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It is a Romantic video, in every respect. The rustic location, the woodland hut, the beauty of the river and the lush forest, are all elements that figure prominently in Romantic literature.

But above all, it is the telling presence of the mill-wheel which links the video to the Romantic tradition, as mill-wheels are a prime symbol of Romanticism in general, and of German Romanticism in particular.

As Oskar Walzel writes in his book German Romanticism (1932):

The turning mill-wheel represented, to the Romantics, a visual expression of a golden age of the past, an era when humanity lived in concord with the natural world, a time prior to the advent of the Industrial Revolution, which set in motion the processes of dehumanization, mechanization, regimentation, and urbanization which blighted the 19th century and which have morphed into the soulless cubicle-world of our own time.

For the Romantics, the mill-wheel, forever turning and forever rushing forward, propelled by the surging stream that powered it, also represented movement. It became a visual symbol of their own perpetual Sehnsucht, their restless striving after the infinite. The first Wilhelm Müller poem in Schubert's Die Schöne Müllerin song cycle (1824) expresses this sentiment:

Countless paintings of the Romantic era depict mills distinguished by lovely, rustic mill-wheels, just such as that which appears in the Elegance Plus Size video. Here, for example, is The Old Mill (1855), by the German-American painter Albert Bierstadt:

The Kunsthalle in Hamburg, one of the finest galleries of Romantic art in Germany, features Carl Morgenstern's idyllic A Watermill in the Vosges near Ribanville (1836). Observe how, in each of these paintings the mill and mill-wheel is not an intrusion into the setting, but is seamlessly integrated into the landscape (rather in the manner of a medieval castle), as if these edifices had grown from the soil.

J.R.R. Tolkien was, of course, profoundly influenced by Romantic aesthetics and philosophy when he penned The Lord of the Rings. Not for nothing is the first glimpse of Hobbiton, in Peter Jackson's masterful adaptation The Fellowship of the Ring, a view of the village mill, with its turning mill-wheel:

And Gandalf, the "Grey Pilgrim," is, of course, a signal example of the Romantic wanderer, so the association of the perpetually turning mill-wheel with his tireless travels is unmistakable.

A female Romantic painter, Caroline von der Embde (1812-67), created this enchanting canvas titled Mill near Dörnberg, found in the Neue Galerie in Kassel, Germany:

Observe the presence, in Embde's painting, of the miller's daughter. This female element too was a key element in the rustic-mill trope: a lovely girl whom the Romantic wanderer meets and falls in love with, as he chances upon the mill, only to have his heart broken, leading to the fabled romantic melancholy.

Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff's poem Das zerbrochene Ringlein, or "The Broken Ring" (1810), offers just such a narrative:

In the Elegance Plus Size video, then, Nathàlia becomes a type of the sweet/seductive enchantress who is associated with the mill in Romantic poetry. And to be sure, what Romantic wanderer could help but lose his soul to such a baby-faced, well-fed, lusciously curvaceous, fair-haired vixen?

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Bravo to Elegance Plus Size for filming such a cinematic video featuring Nathàlia Contier, who is, after Mayara Russi, the second-most-beautiful Brazilian plus-size model. With gorgeous fashions, a lovely setting, and a visibly full-figured model, this is the plus-size fashion industry at its most accomplished. It also happens to be a wonderful evocation of the themes of Romanticism, which are the richest in the Western tradition. The Brazilian industry is know for being superlatively size-positive, but this video demonstrates how artistic it can be as well.

We look forward to future triumphs from both Nathàlia and Elegance Plus Size.

(Click images to view larger.)

- Elegance Plus Size