women’s standing, has the female image become honored mainly in its diminution? Judeo-Christian tradition has always had its own problems with the flesh, of course, evocative as it is of the carnal and thus sinful (and, by further implication, slothful and unclean). Christian iconography has tended to be half in love with flesh as an object of mortification, as in the crucifixion of Christ, while the Judaic tradition strictly regulates the exposure of flesh for both men and women. Meanwhile, as Lebesco demonstrates in “Revolting Bodies,” an ethnographic view of fat shows it to be a more fluid construct, one that is governed by prevailing economic and cultural interests rather than the negative idée fixe our contemporary eyes have been conditioned into seeing it as. (The stigmatizing term “obese,” from the Latin obesus, originally meant “having eaten well” until it was reclassified by 19th-century doctors and health workers, just as “fat” was once a flattering term used by the Greeks.) In premodern times, for instance, chunkiness in women was generally seen as a positive signifier, indicating fertility in a time when food supplies were scarce or irregular and human reproductivity was endangered; fatness, it appears, was perceived as a kind of internalized abundance. Similarly, during the early part of the 20th century in southern Italy, where back-breaking work was necessary for survival, corpulence was valued because it was equated with wealth and beauty. By the 1960s, however, when the vast majority of the population was adequately fed, fat people began to be marginalized and pathologized. Perhaps most interesting, in stark contrast to our own culture of endless dieting and food fetishism, are certain primitive societies that engage in an actual “fattening process,” like the Annang of Nigeria, whose women until very recently were deliberately fattened up in fattening huts before marriage. This approach sounds so antithetical to our own “Am I fat?” anxieties (generally asked only by girls and women who are safely thin) as to verge on the surreal.

All the same, it is hard to imagine that flesh in all its ungainly specificity will ever be given its due so long as a woman’s power continues to hinge more often than not on her beauty, and so long as beautiful equals thin. Harder yet to imagine that young girls who are overweight or who deviate from the cultural norm of extreme thinness will ever feel significantly better about themselves — the efforts of fat activists notwithstanding — than Judith Moore, the author of the haunting memoir “Fat Girl: A True Story,” felt about herself: “I hate myself. I have almost always hated myself. . . . I do not hate myself for betrayals, for going behind the back of someone who trusted me. I hate myself because I am not beautiful. I hate myself because I am fat.” There is something in us that doesn’t like fat, something deeply ingrained in us that draws us to thin. Female consumers of all sizes, according to a recent study, seem to prefer looking at ads with thin rather than plus-size models. The origins of this preference are complex, having to do with tangled notions about purity versus contamination, self-indulgence versus self-control, and the ambivalence with which we regard our own appetites. In some sense fashion designers are merely messengers, delivering up to us our own grotesque parody of religious grace, in which food substitutes for sex and the sinful pleasures of the flesh lead only to the purgatory of size 14.

Plus-Size Revelation: Bigger Women Have Cash, Too

NY Times

 

Corseted into a size 18 white denim dress, wearing heels that made her about 6-foot-2, Gwen DeVoe, a former model and fashion-show producer, stepped onto a runway in Manhattan this week and made a pitch to retailers for the plus-size woman.

Those stores that don’t carry bigger sizes? “Shame on you, baby, shame on you,” Ms. DeVoe said. “Every curvy girl that has a dollar is willing to spend that dollar.”

So retailers are realizing.

That same day, a division of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 28 percent of the adult population was obese last year, the highest percentage yet. Almost two-thirds of American women are either overweight or obese, according to the most recent CDC figures.

As doctors and public health officials encourage Americans to slim down, the fashion industry is embracing Americans as they are. Both mass-market stores like Forever 21 and Target and expensive designers like Elie Tahari are deciding the fattening of America is a big business opportunity, and are reinvigorating a market that had faltered during the recession.

The standard clothing that most stores have focused on in recent years fits fewer and fewer people. And as retailers search for ways to invigorate sales, plus size is one of the few categories where there is growth. The plus-size market increased 1.4 percent while overall women’s apparel declined 0.8 percent in the 12 months leading up to April 2010 versus the same period a year earlier, the most recent figures available, according to NPD Group, a market research firm.

“It just makes business sense,” said Ms. DeVoe, who founded “Full-Figured Fashion Week” last year to press mainstream retailers to embrace bigger sizes. “I’ve been told several times that no one fantasizes about being a plus-size woman, and that’s probably true, but the fact remains that you have to work with what you have.”

That is not always so easy for retailers venturing into the world of larger shoppers. Some bigger women do not like to try on clothes in the same fitting rooms as smaller women. Plus-size stocks take up valuable storage space, and not everyone is big in the same way, meaning stores cannot count on, say, a size 16 dress fitting most 180-pound women — one might have a larger torso, another big thighs and another wider hips.

“There are variations not only in the frame, but if you’re looking at larger women, you’re also looking at the way fat deposits are arranged around the body,” said Susan Ashdown, a professor at Cornell who studies body shape and clothing fit by creating a three-dimensional scan of a person’s almost-nude body.

Plus-size clothes, which now generally begin at size 14, have been around for at least 90 years, since a Lithuanian immigrant, Lena Bryant (her name was later misspelled as “Lane” on a business form), turned a maternity-wear business into a line for stout women in the 1920s. There have been several efforts to make plus-size clothes more available, but, as the name of the 1980s-era plus-size chain The Forgotten Woman suggested, larger women have usually been relegated to stand-alone boutiques stocked with shapeless purple caftans.

“One of the things that happens with plus-size women is, as a rule, they’re pretty under-served,” said Bill Bass, president of Sonsi, a social networking and retail site for heavier women. “The big companies forget about them or ignore them, or make them go online to buy their clothes since they won’t have them in stores.”

Although Americans have grown steadily heavier in the last decade, women’s plus-size clothing still makes up only 17 percent of the women’s apparel market today, according to NPD. There just is not much supply or variation in plus-size clothes for women to buy, said Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD. And the big retailers have mostly stayed away.

Cost is one issue. Plus-size clothes are more difficult, and expensive, to make than more traditional sizes. Material can be the largest portion of a garment’s cost — up to about 60 percent — and larger sizes require not only more of it, but sometimes different production processes.

“Its not just about how much fabric is required,” said Deepa Neary, a retail consultant at A.T. Kearney, a consulting firm. “You’re actually using wider bolts of fabric, and that sometimes requires special machinery to produce the garments. You often don’t get to pass that on to the consumer, so your margins are not as high as the regular-size clothing.”

And with limited floor space, retailers say it’s hard to display, say, blouses from size 0 to 24. So the plus market “unfortunately gets treated like an exile,” said Kathy Bradley-Riley, senior vice president for merchandising at the trend forecasting firm Doneger Group.

Given those difficulties, some companies have pulled back on plus-size offerings. Old Navy and Ann Taylor stopped selling plus sizes in stores in the last few years, and now sell them only online. Liz Claiborne, which still sells some plus-size clothing, shut down its plus-size line Elisabeth, along with Sigrid Olsen, which carried larger sizes. It sold Ellen Tracy, which also had a plus-size offering. But given the strong sales in the sector more recently, and women becoming ever more overweight, some companies are giving the plus-size market a second look.

The chain Forever 21, which is based in California, introduced Faith 21, its larger-size line, last year. Though sales were much stronger than the company expected, that did not mean it had mastered the category. “We have been working through the kinks even now,” said Linda Chang, Forever 21’s director of marketing. “It doesn’t come as easily as maybe the smaller clothing would.”

Last summer, Target began carrying a line called Pure Energy that translated young, trendy clothes to larger sizes, adding to its more mature plus-size offerings.

“We definitely view this category as a growth opportunity,” said a Target spokeswoman, Katie Heinze. After testing Pure Energy in some stores, Target decided to carry it in all 1,740 outlets.

Elie Tahari, the high-end designer, began selling a plus-size line this year, and at Full-Figured Fashion Week, more than 25 other designers showed their plus-size clothes to an audience of retail buyers and plus-size women.

Backstage before a runway show on Wednesday night, it looked like a sorority house before a formal: shoes everywhere, makeup stacked on tables, the smell of hairspray and baby powder, and women lounging about in silk robes.

On stage, Ms. DeVoe emphasized that plus-size women were ready to buy clothes.

As the crowd whooped, Ms. DeVoe shouted, “My pockets are fat!”

Fashion Industry, Struggling with Size, Realizes Age is Part of the Problem

The Detroit Free Press

The models auditioning for New York Fashion Week were undeniably thin. But it was only after the fashion industry started worrying about too-skinny models that casting agent James Scully began asking their age.

Most, he found, were under 16.

"Things are very seriously wrong at this moment," Scully said.

As another round of runway shows kicked off last week, fashion insiders have again taken up the cause of emaciated models, this time with a new target to blame: youth.

The Council of Fashion Designers of America hosted a panel discussion last week about changing the standard model "sample size," part of the health initiative it started after the death of a model with an eating disorder three years ago.

Spain and Italy adopted mandatory weight guidelines at the time, but the CFDA opted for voluntary measures that put the focus on nutritional and emotional counseling. Since then, some models have been red-flagged and removed from the runway to focus on eating and living well, said CFDA president Diane von Furstenberg.

The recent panel, "The Beauty of Health: Resizing the Sample Size," initially focused on whether increasing the size of sample garments used in fashion shows and magazine photo shoots from 0 to 4 would result in healthier models. But designers, models and agents agreed that part of the problem is the dominance of very young models.

"You can't address the sample size 0 without addressing age," said David Bonnouvrier, head of DNA Models.

Among the CFDA guidelines was a recommendation that models under 16 be kept out of fashion shows, and models under 18 kept out of fittings or photo shoots past midnight. Those guidelines clearly haven't stuck and remain purely voluntary.

The current youthquake happened as runway tastes moved from Brazilian bombshells like Gisele Bundchen to Russians and Eastern Europeans, such as Natalia Vodianova, who has talked about her weight struggles, Scully said.

When scouts first fell in love with the very angular, narrow Eastern bloc look, those girls were ill-prepared to be away from home in the high-pressure, competitive fashion world, added DNA's Bonnouvrier. Even American models were younger -- 17-year-old Karlie Kloss, for example, did her first round of shows with her dad by her side.

Designer Zac Posen traced the problem to Kate Moss back in the early '90s, and said it could take a long time to erase the cultural impression of the waif.

It's natural for a 13- or 14-year-old to be slim, have a small bust and hips that measure no more than 33 inches, but as those models age -- to all of 18 or 19 -- they will do "terribly dangerous things" to fight nature and their increasingly womanly bodies, Scully said.

Model Doutzen Kroes, 25, is a Victoria's Secret Angel but says her fashion-show work has slowed to almost nothing. The reason? She's too big.

"I'd love to do shows but I don't fit in the sample size," she said in an interview after the panel.

The Dutch native started her modeling career at 18, and was constantly told she was pretty but "needed to lose a few pounds," she recalled. But she looked in the mirror and liked what she saw, and made the decision to work with her agent to make her curvy figure an asset -- hence a brand like Victoria's Secret.

Tyra Banks Announces Teen Plus-Size Model Competition

iVillage

Tyra Banks announced Monday that she is creating a new plus-sized modeling competition for teens, which she's calling Tyra’s Fiercely Real Teen Model Search. The talk show host and former model, 36, is on a search for aspiring models age 13-19 and between 5′ 9" and 6′ 1".

“I’ve always felt it was my mission to expand the narrow perceptions of beauty; through America’s Next Top Model, True Beauty and The Tyra Show I challenge industry and universal standards by featuring and celebrating non-traditional beauty, and stressing that true beauty is both inside and out,” Banks says of her new venture. “Plus-sized tends to have a negative connotation and I want young girls to realize that what’s considered plus-sized is the average American woman. That woman is healthy, fit and beautiful. Adolescence is such an impressionable time in a young woman’s life, and I hope this contest helps teen girls discover their own beauty from the inside out.”

The winner of the competition will get a one-year contract with Wilhelmina modeling agency, a magazine cover and more. If you're interested in entering -- or know someone who is -- check out tyrashow.warnerbros.com for more info!

'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?”

Size Matters

Irish Times

The decision by a top German magazine to banish skinny models in favour of ‘real’ people has earned it cheers from its readers and hisses from the fashion industry, writes DEREK SCALLY

EVERYTHING looks normal in the new year edition of Brigitte , Germany’s leading women’s magazine. There are tips for better hands and hair, a story about hermaphrodite babies and, as always in the post-Christmas issue, the Brigitte diet to help shed those unwanted festive pounds.

But a closer look reveals something startling: does that woman in the red chiffon dress on page 57 have . . . a wee belly? And does that woman on page 49 have . . . a tattoo? They are tiny details that should be barely noticeable, yet on the glossy pages they stand out like a juicy hamburger in a vegetarian magazine.

“Compared to the touched-up photos that are all-present these days, a ‘natural’ person appears almost pornographic,” remarks Brigitte in its first ever “no models” issue.

It’s a radical departure for the 56-year-old magazine and one that has earned cheers from its three million German readers and hisses from the fashion industry.

Brigitte editors announced the step last October, after complaints from readers that they couldn’t associate with the models. Adding to pressure for change were the magazine’s picture editors who had what they called the “disturbing and perverse” task each month of using photo-editing software to digitally add weight to models’ breasts and thighs.

“It’s not just about weight, but producing an authentic magazine with which women can identify better,” says Brigitte spokeswoman Eva Kersting, something she says is increasingly difficult with models who show up much thinner than their agency cards suggest.

“One showed up for a shoot looking nothing like her photo, telling us proudly how she’d lost another 3kg,” says Kersting. “That was the end for us.”

The magazine’s “no models” announcement in October caused a sensation, but was dismissed by many in the German media world as a PR stunt. After all, Brigitte is more a general women’s magazine combining fashion with recipes than a high-fashion glossy with stick-thin models on every page.

Competitor magazines, annoyed by Brigitte’s coup, complained that they had been doing “street fashion” shoots with regular women for years. Countless designers weighed in to defend the “size zero” trend, saying their clothes simply looked better on thinner women – but that they were happy to produce versions in all sizes.

The war of words climaxed with a barb from German designer Karl Lagerfeld. “No one wants to see curvy women,” he told Focus magazine. “What you’ve got here is fat mothers with their bags of crisps sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly.”

Brigitte editors stand by their decision, encouraged by a reader survey in which just over a quarter of women aged 19-29 rated being thin as important.

Since announcing the move, editors say they have been flooded with thousands of congratulatory letters from relieved readers. “I find it great that other women won’t just see themselves as mothers, friends, housewives but also as women who are pretty, even if they aren’t models,” said one reader.

Browsing the first “no models” issue is an interesting experience, in particular to see women who seem to be enjoying posing rather than pages of dead-eyed models whose last full meal was back in the last century. Of course shifting to “lay” models has created extra work for the production team: getting the right shot from normal women requires more coaching and patience. Then there is the problem of getting clothes for fashion shoots from companies still sending out “size zero” samples.

The German magazine’s move is another small step in the revolt against the “size zero” trend that began last June when British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman complained about “jutting bones and no breasts or hips” on the models booked for shoots.

In a letter to designers she laid the blame at their door for supplying sample clothes “many of [which] don’t comfortably fit the established star models”.

But the backlash from the fashion industry has been quick, with some rebelling against Brigitte ’s initiative.

“Too many things are being thrown into the one pot here,” said Berlin designer Michael Michalsky to the magazine. “Naturally I find it great when I see a girl at a casting with the right measurements to look good in my clothes. But one thing is clear: when the ribs and spine poke out front and back, then I know the girl has a problem and can’t appear at my show.”

Model figures

    * Thirty years ago a model weighed on average 8 per cent less than the average woman; today the difference is 23 per cent.

    * A survey of model eating behaviour found that half had a body mass index under 17.5 – the “anorexic” zone – with one-third of the total “acutely disturbed”.

    * A decade ago, models’ careers began at the age of 15-18, today the industry favours 13-14 year olds.

Courtesy of Brigitte

A Salute To Big Ladies

NY Times

A FORTHCOMING feature in V, among the more progressive of American fashion magazines, will trot out a parade of flamboyantly curvy models showing off what Bridget Jones, that Everywoman’s heroine, called her “wobbly bits.” But the editors of the February issue of V intend no insult or irony. “Big, little, pint size, plus size — everybody is beautiful,” said Stephen Gan, the magazine’s creative director, “and this issue is out to prove it.”

The eye-popping centerpiece of the magazine’s “Size” issue features several voluptuous women clad in skimpy swimsuits, bra tops and low-slung jeans. The models flaunt bulging tummies, powerful thighs and fleshy midsections — with love handles intact.

The magazine’s online preview on Models.com was picked up by scores of other Web sites and stirred a raucous debate. Some readers praised the decision to highlight models larger than size 2 as bold. Others castigated the editors as following the lead of more-conservative fashion magazines, which habitually ghettoize a large-size population that ought to be featured in every issue.

Further fanning the argument were those pointing out that plus models tended to measure a size 12 or 14 — hardly representative of the “real” plus-size woman, who typically wears a size 16 or 18.

But many such discussions were rendered moot by a handful of bloggers who simply preferred to look away, citing Karl Lagerfeld’s dictum, “No one wants to see curvy women.” What’s your view?

More Online Options For Plus-Size Fashions

San Francisco Chronicle

Here's the good news about plus-size fashion.

The industry is more or less listening to what women want. Hip new Web sites and blogs are cropping up all the time with links and news about cute, chic clothes. Given that the average American woman wears a size 14, according to a recent segment on plus-size fashion on "CBS News Sunday Morning," and with the recent outcry over an absurdly altered Ralph Lauren ad that made the already teensy model look grotesquely thin, there's hope that more designers will cater to curvy women

The bad news: You won't find any Chanels, or sexy separates from hot labels like Alexander Wang, and the department store offerings are far more traditional than trendy - if they have plus-size departments at all.

E-commerce is taking up the slack, but it will take time. "Patience and research, patience and research," counsels Marie Denee of Oakland, a former Bay Area women's contemporary clothing retail manager who started her own Web site, in September, and blog, the Curvy Fashionista, in December 2008.

"I want my site to be a place where you can find out what Jennifer Hudson wore, what Beth Ditto said and where to find the latest trends," she said.

Denee is happy there are so many contemporary plus-size lines out there. "There's Jibri, Qristyl Frazier, Gayla Bentley, Faith 21 (Forever 21's new plus-size line), Torrid, Amanda Uprichard and Kingley & Posh," she says.

Several big-name designers, including Michael Kors and Calvin Klein, do cute plus-size lines; Oscar de la Renta and Betsey Johnson do plus-size lingerie. At Macy's, in addition to Klein and Kors, you'll find Tadashi, INC, Sunny Leigh and Studio M. At Nordstrom, the Suzi Chin line has been a longtime favorite with plus-size shoppers.

From New York, Sarah Conley's chic and cheery photo blog, On the Plus Side, is a fun, informative read. Locally, Igigi.com (pronounced ee-zhee-zhee) is a hip San Francisco plus-size Web site run by designer Yuliya Raquel. She started Igigi (the name given to some ancient Mesopotamian gods) in 2000.

Her Web site's LC (Limited Collection) is her nod to runway trends, with structured jackets sporting interesting cuffs and hems, and slimmer pants; all the clothes are made in San Francisco.

"The plus-size woman is a savvy and sophisticated shopper, and I think plus-size designers are finally starting to celebrate women's curves rather than cover them up with piles of fabric," she says.

Not the trendy type? For a more artful look, Go Figure, a popular plus-size boutique on Clement Street, delivers with lots of classic looks from European and Scandinavian brands. The boutique carries lots of hard-to-find labels in nicer fabrications than the polyester of old.

"I make every effort to get the silks, satins and georgettes," says owner Carolyn Honig. "My customer spans all ages and is looking for a more arty, unusual look." For the traditionalist, there's San Francisco's Harper Greer, which has carried its own made-in-San Francisco designs since 1985.

And, of course, the been-there-forever chain Lane Bryant caters to just about everybody, offering a range of both conservative and more youthful looks.

If there's a clear consensus among plus-size experts, it's to wear the proper foundation garments, find the best fit and let the fabric hug your body without clinging.

"Make sure your clothing choices are somewhat fitted so you don't add extra girth to yourself, but at the same time, making sure that they don't pull or ride is important," says Liliane Klein, a plus-size model and actress starring in Neil LaBute's poignant and provocatively titled "Fat Pig," at the Aurora Theatre through next Sunday. "Your clothes should lay nicely on your body. ... I am a huge fan of control-top anything," she adds with a smile.

For the holidays, palazzo pants have given way to slimmer lines; you'll find more jeweled collars and embellished dresses, one-shoulder gowns and tops with sexy cutouts, body-conscious silhouettes, structured jackets and contemporary prints. The Chronicle asked fit model Dana Roeting of Marla Dell Talent SF to try some of the options and see what worked.