indicates stories that are particularly noteworthy.The following is a selection of news stories dealing with the dual topics of the lunacy of weight control and of our skewed contemporary aesthetics. Regrettably, I cannot endore the entire content of these articles, since each writer, to a greater or lesser degree, still reveals himself to be the victim of one type of aesthetic brainwashing almost in the same sentence that he manages to see through another type. Nevertheless, the general thrust of each of these messages is positive, or at least thought provoking, so I do consider them worth some attention. The eyeglasses symbol indicates stories that are particularly noteworthy.
Articles published after 1999 are located on the current News Plus page.
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Anna Nicole Smith, the buxom Guess? jeans girl is, at 5 ft. 11 in. and 155 lbs., living proof that you don't have to be small to be big.
“Thin models look so unhealthy,” she has declared. “Who wants to hug a skeleton?”
“The image of Anna Nicole Smith has liberated a lot of people,” says eating-disorder counselor Suzanne Henrick. “One anorectic brought her picture in to me and said she was finally getting the point. It was a breakthrough.”
The stately Smith, 25, demands Godiva chocolates at every shoot. She claims to eat just about anything she can get her hands on and hates to exercise. “You sweat and get all nasty,” she says.
A high school dropout from Mexia, Texas, Smith ballooned from a pre-pregnancy 125 lbs. to 211 after the birth of her son, Daniel, now 7. Soon divorced, she dropped the extra pounds while supporting herself and Daniel as a $60-a-week cashier at a local Wal-Mart and making a jar of peanut butter last two weeks. “It was a starvation diet,” she says.
After rejections from countless modeling agencies, she sent nude shots of herself to Playboy and was selected as the March 1992 cover girl. Her Junoesque appeal led straight to a three-year contract with Guess?
“I always wanted to get back to be smaller than I was,” she says. “But I just couldn't. Now I feel very good about it, and I wouldn't change my figure for anything.”
When American supermodel Emme Aronson first sent her portfolio to a large number of modelling agencies in the late 1980s, the overwhelming response was: “You're not our type.”
What they meant was that she was too big. “I knew they wanted me to lose about 40 pounds (18 kg),” says Aronson, “but I refused to do it. That would have been like taking off my right leg.”
Instead, she went on to become to the top model in the plus-size division for the renowned Ford Agency in New York, featuring in advertising campaigns for big names such as Givenchy, Bloomingdale's and Macy's .
Two years ago she was chosen as one of the world's 50 most beautiful people by the U.S. magazine, People.
Aronson, who is 180 cm tall (5ft 11in) and weighs 84 kg—about 34 kilograms heavier than the waif supermodel Kate Moss—is concerned that society values the attainment of unrealistic beauty.
She argues the media should reflect the “miracle of difference,” pointing out that women range from having very small bones to very large frames. They also come in three main body types: angular, muscly and naturally rounded.
“Everyone says fashion is fantasy. You can't really take it seriously. I don't want those models who are in the media to be taken away. What I would like is to see is an array of beautiful models of all different sizes to represent what our society is.”
The size 16 model spends part of her time lecturing to groups, including high school students, with the message that self-esteem should not depend on size. “If we can look within ourselves, instead of trying to change the outside, we can change these problems of eating disorders and poor body image. But it takes a lot of work and a lot of commitment to being healthier and happier in the world you live in today, not tomorrow.”
Aronson is encouraged by the fact that larger women are becoming more demanding consumers.
“They are saying, ‘If you want us to buy your clothes, you are going to have to make them to fit us…not a tent with a hole in it, but clothes of beautiful material.'”
Women who put on weight over Christmas should not feel guilty: they have probably made themselves healthier, a two-year study has found.
An analysis by an insurance company has found that women who were between 20 and 50 per cent overweight cost less in health care than their thinner counterparts. The good news for the larger woman—of the likes of Roseanne, Dawn French and Jo Brand—is that the results have led the company to revise its premiums.
Colonia Insurance, one of the largest in Germany, has admitted that it had been charging overweight women more for health care policies. British companies said the results would be studied. The Association of British Insurers said companies were continually looking at medical research and these findings may lead to a review of health and life insurance policies here.
Full medicals are often required before a policy is agreed and along with age, life-style—including smoking and drinking—and weight-related illnesses are taken into account. Mary Evans Young, founder of the Diet Breakers anti-slimming group, urged the insurance companies to follow suit. “We should be getting some benefits,” she said, “but most women will remain happy to put their health at risk in order to be slimmer.”
The Colonia study looked at a group of women in Cologne [Köln] to evaluate whether an individual's risks were covered accurately. To its surprise it found the overweight women, aged between 20 and 40, spent less on therapy and drugs.
Insurance companies sometimes load premiums against overweight people. But for women in the 20 to 40 age group, the main health expenses are complications arising during pregnancy, maternity medical costs, disease related to the reproductive organs and mental disturbances. These are far more than doctors' fees and medication for high blood pressure or for skeletal and muscular-related illness which are the main complaints of the overweight.
Colonia did admit that once a woman is over the age of 40 the costs for blood pressure and skeletal and muscular-related illnesses are higher, but still not significantly so in relation to other typical costs for females.
The survey was carried out by Colonia staff and an external risk researcher with the aim of setting an exact surcharge policy. Prior to this, the insurance company took its information from reports by the company's doctors and reinsurance statistics. Dr Joachim von Reith, Colonia's product manager, said the results from the survey were a more accurate way of forecasting.
The company actually found that some of its premiums were too low but others, such as those for larger women, were too high. However, for men wanting to assuage their guilt over the Christmas over-indulgence, the news is not so good. Colonia found overweight men the most expensive group for payments by health and life insurance companies—and this could be reflected in future premiums.
The British Nutrition Foundation said that being slightly overweight was acknowledged to be healthier than being underweight. But, pouring cold water on the festive feasting, the nutrition foundation said the 50 per cent figure was considerably overweight.
Laura Ellia, a nutrition scientist, said: “I would have thought that if you are that overweight between the ages of 20 and 40 it will cause other health problems later. Traditionally, insurance companies have found overweight people to be more expensive in insurance terms. I am surprised that they have found such a difference in medical costs. I would be reluctant to say that being overweight is good for you.”
Sophie Dahl has long legs, wild hair and a famous family. It should surprise nobody, therefore, that she is being tipped as the newest pretender to the supermodel crown. But she has one attribute that her similarly lanky, tousled and well-connected chums Honor Fraser and Iris Palmer lack: a figure. Sophie is an unabashed size 14 and sports a 38DD bosom.
It is a revolutionary departure for an industry that regards xylophone ribs as sexy that she has not been laughed out of the door. Still more surprising is the fact that Storm, the agency that signed her up, has made no demands that she go on a lettuce-leaf and water diet. What is going on?
There are two explanations. The first is that since the watch company Omega threatened to withdraw its advertising from Vogue in protest at the gauntness of the models, a sense of realism has weakened the superwaif's bony grip on our perception of beauty. The second is that telling Sophie to diet doesn't work. The last time a modelling agency was unwise enough to try, she went home in a rage and consoled herself with chocolate cake.
Sophie strides into the Storm offices off the King's Road, a 6ft Juno on 3in heels, biting the heads off defenceless jelly babies. In her grandfather Roald's book, The BFG, she was immortalised as the Big Friendly Giant's sweet little bespectacled sidekick, but these days she's more of a BFG herself.
“I still can't believe I'm here,” she says, murdering another Jellytot. “I really thought I was destined for a life chained to a typewriter. I'm not knocking being a secretary, but it isn't a career you can get excited about, is it?”
Her preference for partying over homework, she explains, led to her leaving college two months into her A-level course. This academic laxity, however, was to lead indirectly to her new career.
“Mummy and I were having a huge argument on a street corner about my prospects. I was screaming, ‘I'm not a failure, I will have a proper job, you'll see!'” Fortunately, the row took place outside the house of Isabella Blow, fashion's eccentric doyenne and a noted talent spotter. “I was sitting on a doorstep crying, when a taxi drew up and a hat got out,” says Sophie. “I saw these little legs and a tiny bottom in lace trousers, and I thought, ‘God, she looks cool'.”
The feeling was mutual. Half an hour later, Blow informed Sophie's mother, the writer Tessa Dahl, that her daughter had a new career. “Issy thought Ellen von Unwerth [the photographer] would love me, so she took me along with her to shoot a Spice Girls album cover, pretending I was one of her stylists. About halfway through the shoot, Ellen came up to me and said, ‘Hmm, who are you? I like you!' and took two rolls of pictures.”
Others, however, were less susceptible to Sophie's charms. When she turned up with Von Unwerth on a prestigious assignment for Italian Vogue, the stylist was horrified.
“She was such a bitch,” says Sophie. “All the other girls were really thin, but they happily accepted my size. But the stylist was furious. She said, in front of everyone, that I was enormous and she couldn't do anything with me. I felt so humiliated, I went and cried in the loo.” In the end, Sophie was photographed wearing a carving knife, an ostrich feather fan and a furious expression.
“I was furious,” she says. “It was the stylist's fault; she'd been sent my measurements weeks before. It was her job to get clothes to fit me, not mine to fit her clothes.”
That was months ago. Now, Sophie finds that posing alongside size-eight models holds no fears. “Actually, I love it, because I can eat lunch and they can't.” She won't exercise, goes out for greasy-spoon breakfasts (though she doesn't order fried bread any more) and can't say no to rice pudding.
She doesn't know how much she weighs; in fact, she hasn't stepped on to a pair of scales since she almost succumbed to an eating disorder when she was 14.
“My mother and I had been living in an ashram in America,” she says, casually, “and I longed to be a swami when I grew up. Then it all turned nasty and we had to run away in the middle of the night. I'd loved the ashram, and I was furious with her for taking me away. So I stopped eating as a way of gaining control over some part of my life.”
In the end, the boredom of calorie counting proved her salvation, and she began eating normally again. “Dieting is a horrible way to live,” she says. “I feel so sorry for some of these models who have to diet to stay all bones and hips. It's not humanly possible that they're naturally that shape, and I don't think it's at all sexy. In fact, it's sick.”
Sophie believes the fashion world is ready for a change. “We've had the waif for the past five years; it's time for a different look.” But it is premature to trumpet the return of realism to that looking-glass world. Although models are supposed to be selling clothes to normal women, they are still required to be built as much like coat-hangers as possible. Real women were never meant to wear clothes, it would seem: a bosom stops a dress hanging properly, while hips spoil the line. This explains why, despite the rapturous reception photographers have accorded the voluptuous Sophie, they all seem to prefer her with her clothes off.
Her first assignment, with Nick Knight for the fashion bible Visionaire, left her clad in just her contact lenses. “Mum thought I was going to be posing for a porn mag,” she says. “During her modelling days, she'd experienced too many photographers saying the picture wouldn't work if she didn't wet her T-shirt. She told me not to do it, and then all the family started calling. I said, ‘I'm 19—and if it's a mistake, it's a mistake, but it's important for me.'
“The shoot was absolutely terrifying. I was standing naked in the changing room, with the stylist powdering my bottom and covering my legs with foundation. It was surreal. But I really loved the pictures in the end. I looked like a Fifties pin-up. I didn't recognise myself.”
She went on to be photographed for Vanity Fair in big knickers and stiletto heels. How fine is the line separating such photographs from those in a men's magazine? She looks appalled. “There is a Page Three mentality in this country,” she says, “and having a shape is equated with sex. But I'd never do glamour shots—I couldn't.”
Sophie believes Roald Dahl would have been proud of her career: “He always wanted me to do what made me happy.” Her ambition, however, is to follow in his footsteps. “I'd like to buy a little villa in Italy and write all day, with lots of sweet babies running around and a divine husband,” she says, dreamily. “But that means I've just got to make a lot of money modelling.”
Here's a surprising state of affairs: the editor of a fashion magazine who can't find anything to wear.
But such is the predicament of being on the far side of size 12, says Veronique Vienne, the editor of Mode, a glossy new monthly for plus-size women.
“Most stores will carry all styles up to size 10,” she said. “There'll be a couple of 12s. But if I'm not first in the store to snatch up that one size 14 immediately, I leave empty-handed.”
With Mode, which will make its debut on Tuesday, Ms. Vienne has a mission: to demand equal fashion for full-figured women. “Our subject matter is looking fabulous no matter what size you are,” she said. “We are not about dieting or losing weight.”
Indeed, there will be no calorie-counting features in Mode, the first fashion magazine aimed at women who, as its promotional material states, “have breasts and hips and maybe 20 or 25 extra pounds.”
Mode is tapping into the very-90s acceptance of America's increasing girth. An estimated 65 million American women, or 40 percent, wear plus sizes, or 14 to 24. Over the last three years, sales of women's large-size clothing have outpaced the overall women's market—up 6.1 percent last year over 1995, with general women's apparel up only 5.1 percent, according to the NPD Group, a market research company. In 1996, $21.3 billion was spent on women's plus sizes.
It used to be that big clothes were designed as big fashion statements—in bold patterns and prints, with bows and other extraneous details that seemed to exaggerate rather than streamline a woman's silhouette.
But today, in answer to the growing market, many fashion designers who used to stop at size 12 are expanding into the upper reaches. Emanuel Ungaro, Mary McFadden, Givenchy and Gianni Versace have started offering designs in plus sizes. Even Lane Bryant, the oldest name in large-size clothing, is showing a more sophisticated look.
Nonetheless, demand for stylish plus-size clothes, especially formal and cutting-edge fashions, still exceeds supply.
“It's fairly easy to find career clothes in that size range, and getting easier to find weekend clothes,” said Cindy Weber Cleary, the fashion director of Glamour, which along with Marie Claire were the first magazines to introduce full-figured fashion news several years ago. “But plus-size women want the same range of options. They want to be able to find sexy downtown black leather in their size.”
In response, Mode will be heavy on how-tos and where-to-finds. The premiere issue also features valentines to Bette Midler, Kathy Bates, Cecilia Bartoli, and Fredi Walker of Rent—women who have never let a few extra pounds hold back their careers.
In these pages, no waifs are welcome, though even with Rubens-esque figures, none of the models are exactly obese: most are size 14.
Mode's creators think they have discovered one of the last demographic niches without its own magazine. Published by Harris Publications, best known for magazines like Dog Aficionado and Guitar World, Mode is the brainchild of two seasoned executives: Julie Lewit-Nirenberg, the founding publisher of New York Woman and Mirabella, and Nancy Nadler LeWinter, a former publisher of Esquire and the founding publisher of the American edition of Marie Claire.
Mode's first issue, at 160 pages, has a relatively large initial print run of 550,000 copies. Its 70 pages of advertisements include companies like Revlon, Virginia Slims, Lane Bryant and Saks Fifth Avenue, whose Salon Z for women sizes 14 to 22 is advertising in a fashion magazine for the first time since it opened in 1992.
As neither Ms. Lewit-Nirenberg nor Ms. LeWinter is full figured, they insisted for credibility's sake that the staff consist of women who can relate to the struggles of finding fashion to fit a queenly physique. When reminded of this job requirement, Ms. Vienne at first demurred, then admitted to being a 14.
“It's not even so much a question of size,” she said. “Mode is designed for women who have curves. Some women have curves on the bottom and not on top, or vice versa. Curves are distributed in all different places.”
Ms. Cleary sounded a note of mild skepticism over how many women would want to publicly identify themselves as plus-size readers. Glamour has received “mixed messages on how ‘real' our readers want us to be,” she said, adding, “We've only shown 14s, which is straddling the divide between plus size and not.”
Even the industry giant Lane Bryant, which manufactures clothes in sizes up to 28, tends to show women no larger than size 16 in its advertisements, said Chris Hansen, vice president of marketing for the more than 850 Lane Bryant stores nationwide. “We all want to see pictures that are prettier than we are,” she explained.
Ms. Vienne, who as art director at Self and Parenting magazines was used to hiring size 4s and 6s, said she was taken aback when the first plus-size models came to Mode's offices for interviews. “Geez, I thought to myself, they're enormous!” Then, she said, “my eyes began to be re-educated—the models now began to seem more graceful.
“And then it occurred to me,” she continued. “The reason they were so amazingly beautiful was that they'd taken charge of their size, and what they looked like.”
Picture the scene: you are standing outside Mothercare in Liverpool on a Saturday afternoon, and it is raining. You are 20 years old, your streaked blonde hair is wet, and you are hung over. A stranger comes up to you. He says he is a talent scout for Nick Knight, a renowned fashion photographer, and is searching for a new model. He thinks you are she. He mentions Vogue. Your friends start giggling, you think it's a joke. It is, in fact, a fashion moment. Why? Because your name is Sara Morrison and you are not pipe-cleaner thin, but a fleshy, some say fat, size 16.
Months later, your thick ankles and cellulite-dimpled thighs are sprawled across six pages in Vogue and you are part of a new fashion breed: the superweight. “I still can't believe the story myself,” says Morrison. “Me, in Vogue! I thought the talent scout was having a laugh, because Vogue is a thin girls' magazine. I screamed the street down. It was like, wow, someone actually wants to see my thighs!”
There is not a sharp edge on Sara Morrison. The camera lingers curiously on the creases around the swell of her stomach, the dimpled knees, the plumpness of the hand. She is an aberration in a world of anorexia, bulimia and of dark circles around the eyes of those indulging in the now infamous heroin chic. “I don't diet,” says Morrison. “I have no idea how much I weigh. I suppose I would describe myself as fattish, but I don't really think about it that much. I have got better things to worry about. Of course, I love food,” she snaps. “But I like my beer even more.” Loud guffaw.
Six months down the line, Morrison has signed up with outsize model agency Excel, she has appeared on the cover of Suede's Saturday Night single, posed in front of a mirror, sulkily applying lipstick, sat on chat-show sofas, modelled for Dawn French's clothing label French & Teague, and been flown to Paris and Milan to model for, among others, Valentino. It seems the often quoted—and then frequently ignored by the fashion world—statistic that 47 per cent of British women are a size 16 or over, is beginning to sink in, albeit slowly.
Young photographers are fond of asking, “Did you know that Marilyn Monroe was a size 16?” Sophie Dahl, Morrison's size 14 superweight forerunner, was once greeted at a studio door by a photographer who exclaimed: “Omigod, it's Diana Dors!” His fashion editor then had a hissy fit, shrieking, “She's enormous, what the hell am I supposed to do with her?” We can only applaud fashion's inventiveness in the face of cellulite and a 38DD cleavage—Dahl was eventually photographed naked, clutching an ostrich feather and a carving-knife.
Yet Morrison has little pretensions about her and all the other women who share her voluptuous figure making a lasting impression on the fashion world. “I like to think that my being in Vogue and taking up modelling will have an influence, but deep down you know it's a one-minute wonder,” she says. And then she adds, chuckling, “But it' s not as if I haven't told them all I'll get out of bed for a lot less than £10,000, any day of the week.”
For a mere mortal man, and a skinny one to boot, there is something scary about the prospect of meeting Emme. She is America's top “plus size” model. Translating the euphemism, this means she is America's top big-girl model—a state-side version of the English amazon, Sophie Dahl.
Emme has hung, billboard-sized, in Times Square, models in all the top American glossies, and appears in the New York Times almost daily in advertisements for Macy's store—yet you will not have seen her on the catwalk during this year's New York fashion week.
Emme Melissa Miller is 5ft 11in and weighs 190lb (13.5 stone)—I am half an inch taller and weigh a pathetic 155lb (11st 1lb)—and measures in at 43-33-44. She is also blonde, blue-eyed, smooth, pale-bronzey skinned and, at 33, blatantly free of stress lines and wrinkles.
She is, in other words, the ultimate All-American Girl, a Nordic Amazon, a Goddess of the Prairie. She has even been an athlete. Indeed, her prowess as a rower was such that she was invited to try-out for the Olympic sculls while at college. It is quite proper for a humble man to tremble before such a woman.
But the inevitable irony in an America whose female maxim remains “never too rich or too thin,” is that Emme has struggled for most of her life against the torment of a “negative body image.” She admits to being slightly surprised still that any man would countenance any kind of intimacy with her, as she feels she is too big, too fat. In fact, she is so amazed at finding herself confident, successful and happy, that she has written a book about it, True Beauty, which is soaring up the American “self-help” bestseller list.
Her round, blue eyes get bigger in nervous wonder as I broach my goddess theory. Never has she conceived of such a thing. A goddess? She, like many other big women, is more used to torturing herself with the idea that she is a pig.
“But come to think of it,” she giggles, “my husband is always asked how he can handle Emme. Not just physically, but emotionally, too. Guys do seem to wonder how a man can deal with a big, powerful woman.” She adds that her husband of seven years, Phillip Aronson—a successful advertising man—does sometimes fret over whether his “pecs” are up to scratch.
It would be possible to construct a whole Freudian theory about modern man and his apparent need for smaller, thinner women—such as the Kate Moss types so beloved on the catwalks. This obsession with skinniness could have something to do with women having the vote, careers and a modicum of “empowerment.” After all, in the pre-emancipation American pioneer days, an Emme of such sturdy Welsh/German stock would have been prized for her strength and potential to survive and breed through howling Mid-Western winters.
What is certainly the case, according to Emme, is that the torment of American women with “real, female bodies” goes hand-in-hand with the rise of popular magazines and their advertisements in the Twenties, and television culture. “The flappers used to bind their breasts for a boyish look,” she says, “and ever since, girls have grown up aspiring to unobtainable ideals.”
Class is also a contributing factor, at least as far as fashion is concerned. The elite are thin—and “fashion markets to the small percentage with the money”—while the masses out there in McDonald's country are large.
It makes no difference that the majority of women, in Britain as well as America, are much closer to Emme's size than any woman on the catwalks or in Vogue. Sixty per cent of American women are between a British size 14 and 20, and 49 per cent of them—a formidable crowd of 35 million women—are a size 16 or bigger.
This creates good business opportunities for Emme and other “plus size” models, who feature in advertisements for stores and clothing manufacturers selling to the mass market.
But it is only just beginning to dawn on these women that they are the norm, and that the attempt to torture themselves into a different body shape is pointless. “It is very exciting to feel part of a wave, of a revolution,” Emme says, “to see a diversification of bodies, with different role models.” The $33-billion-a-year dieting industry ranks with the fashion despots in her villain's gallery.
Her book suggests that large women can improve their “self esteem” by taking up “postive attitudes” towards their size. It also offers “practical tips” on how to overcome eating disorders, recover from adolescent traumas of self-acceptance and make sure that those full-size bodies are toned through exercise.
But the book is at its best when Emme writes about her own life and struggles. Her father was 6ft 7in tall, so Emme was born to be big, but her parents divorced when she was an infant. Her mother who “liked big guys” remarried. Emme's stepfather was a man of 6ft 6in and more than 21 stone—and it is he who figures large in her story. Always worried about his own weight, he obsessionally measured out the portions at family dinners and told her that she would catch a decent man only if she stayed below 120lb (8.5 stone). Emme was heavier than that at puberty and remembers feeling “terrible shame” when she outweighed her mother on the bathroom scales.
When she was 12, her stepfather made her strip to her undies and marked her “problem areas” with a pen. She scrubbed and scrubbed to wash off the ink before going to the local swimming pool, but the laughter of the other kids told her that her “problem areas” were still vividly highlighted.
Such traumas meant that, for years, Emme would date only big men, “so I could feel petite for a while.” Even then, she still worried about squashing them, and felt inhibited.
The first time she felt satisfied with her body was when she walked into a plus-size modelling agency in New York and was promptly told: “Don't change a thing.”
“I had,” she says, “been waiting all my life to hear those words.”
Last summer a rumour went around that Vogue was planning a special issue featuring fat models. They would be “deliciously” voluptuous, with double chins and buttocks like barges, it was reported. The fashion industry braced itself. It never happened.
Almost a year on, Vogue—the fashion victim's bible with a strictly size 10 (or under) tradition—has finally bitten the bullet. In what is being described as an historic first, the June issue features a size-16 model provocatively dressed in Dolce & Gabbana black lace, in a six-page spread.
Under the headline Modern Curves, the photographs of 21-year-old Sara Morrison linger on her gently swelling stomach, rounded bottom and Beryl Cook-style legs; hardly obese, but not the sort of images associated with Conde Nast's flagship magazine, which last year came under fire from one of its advertisers, watchmaker Omega, for using anorexic-looking models.
The shoot—tucked away in the second half of the magazine on page 126, immediately after a feature on itsy-bitsy bikinis worn by impossibly slender women—follows the success of “bigger model” Sophie Dahl, who was photographed nude in i-D magazine.
But hopeful speculation that the feature marked a new realism in the fashion industry was swiftly crushed by Vogue's editor, Alexandra Shulman. “I wanted the pictures to be a kind of celebration of flesh, but we're not about to use girls that are size 16. This is a one-off.”
The shoot was the idea of photographer Nick Knight, who discovered Ms. Morrison, a textiles student, last year with the help of a talent scout. After the Omega row, Vogue backed off.
Knight, who was yesterday photographing the more conventional fashion figures of Linda Evangelista and Yasmin Le Bon for Christian Dior, said if the way women were portrayed in magazines was to change, designers had to embrace the bigger look.
“When I was doing the shoot I felt we were breaking some taboos. It's a very positive image. She's supposed to look powerful. I didn't want to make her look freakish.
“I'm not really saying this is the new shape and the old shape is out. What I want to say is that women are very beautiful in all their shapes.”
Belfast-born Ms. Morrison, meanwhile, was keeping her optimism in check. “There may be a bit of excitement for a week about it, then they go back to liking thin people.
“I like my body now. But back when I was getting the bus home from school, boys used to shout at me ‘you lump,' I think it affected me. There are still times when I don't like being fat. I pretend to go on a diet for a day, but basically I'm happy the way I am.
“If someone like Vogue is doing this, it should influence other magazines. I think it's been quite backward in the past. After all, 47 per cent of women are between size 14 and 16. I read that all the time and it makes me feel better.”
Shelley Bovey, author of Being Fat is Not a Sin, dismissed Vogue's feature as “a bit of tokenism.”
Sara Morrison languishes on the pages of this month's U.K. Vogue magazine like a porcelain oasis in a sea of skeletons. Dolce&Gabbana black lace pulls pleasantly over the swells of her belly and thighs, her fingers are plump like a child's and her mouth has a natural fullness that no number of collagen implants can ever truly appreciate.
She has flesh, this woman, she has substance.
Like the stick figures in bikinis in the pages surrounding her, the image of Sara Morrison has been manufactured. Armies of stylists have spent hours painting her face and arranging her hair. All traces of imperfection on her papery skin have been airbrushed into ether. Thanks to this process, Sara Morrison does not look like any woman you would see in the street. She does, however, look at home on the pages of Vogue and is a testament to the fact that a size-16 model can be glamorised and eroticised just as easily as a size 10.
Why then, is she such a rarity?
The arguments in favour of using larger fashion models have received a thorough airing ever since Christy Quilliam flaunted her ribs through that intriguingly cut swimsuit at last year's Australian Fashion Week. And, on the surface, the arguments seem overwhelming.
On a purely commercial level, women have more money to spend on clothes and are getting larger, with 60 to 65 per cent of Australian women taking a size 14 or above.
Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia are also increasing. According to a new NSW parliamentary committee, girls begin starving themselves from as young as eight, one in six female tertiary students is bulimic and up to 60 per cent of women are dieting.
The committee, formed after last August's summit on eating disorders, will target the “plague of eating disorders among young women” and is expected to put pressure on the advertising industry, women's magazines, and fashion designers. But, a year after the Quilliam outcry, there have only been isolated instances of positive change.
Sarah [sic] Dahl—model, Sunday Times columnist, granddaughter of writer Roald Dahl and size-14 party girl—has been heralded as “the new catwalk phenomenon” and was recently photographed nude in i-D magazine displaying more curves than a slinky spring. According to Elle magazine, many of her designer outfits in a shoot by Karl Lagerfeld for German Vogue had to be undone at the back or held together with pins. Recent shots of actress Drew Barrymore sexily exaggerated rather than eliminated her lumps and bumps, the Body Shop has adopted a Rubenesque version of Barbie called Ruby as its mascot, and large models like size-16 Emme Aronson (voted by America's People magazine as one of the world's most beautiful people) are gradually gaining higher profiles.
On the magazine front, Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue, has launched a glossy magazine for larger women called Encore, while Australia's New Woman magazine which featured Aronson as last month's cover, consistently campaigns against lookism.
But despite these developments, the media remains dominated by images of scrawny sheilas and much of the fashion industry seems resistant to change.
The magazine world's most frequent defence is that designers provide samples only in the relatively freakish size 10. Apparently, in this multi-million-dollar industry, the extra fabric needed to produce a size 12, 14, or 16 would cost too much.
There is also the ultra-sensitive issue of so many fashion designers being gay men with little interest in catering for female curves.
“I think it's more relevant in Europe, where you have got Armani and designers like that,” says Mia Freedman, editor of Cosmopolitan. “They don't like curves; they see everything in terms of lines. Whether it's misogyny or a gay thing or purely aesthetics, I don't know. I guess it depends whether you think clothes look better on wire coathangers or the big padded ones that your grandmother has”
Glossy magazine editors say they are sick of copping the blame when film, television, and advertising are equally obsessed with stereotyped images of female beauty.
When was the last time you saw a size-16 woman on Baywatch or even reading the news? they ask, pointing to the recent hoo-ha over Nicky Buckley's decision to appear pregnant on Sale of the Century as proof that the public—the very people who are allegedly being damaged by unrealistic images of women—have mixed feelings about getting what they say they want.
In the June issue of Cleo, editor Gina Johnson points out that in a survey of 5,000 readers, 86 per cent of respondents said they thought models were too thin. Yet most respondents went on to say that they would rather be a model than a nuclear physicist and would rather have Elle Macpherson's body than be fluent in a foreign language.
Freedman says that in October 1996, a size-10 model with relatively large breasts was used in a swimsuit spread in Cosmopolitan. As a result, 30 per cent of respondents in a reader survey complained that the model was overweight.
Freedman says the magazine now includes many more “real” women (“real” being the expression magazine people used to describe people who don't earn a living from their appearance) but will not use models larger than size 10. While Sara Morrison looked “gorgeous” in Vogue, Freedman regards it as tokenism on the part of the British magazine.
“I don't think they would necessarily sell clothes,” she says. “I certainly don't want to pay $5 for a copy of a magazine to look at people I could go out and see on the street.”
Maggie Alderson, the editor of the Herald's Good Living section and a former editor of British Elle and Mode [NB: Not the American plus-size fashion mag] agrees that the whole point of beauty is rarity. “In societies where food is scarce, plumpness is considered beautiful, whereas in societies where there is overconsumption, slimness is considered attractive,” she says. “I don't buy car magazines to see pictures of beaten-up old cars like mine so I don't want to see run-of-the-mill, ordinary bodies in fashion magazines.”
The editor of Vogue Australia, Marion Hume, also maintains that such magazines are about dreams and escapism. “Having an unfashionable physique, it would be pitiful if I tried to squeeze myself into the latest Prada,” she said in a recent interview with the Herald. “[But] fashion is fantasy—the more you analyse it, the less sense it makes.”
Hume would not comment on whether models such as Morrison are likely to be used here, but it is unlikely, given remarks made by U.K. Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman. “I wanted the pictures to be a kind of celebration of flesh, but we're not about to use girls that are size 16,” she said of the Morrison shoot. “This is a one-off.”
On the sticky issue of responsibility, it should also be noted that the media—which charts the weight gains and losses of celebrities with intense and hostile voyeurism—is also guilty of backlash when confronted with change.
The Sun-Herald's Susan Owens dismissed Sophie Dahl at London Fashion Week as looking “like a size-14 milkmaid,” while The Guardian made an extraordinary attack on Conde Nast's Encore…
No, the fashion industry is not the only one to blame, and yes, it does make some legitimate points in its defence. Still, there remain some rather confusing anomalies.
Isn't the idea of designing clothes that look best on coat-hangers akin to Basil Fawlty's belief that his hotel would run more smoothly without guests? And while it's all well and good to claim fashion is actually an elite art form or a spectator sport, the route by which it reaches the masses is via glossy magazines which package fashion in a functional and indeed instructional format.
Arguing that “clothes simply look better on thin girls,” meanwhile, flies in the face of the fact that ideal of beauty change. According to Deakin University's Body Image and Better Health Program, models in the 1990s are 14 per cent thinner than models in the 1960s. Clothes certainly look all right on the relatively pudgy Marilyn Monroe.
Then there's the bizarre fact that many designer brands simply won't manufacture to fit the bulk of the population. What other commercial enterprise would so blatantly and arrogantly ignore market demand?
“The retail fashion industry is in a huge slump while the majority of Australian women are continuously pissed off because they can't find anything that fits,” says Cyndi Tebbel, the editor of New Woman. “It's crazy.”
It certainly is a mother of a chicken-and-egg dilemma. And until the various links in the fashion food chain show more willingness to break rank, it seems likely to stay that way.
He says he is a prude, but Nick Knight has been photographing a lot of nudes recently. He shot the model Sophie Dahl for i-D magazine in all her curvaceous glory—except that her curves were not glorious enough. When she arrived at the studio, Ms. Dahl had been on a diet. “I curved her up on the Paint Box and made her tummy bigger, her breasts bigger, her bottom bigger,” he says. That's why the images in i-D' s New Beauty issue in March looked a little unreal, as though this was a body that had been gently eased from a jelly mould. Not only does the camera lie, but the computer paint box can triple your cup size with one single swoop of the mouse. As Knight admits, photography is not a good medium to record reality: “If you want reality, look out of the window.”
Fashion photographers traditionally spend hours in the darkroom—re-touching, streamlining, shaving off a slight hip bulge here, a dimple in the bum there. Nick Knight, however, has perfected the art of enhancement. He also has the great gift of anticipating trends. The shoot with Dahl made her an instant celebrity. Then he was credited with another fashion coup.
Readers of Vogue, usually dedicated at this time of year to skinny girls on tropical beaches wearing nothing but a few straps of elastic, were treated to the sight of a creamy-white, size-l6 girl photographed in the same few straps by Knight. These images were not enhanced. Sara Morrison, the Liverpool textiles student, appears as she is, with Knight's camera lingering lovingly on the swell of the calf, the crease at the back of the knee, the plumpness of the hand. These are not pictures documenting cellulite, bulging ankles or stretch marks; they are about Botticelli curves, a glowing roundness.
Sara Morrison is about as representative of the common woman's shape as Kate Moss or Jodie Kidd, which is why it took Knight and his assistant, Travis, several newspaper ads and two years to find her. Before the Vogue shoot, publication of which was held up after the Omega watch anorexia scandal (“a lot of hot air,” scoffs Knight) for fear that they would be accused of sensation-seeking, Knight tried Sara out for the cover of Suede's Saturday Night single.
“I wanted to show a different image of woman,” says Knight, whose own lanky body is clad when I meet him in navy pinstripe trousers and waistcoat. “My wife, Charlotte, is Sara's shape. You fall in love with someone because of the person within, not because of their shape. It isn't about perfection. I felt like I was doing something that needed doing. If those pictures can make people feel happy with the way they are, then that's great.”
Knight was inspired to this by Tamara [de] Lempicka's paintings of typically big, powerful women. “I thought the pictures with Sara worked. They didn't make her look freakish. I hope they made her look powerful and intelligent. This is an image of woman that isn't current right now. I told Travis I wanted a woman who is curvy in a healthy way. I didn't want her to look like she'd eaten too much and gravity had taken its toll. I wanted her to look healthy.”
As a result, the voluptuous look is suddenly all the rage. Young photographers who once liked their models pin-thin are talking about this “great idea” they have had of finding a model with curves and flesh. The fat girl has become the latest fad. Morrison has signed up with outsize model agency, Excel, which has been inundated with bookings for chat shows and catwalks, not to mention the advertising campaign for Dawn French's clothing label, French & Teague. But, as Knight points out, it is only the beginning of something, a new role-model to sit at the opposite end of the spectrum to Jodie Kidd, with all that space in-between to fill.
…Knight has been exploring explosions since he photographed Alexander McQueen's head, apparently being ripped apart, for the Florence Biennale last year. The idea came from the film Scanners. Knight and McQueen have been collaborating ever since. They produced the image on the invite for McQueen's last show, and they are working on Bjork's latest album cover. McQueen also art-directed the Sophie Dahl magazine story, which was originally for the Biennale. “The idea was to manipulate the body and make it more sensuous than it actually is,” he says…
As I sat on my size 16 bottom yesterday, leafing through a stack of magazines and tucking into a large fried breakfast, I felt an unexpected rise of emotion. And, for the first time in my life, this feeling had nothing to do with guilt about my size.
It had suddenly dawned on me that I might in fact be rather beautiful. This realisation was so strange and so total that I put on my sunglasses and sat in the café, weeping for all the years I had thought my shape was wrong; my thighs too dimply, my breasts too heavy, my backside too large, my arms too fat.
Evidence of the new dawn was scattered with sybaritic abandon all over the formica table. One glossy magazine after another—Vanity Fair, Elle, Esquire, i-D, Vogue, GQ—had published pictures of big, gorgeous women. Was it something in the air? A reaction against yet another hateful survey decrying fat women as the new underclass: statistically less employable, poorer, more miserable and lonely than their thinner peers?
Some of the pictures, such as Vogue's shoot of a creamy-skinned, voluptuous beauty, were not even illustrating a story about big women. No, this particular woman was just modelling clothes for a fashion feature.
Equally cheering was the model Sophie Dahl—all eyes, curves and fleshy abandon—who has now been featured everywhere from Electronic Telegraph to GQ. Even though you can't see her skeleton through her skin and her legs are thicker at the top than they are at her ankles, she still looks truly lovely. Suddenly, all those years of disgust and hatred of my own body did a flip-over in my head.
We have, of course, seen big models before—particularly in women's weekly magazines, where they are used in the context of Size-16 Model of the Year competitions or articles about “swimming suits to flatter the fuller figure.” I worked on one of those magazines for seven years, and always found such pieces cynical and patronising. They focused on flattering, hiding and changing, and were done “to stay in touch with the ordinary reader.” There was no way the stick-like editors ever identified with the fat freaks in the pictures—and there was always a diet feature over the page.
For 15 years, I was deluded by television, women's magazines and the diet industry into thinking that not only was I the wrong shape, but I actually had some sort of control over my size. That if I ate 2oz wholegrain cereal with quarter of a pint of milk for breakfast, a 4oz tub of plain cottage cheese and two crispbreads for lunch, or indeed skipped these two meals for a delicious, filling milkshake and a proper meal in the evening (of, say, an inch square of boiled fish, two new potatoes and a couple of French beans), then after, say, a year I'd look like an “ordinary woman.”
Once, I starved myself for three days, then felt so ill that I threw up. I went on the Micro diet, the Cambridge diet—where your intake is limited to three “tasty” milkshakes a day (have you ever tried a lamb flavoured milkshake?)—I did the F-plan, the Beverley Hills, the Scarsdale.
I even did amphetamines from a dodgy clinic in Bermondsey for a year (often finding myself doing the ironing at 4am or leaning into the kitchen cupboard, making sure all my soup tin labels were facing outwards). I went so far that I wished I was bulimic—I tried making myself sick a couple of times, but it took so long and my throat was so sore afterwards that I couldn't bring myself to do it again.
I remember watching a documentary about anorexia and feeling secretly jealous. I wished I had their control over what I ate; I was envious of women who were literally dying to be thin. That, I fear, is normal these days. Most women in this country, fat or thin, are on diets, and many of those diets started when they were 10. Does anyone actually know a woman who is happy with her body? I've never met one.
Recently, I heard television presenter Vanessa Feltz talking on BBC2's The Chair. “Even though my mother knew she had cancer and she was dying,” she said, “she still delighted in the weight loss caused by the disease.” How much more can someone hate their body?
Our grandmothers didn't hate themselves in this way; they knew they would put on weight as they grew older. It was perfectly natural. But they weren't told they were fat and ugly every time they opened their eyes.
We have, of course, had our rebels—a few years ago, features and books entitled Diets Don't Work and You Count, Calories Don't started to hit the shelves. “Accept yourself the way you are,” they said. “Only two per cent of dieters who have lost weight keep it off.”
So, feeling exhausted, I gave up dieting. My poor, starved brain finally realised that no new regimen was going to make any difference, so I told myself: “You can't change, so accept it.” It felt great at the time.
But all that really happened was that I changed the enemy. I went from trying to change myself to trying to fight the bad feelings I had about myself, telling myself that I wasn't wrong; it was people's perceptions that were wrong. Yet I still eyed every curve with distaste, continued to cover my body, felt out of place in public and made love with the lights off. In the end, it was just as futile a struggle as the dieting.
But now I feel that there is a slim chance I might be able to give up the fight. It's a precarious chance, balancing on a razor's edge. If “they”—in fashion, advertising and photography—change their minds and say, “Nah, we were only joking; this new ‘big women thing' was just a short-lived fashion fad,” we shall carry on starving, vomiting and hating ourselves for the rest of our lives. And so will our children; the brainwashing goes too deep.
No matter how individual we think we are, images in the media do matter. So, please God, don't let this “big women thing” be a fad. Let's see more large, lovely, bouncy women on television, in the movies and on the covers of magazines. And, yes, let's have a feast of sexy, fleshy bosoms selling enormous push-up-and-out-even-further bras on every billboard in the country.
Fashion model. For most people, that term conjures the image of a tall, gorgeous, imperially slim young woman with roughly the dimensions of Kate Moss, whose waif-like figure sparked a firestorm about models and eating disorders not long ago. When it comes to fame and lucrative contracts, it seems the fashion world rewards only Moss and her impossibly slender colleagues. Right?
Wrong. Believe it or not, the recent triumphs of a few plus-size models—models size 12 and over—suggest that there's a revolution afoot. And this revolution could redefine what it means to be a beautiful woman. Take, for instance, Sarah [sic]Morrison, 21, discovered in Liverpool, England, and championed by the cutting-edge British photographer Nick Knight, who featured her in a fashion portfolio he shot for the June's issue of British Vogue. Sarah has model-perfect blond hair and blue eyes, but her dress size is a 16. Then there's Sophie Dahl, 20, a model with Storm Model Management in London (incidentally, the agency that also represents Kate Moss). Dahl has done runway shows for the Paris design house of Nina Ricci, as well as for London designers Lainey Keogh and Stephen Fuller, and she's been photographed for publications as various as British Elle, Spanish Marie Claire and German Vogue.
At 5-foot-11, Dahl has blond hair, alabaster skin and blue-green eyes. (She also happens to be a granddaughter of the actress Patricia Neal and the author Roald Dahl.) But unlike the size-6 Kate Moss, full-figured Dahl wears a size 14. "We represent people across the board here,” says Gavin Boardman, a booker at Storm. “We try not to be so single-minded about modeling and beauty.” Dahl and Morrison are bonafide supermodels in the plus-size category; Morrison, who signed with the London agency Excel, is set to appear in advertisements for Valentino's new Charisma range of plus-size fashions, and she recently landed a part in Richard Attenborough's next film.
On these shores, meanwhile, the plus-size category is teeming with models who are doing very well. These models, it should be noted, are not obese—they're simply big (as Marilyn Monroe was at the height of her fame, when she wore a size 16). “And when they walk into a room, they look like models,” says Patty Sicular, who heads up the Twelve Plus division of Ford Models. “They're beautiful girls, they're in shape, they exercise, they eat correctly, they dress beautifully. They're not fat, they're just larger.”
Some, like Ford model Christine Alt of New Hyde Park, began their careers as so-called straight-size models, then eventually stopped struggling to conform to the thin-is-in stereotype. “Whenever I do a personal appearance at K mart or Wal-Mart now, people come up to me and say things like, 'I love you because you let me know it's okay to be me,'”Alt says. “Most people weren't meant to be a size six; I know my body is meant to be a fourteen-sixteen. I actually feel sexier and more womanly now that I have more curves than I did when I was a size four.”
Peggy Dillard, a plus-size model with Karin's Models, also began her career as a straight-size model who made the cover of American Vogue in the early '80s. “I was a size eight-ten,” Dillard says. “I was always on the larger side of high-fashion models, because I was considered more of a 'body' than the typical runway model, and my weight was fluctuating. So one day I just sat down and did some demographics research, and when I saw the numbers on large sizes, that was a real eye-opener.”
The demographics are eye-opening, indeed. According to research conducted by Just My Size, the plus-size clothing manufacturer based in Winston-Salem, N.C., 50 million American women wear size 14 or above.
Other American success stories: Kate Dillon, a model with the Wilhelmina agency who also gladly made the transition from straight-size to plus-size; and Emme, the Ford model named one of People magazine's 50 most beautiful people in 1994, whose inspirational book, True Beauty (Putnam) will be released in paperback this March.
They may be supermodels in their field, but even the most successful plus-size model's day rate doesn't stack up favorably against what the average straight-size model earns. According to her booker, Emme's day rate is $5,000. If that sounds like a lot, consider that when author Michael Gross was researching Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (Warner Books), his expose of the modeling industry, Naomi Campbell and her ilk were making as much as $25,000 a day.
“We still don't make as much as straight-size models,” points out Christine Alt, the sister of model and Les Copains spokeswoman Carol Alt. “Carol had multimillion-dollar contracts, and nobody pays plus-size models that kind of money. Hopefully in the next ten years that will change.”
Still, the rising profile of plus-size models is one of many indicators pointing to the growing power of women size 12 and over in the fashion marketplace. “Plus sizes are a very big business, and they will continue to be one of the fastest-growing areas into the millennium,” says retail consultant Alan Millstein, “because the bottom line is the plus-size customer will pay any price for fashion. She doesn't want to go back to double-knit pull-on pants and tunic tops.”
It may be too much to hope that American Vogue will follow its British edition, casting a plus-size model in a fashion shoot. But another Conde Nast Publication has already given its plus-size readers something to celebrate. Glamour's “Fashion That Fits” column, which made its debut in the magazine about a year ago to rave reviews, has since expanded from one page to three to accommodate reader demand. “It's not just plus sizes,” explains Cindy Weber Cleary, who oversees the column as Glamour's fashion director.
“We cover anything related to body and fashion. It's about finding clothes that flatter your body, whether you're full-figured or small-busted and petite.” Cleary says she's seen evidence that other magazines are covering the subject, including Seventeen, which features an advice column called “Ask Emme.”
In the publishing arena, perhaps the most heartening homage to plus-size women was the launch this past spring of Mode, a magazine catering specifically to them. “We're the first upscale fashion and beauty magazine in America for full-figured women,” explains the magazine's co-publication director Nancy Nadler LeWinter. “We deliver to full-figured women all the fashion information available to their thinner counterparts,” LeWinter adds. “And the response has been great.”
Mode's circulation stands at about 350,000, LeWinter says—an impressive figure for a start-up…[Editor-in-Chief A.G. Britton says] “We believe being sexy and stylish is the biggest political statement a woman can make. The way your body looks is the last bastion of discrimination and bigotry in the world.”
Britton says it took awhile for top photographers and makeup artists to accept the magazine. “When I came on board here, nobody would work with me at first,” she says. “They didn't want to work for what they saw as a 'fat women's magazine.' I even had one makeup artist meet the model and walk off the shoot.” Now, Britton says, “We have people calling us, and they're very supportive.” Mode works regularly with photographers such as Michel Arnaud and the hair guru Garren.
Then again, there have always been photographers who appreciate working with plus-size models. “I think the girls' attitudes are generally much better,” says Troy Word, who photographed Sophie Dahl for the cover of Spanish Marie Claire. “And my experience has been that they're a lot more fun to work with. Generally, I find plus-size girls are more comfortable with themselves than most models. For the most part, they understand who they are, what their body looks like, and they're quite at ease with it. They have fewer hang-ups than more traditional-looking models would; there's less panic if they gain an extra pound.”
Sidebar: THE PETITE-PLUS MARKET
by Barbara Schuler
As the fashion industry works to keep up with customers' needs, one company has gone after a virtually untapped market—the plus-size petite.
Japanese designer Tamotsu recently announced he will do a special collection for women 5-foot-4 and under who wear size 14 and over, starting with his resort line; the clothing in sizes 1P, 2P and 3P will be available about Dec. 1.
“Nobody is servicing the shorter large-size customer,” sales manager Ellen Mullman told Women's Wear Daily, the trade newspaper. According to the designer, this “virtually neglected” customer has great difficulty buying clothes because “the proportions of shoulder to waist and waist to hip in average large sizes are out of balance for the petite body size.”
Rosie O'Donnell. Kirstie Alley. Oprah Winfrey. Cybill Shepherd.
All these women are big in TV Land, and we're not just talking about ratings. Known not only for their star power, they're now being held up as living proof that success doesn't begin at size four and end at size eight.
Which is not to say, in an industry ruled largely by fantasy, that size 14 has become the ideal. But life is good for these Big Girls.
“I think it has a ways to go, but the reality is that probably until Cybill, full-figured women were relegated to downscale roles, or they were buddies,” said Nancy Nadler LeWinter, one of the co-founders and publishers of Mode.
A slick, New York-based, bi-monthly fashion magazine that hit the streets last March, Mode's target audience is women size 12 and beyond. Their message is an affirming “You go, girl!” for full-figured women.
“With ‘I Love Lucy,' Ethel was the buddy,” LeWinter recalled. “With Mary Richards, Rhoda was the buddy. Then when Rhoda got thin and got her own show, Brenda (her ample sister) was the buddy. Before Cybill you didn't have really curvy, sexy ladies getting the guy.”
LeWinter cited Kirstie Alley as another actress with the Mode image.
Another person we love is Kirstie Alley. But even though she is changing the perception, the truth is the press still talks about Kirstie. It's ‘Oh my God…she wears sleeveless dresses with those arms?' Well, yes, she does, and why not?”
LeWinter, who places Alley “in the 14 range,” agreed that the curvy actress is sexy and appealing in a Real Woman kind of way.
“One of the things we have learned in the process of doing the magazine is what a 14 is,” she explained. “And it's not—gasp—14! It's 14, an average-size woman.
“I think women like Cybill and Kirstie and Rosie have said, ‘Hey! I have breasts and and I have hips. Yeah, this is me and I'm proud of it.'”
Julie Lewit-Nirenberg, LeWinter's partner at Mode, agreed, noting that for these women it was talent that tipped the scales in their favor.
“For these women it has nothing to do with size,” said Lewit-Nirenberg. “It has to do with their individual talent, which is just over the top.
“But it is interesting that it doesn't matter what size they are. I think Oprah was as successful as a full-figured woman as she is now. She's just Oprah.”
Even though she's engaged in a very public struggle with her weight over the years, Winfrey has still had the benefit of a different cultural aesthetic.
As an African-American woman from a culture which is much less weight-conscious and fat-phobic—and where having a few healthy curves is not only accepted but viewed as an asset—she was as popular at 237 pounds as she is now.
“Sister, Sister” leading lady Jackée, and three of the four divas on “Living Single”—Queen Latifah, Kim Coles and Kim Fields—are further proof of a different standard. In the midst of the mainstream misconception, all of these women are living it up—and loving it up—on the small screen.
Both LeWinter and Lewit-Nirenberg find it ironic, almost comical, that the skinny “ideal” persists at a time when the average American woman is between 5 feet 4 and 5 feet 5 inches tall, weighs 147 pounds and wears a size 14.
In fact, according to plus-size apparel manufacturer Just My Size, 8½ million American women wear a size 16 or larger. Television rarely depicts that.
Could it be that scriptwriters keep a handy-dandy copy of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' dietary guidelines for Americans in the top drawer? According to that table, the aforementioned average woman is “moderately overweight.”
Obviously, most Hollywood insiders believe audiences don't want to see the American norm, and make no bones about it.
E. Duke Vincent, vice president of Spelling Television (Melrose Place, Beverly Hills, 90210) was recently quoted in People magazine saying, “It's a world of fantasy. I do not believe that you or anyone else would watch, unless it were a comedy, a show about a full-bodied Cindy Crawford as a model.”
And so, TV continues to serve up, for the most part, a steady diet of women as waifs. Big-breasted waifs, mind you, but waifs nonetheless.
Just My Size spokesperson Christine Alt is among those who feel it's high time we got more hips, tushes and thighs to match those bouncing TV bosoms.
Alt has lived at both ends of the spectrum. At one point in her career as a runway model—following in the footsteps of her sister, Carol—she was 5 foot 10, size four and anorexic.
Now a more “physically and psychologically healthy” size 14 to 16, she applauds high-profile women who are proud to be considered plus sizes.
“I think we have a long way to go, but we are moving and we're better than we were 10 years ago,” Alt said.
“I think that psychologically we haven't gone much further—there is still a stigma attached to size and weight in regards to women—but we are able to obtain more.
“Ten years ago, I don't think Rosie O'Donnell would have had a show. But the fact that people of size can have their own talk shows says it's changing—slowly.
“I think the important thing is that now you have successful women who are saying, ‘You know what? I'm fine the way I am and if you don't like it, it's your problem, it's not on me,'” Alt said.
Le Winter and Lewit-Nirenberg agree that full-figured stars share the same outlook, and that's what enables them to become icons.
“It's 100 percent attitude,” LeWinter said, “One hundred percent of enjoying who you are, no matter what size you are.
That's why in one issue we had Bette Midler, who has always enjoyed strutting whatever she has—she's had more or less of it at different periods of time in her life.”
Will there come an era when a size-20 leading lady plays the vamp who steals men, toys with them, then tosses them aside in prime time?
Maybe I'm the Pollyanna of the group, but I think so,” LeWinter said. “I think it will happen because women are getting tired of being told who or what they have to be and how they've got to fit norms that aren't normal.
“Now they can get beautiful fashions to complement their size and they can be as glamorous as anybody else. The more of those types of things there are available, the more empowered you are to say, ‘Accept me as I am.'”
“Thats what it's all about,” echoed Lewit-Nirenberg. “Knowing there is no single definition of what's sexy, no single definition of style.”
Sara Morrison is the 21-year-old model who appeared in British Vogue earlier this year wearing a sexy little black dress. Nothing startling about that—except the dress was a size 16.
With her porcelain skin and opulent curves—reminiscent of a Beryl Cook painting—Sara has done much to break the mould of the Nineties mannequin. Thankfully, the bony models who epitomised “heroin chic” can no longer claim to be at the cutting edge of fashion. Large models, such as Sara and Sophie Dahl, are unlikely ever to be as widely used as their size-10 counterparts, but they have already proved that they are more than a flash-in-the-pan.
Their workload shows no sign of abating, and fan letters are pouring in. Even so, the choice of clothes for big women remains lamentably small, considering that 40 per cent of British women take a size 16 or over. A history of ugly “outsize” designs has not helped; frumpy box shapes, fussy styles, insipid colours and loud prints were enough to make most shoppers despair of ever finding a flattering outfit. Indeed, until recently, it was a challenge to find any directional clothes that did not stop short of a size 14. But now several high street stores—Richards, Etam, Marks & Spencer and Hennes, among others—are running selected high fashion styles up to a size 20. Some designers, including Maria Grachvogel and Anna Scholz, are also offering ranges in larger sizes.
We caught up with Sara during a break in filming for the new Elizabeth I movie at Shepperton Studios, in which she has a minor role, and asked her to select a wardrobe appropriate for the Christmas season.
Her brief was: something smart for a carol concert, something cosy for lunch on Christmas Day, a warm sweater and casual trousers for a brisk walk afterwards and special party dresses for New Year's Eve. Although she found several suitable outfits, she concluded that the fashion industry still has a long way to go.
As she sifted through a rail groaning under the weight of seasonal outfits, she sighed heavily. “These are typical outsize clothes—just look at the amount of patterns and the fussy designs. Most of the jackets are shapeless tents with high-cut necks, and some of these colours have never, ever been in fashion.” Then her eye alighted on a simple long, black wool dress by designer Anna Scholz.
“Now, this is amazing,” said Sara, who has put her fashion and printed textile course on hold for a year to pursue her modelling career. “This would be perfect for any occasion; it's stylish and slimming. I normally wear anything so long as it's black.”
She has no desire to go on a diet in search of her hip bones and rib-cage. “I've always been this size and always felt happy about it,” she said. “That's not to say I haven't looked at a skinny girl in a teensy dress and thought…Wow. I read a lot of fashion magazines and wish they'd use more models my size. I know I'd look silly in some catwalk clothes, such as micro minis, but there is always something that will suit me. My favourites include a tight pencil skirt with a nipped-in waist and a satin cheongsam dress I bought from a Chinese shop in Liverpool.”
Sara's agent, Allison Bramwell—a size 16—believes attitudes are slowly changing. “But people are still frightened of the word fat. I see my models as being normal-sized rather than outsize; it's the skinny girls who are different.”
SIZEWISE: If there was any doubt that the waif look is dead, this month's Seventeen magazine proves it. The issue has a six-page layout on fashions that fit teens size 14 and up.
Marie Moss, fashion director, says the feature was done in response to reader requests for realistic clothes.
“We were feeling sort of frustrated because we were getting letters and calls from girls wearing size 14 and 16 who said they couldn't find anything cool to wear,” Moss said. “They wanted the same camisoles and flared boot-leg pants other teen-agers were wearing.
“In the (wholesale) market, there was a buzz about plus sizes, particularly for teen-agers, and we wanted to show it in a story with plus-size models.”
Bongo sportswear is among the manufacturers offering jeans in sizes 16, 18 and 20, and other sportswear designers are following. Other resources include Necessary Objects, Free People, Benetton and b.i.y.a.y.c.d.a. (Believe in Yourself and You Can Do Anything). Even the intimate-apparel market is starting to come around, with lines such as Rene Rofe offering camisoles and other looks in larger sizes, Moss said.
The special-occasion market is also expanding. “Last year for prom we started seeing more sizes, and not just oversize ugly dresses with lots of beading, but slinky, Oscar-worthy dresses,” Moss said.
Not surprisingly, Seventeen had a hard time coming up with teenage plus-size models and had to audition a few on its own. “Most of the modeling agencies won't see these girls. We went to high schools and stopped people on the street. For one, it was her first job ever,” Moss said.
Will Seventeen keep it up? Moss answers with a qualified “yes.” The magazine usually photographs fashion layouts from samples, which traditionally come in sizes 6 or 8, but will keep a watch on the plus- size market, she said.
Moss expects that many more resources will be offering sizes 2 to 20 a year from now and hopes they'll be sold in juniors departments so that “girls can use the same dressing rooms and don't have to go to their mother's section of the store.”
For years, catwalk shows have featured uncommonly slim models. Fashion has seen the lanky and lithe supermodels; the waif look; and even the emaciated, desperate look of the controversial heroin chic. Models, it would seem, have to be skinny to be successful.
But this is changing: a growing number of fashion and cosmetic-house manufacturers are turning their backs on thin, boyish models in favour of curvaceously feminine full-figure gals.
The Swedish clothes retailer Hennes & Mauritz has moved in this direction, swapping posters featuring lanky top model Georgina Grenville for the buxom Sophie Dahl.
“We have to think of our female customers,” said H&M press spokeswoman Kristina Stenvinkel. Most women could no longer identify with slim-hipped supermodels with washboard stomachs.
The negative effect the conventional feminine ideal and aspiring to it can have on sensitive women has been a hotly debated topic in Sweden, Stenvinkel pointed out.
The debate was fuelled by revelations that Sweden's Crown Princess Victoria suffers from an eating disorder.
H&M wants to go against the convention of thin models by featuring radiant models who happen to weigh more than your average supermodel and thus look more like the company's customers, Stenvinkel explained.
Johannes Roehr, of the Düsseldorf-based advertising agency BBDO, believes this strategy will work for Hennes & Mauritz.
“Young women would have to be veritable ‘superwomen' if they wanted to meet all of society's expectations.”
Women are not only expected to be successful at work, says Roehr. They are also expected to be perfectly turned out while at the same time not neglecting their maternal duties.
That is the result of a study the agency carried out with psychologists.
Today's women, says Roehr, are overwhelmed by all these expectations.
“And advertising has failed to give women role models that might show a way out of that straightjacket of ideals.”
The British cosmetics chain The Body Shop has also joined the movement away from the perceived need for women to have perfect figures.
The firm has launched a campaign drawing attention to “body and consciousness.” The Body Shop has installed a life-size female figure called Ruby—a plump, curvaceous woman—in its 72 shops as a part of this campaign.
Brochures distributed in Body Shop stores feature a photo of Ruby on the cover, accompanied by the following slogan: “There are eight supermodels in the world—and three billion women who don't look like them.”
The brochure contrasts the idealised woman from fashion plates with real women and calls for women to develop a new ideal based on confidence and self-respect.
Doctors have long warned against the negative ramifications of Western ideals of feminine beauty.
An estimated two to four percent of women in Germany between the ages of 18 and 35 suffer from bulimia, said Professor Helmut Remschmidt from the University Clinic at Marburg.
In addition, an average of one girl in 150 or 200 suffers from anorexia, the professor said.
Surveys reveal that 62 percent of girls between the ages of 13 and 19 were not satisfied with their weight, with their numbers rising as they got older.
“Eating disorders generally can be traced to causes related to the individual, but socio-cultural facts most certainly play an important role,” said Remschmidt.
Advertising is increasingly turning to less-than-thin beauties.
German fashion designer Wolfgang Joop, who has openly criticised the industry for using what he called scrawny and ugly models, chose the heavier Alek Wek of Sudan to sell his jeans line.
Department stores are also reacting.
Various manufacturers are now offering collections called “Big is beautiful” or “XL-Collection” tailored to women less trim than your average catwalk girl.
“We will expand these areas in order to meet the needs of our clients,” said Thorsten Rolfes of C&A, one of Europe's largest providers of women's ready-to-wear.
American fashion designer Calvin Klein, always quick to spot a trend, has created a fragrance for this new woman.
It is called Contradiction, and is meant to underscore all facets of femininity.
All this publicity for real women has apparently already led German men to see women a bit differently.
According to a study commissioned by the German women's magazine Freundin, men no longer consider big breasts, long legs and a mane of long hair to be the most important female attributes.
Instead, men queried cited naturalness (78 percent), a sense of humour (59 percent), charisma (54 percent) and a confident manner as positive feminine attributes.—Sapa-DPA in Hamburg, Germany.
Mode is a fashion magazine that won't list fashion do's and don'ts, only do's and dares. It won't run stories on dieting, and it will challenge the idea that strong appetites are unfeminine.
“We've thrown such a curveball into fashion,” says Michele Weston, the fashion and style editor of Mode, a year-old magazine for women who wear size 12 and up.
Last March, Mode debuted as a quarterly fashion magazine devoted to “style beyond size.” Its shows women with ample thighs, rounded bellies and curvy bottoms wearing up-to-the-minute fashion in sophisticated photo layouts. Weston and her team of photographers offer unapologetic, upbeat and sexy images of women of all sizes, and of all races and ages.
Within the fashion and publishing industries, such a formula has long been considered risky. But after 10 well-received issues, Weston says Mode has proved that the 65 million full-figured women in the United States appreciate fashion as much as their smaller counterparts do.
“Style is not a size. Style is style,” says Weston, who was in Dallas recently to present a Mode style show and seminar at Saks Fifth Avenue. She showed women how to build wardrobes, how not to fear matte jersey and how to dress to emphasize their body's best features, not necessarily to feature fashion's best trends.
In its short lifespan, Mode has been showered with accolades from readers and the publishing industry, but it has also drawn some criticism recently for having models look “too thin.”
Other plus-size magazines have come before Mode, just as plus-size clothes have long been available in stores. But Mode arrived just as plus-size clothing went upscale. Stores now carry larger-size versions of Anne Klein II, Dana Buchman, Tamotsu and Eileen Fisher, and lines such as Marina Rinaldi, a plus-size label from Max Mara.
Mode's statistics are impressive. The magazine's circulation shot up 50 percent in a year, from 250,000 to 375,000. Mode quickly went from quarterly publication to monthly—a year ahead of schedule. Grateful readers have sent nearly 1,000 letters a month to the magazine, says Nancy Nadler LeWinter, co-publication director. And the magazine has on average 70 pages of ads per issue from retailers such as Lord & Taylor and Nordstrom, and fashion and beauty companies such as Maybelline, Revlon and Givenchy.
The publishers have licensed the Mode name to Vogue patterns. They're developing a fashion book series and a children's book, and a television project is in the not-too-distant future.
In August, Mode Girl will arrive on newsstands. The magazine will be “the first multiethnic, multicultural, multisize” teen magazine, says Nadler LeWinter. Next year, Mode Girl will continue as a quarterly.
A survey in the winter issue of Mode asked readers to describe their beauty purchases and send in receipts because “as ridiculous as it sounds, there are still fashion and beauty companies who don't believe full-figured women care about their appearance,” she says. The magazine expected about 500 replies. It got more than 4,000.
The stacks of mail are welcome validation, but Adweek and Advertising Age added an industry stamp of approval by naming Mode the best launch of 1997.
Such confirmation helps move the world toward what Nadler LeWinter calls “size democracy.” Throughout their first year, she and her partner, Julie Lewit-Nirenberg, had to overcome a number of stereotypes about their full-figured readers.
“There was a presumption that she was demographically different. That presumption has lessened dramatically,” says Nadler LeWinter. Now advertisers understand that full-figured women are “exactly the same as their thinner counterparts. But in the beginning, no one wanted to realize that this is the majority of American women.”
“I think there has been an enormous attitude shift,” says Nadler LeWinter. She says traditional fashion magazines motivate readers with an image that is unreachable. “I think that is not accurate anymore. I think women are far more motivated by achievable fantasy, not unrealistic fantasy.”
Weston also has seen increased acceptance of full-figured women. She says the number of plus-size clothing companies has increased from 200 to 2,000 in 10 years. And when she tells designers, “If you make it, they will come and buy,” nowadays they tend to believe her. One manufacturer added a clingy, bias-cut dress on her recommendation. She also has seen a jump in the number of plus-size model divisions at agencies.
“What we see on the runway are girls' bodies. What we see in real life are women's bodies,” says Weston, who measures models and “road tests” garments to make sure the models fit into clothes that are comfortable to wear.”
A few weeks ago, the first darts were aimed at Mode. A New York Times article suggested that in Mode's recent issues, the models had shrunk to almost-skinny.
Nadler LeWinter insists, though, that the magazine doesn't use non-plus-size models or clothes or shoot with special “thinning” camera angles.
“We would never do that. It's not who we are,” she says, acknowledging, though, that one picture a few issues back featured a model who "shot too thin.”
“That shoot, we learned something. A couple of readers wrote us, too,” she says. The March and April issues again feature models in a range of sizes, ages and races.
Weston says the criticism wasn't unexpected because few people could believe full-figured women could look so good.
“We are retraining the eye. We haven't seen size 12 and up look the way Mode models look,” she says. “With amazing hair and makeup, great clothes, photographers and accessories, the whole package comes together. And visually, it works.”
She isn't letting the critics dampen her spirits, however. Weston says the time has arrived when more than one model “ideal” can exist.
“We've broken from a size 4 to a size 14. We've moved miles!”
NEW YORK (AP)—There's nothing abbreviated about Emme Aronson except her name.
Professionally, she's known simply as Emme (pronounced Emmy).
And she wants to show that big is beautiful.
She stands 5 feet 11 inches tall, weighs 185 pounds and wears a size 16 dress. She no longer diets, and steps on the scale only when she visits the doctor.
As a top moneymaker in the plus-size division (size 14 and larger) at Ford Models, she commands at least $5,000 a day for her big-time beauty. She's also host of E! Entertainment's Fashion Emergency, where celebrity hair and makeup stylists and designers like Nicole Miller, Cynthia Rowley and Tommy Hilfiger perform makeovers before millions of viewers.
“I know I have curves happening, and I've tried everything to become this ideal. But my body won't go there,” she says.
In 1994, Emme posed as a reclining nude as one of People magazine's 50 most beautiful people in the world. Two years later, she graced a billboard in New York's Times Square for Liz Claiborne's plus-size line.
Today she is spokesperson for Playtex Body Language Lingerie, has her own Web site for fan mail, and runs a one-woman crusade for accepting your size right now, even if you never lose those 20 pounds.
“I think Emme is the first plus-size model to become a celebrity, a supermodel. Just by her first name, we get fan mail from all over the world,” says Patty Sicular, who books Emme's modeling assignments.
Not that it came easy.
HUMILIATIONS
Well before 1997, when she was invited to speak before a Congressional subcommittee about eating disorders, Emme endured her own humiliations. In her book, True Beauty, written with Daniel Paisner (Perigee, 1998, $14), she describes “the most clarifying moment of my young life.” It was at age 12, when her stepfather drew in black marker on the parts of her body he thought she needed to reduce.
From ages 18 to 27, Emme suffered through bouts of compulsive overeating.
“I was constantly failing with diets,” says Emme, 34. “Every single Jan. 1, I always gave myself a new one.”
Eventually, “the little light bulb went off,” she says. “When I got my first few paychecks for modeling, I went to a therapist and was presented with the challenge: ‘You can either feel bad about yourself or not.' I threw out the concept (of dieting).”
That's not all she tossed.
“I stood in my kitchen with a huge plastic bag and got rid of all the diet powder, diet candy bars, and protein packs that I had tucked in little niches,” she says.
Her modeling career wasn't nearly as deliberate.
“I fell into it. It wasn't a major goal,” says Emme, who was born in Manhattan, grew up in Saudi Arabia and graduated from Syracuse University. Today she lives in a northern New Jersey suburb with her husband, ad executive Phillip Aronson.
PLUS-SIZE DIVISION
Around 1988, a friend mentioned a new plus-size division at Ford Models.
“I was size 12 and thought, ‘what the heck.' It took two years of working as a massage therapist and marketing director for a real estate firm, and also trying to have people see my book as a model.”Emme cites statistics that suggest her views speak to an increasing segment of the population: 49% of adult American women—or 35 million—wear a size 14 or larger, and by the turn of the century, that number will rise to 50 million.
But the fashion industry has been slow to respond. Styles for large women traditionally have been limited, although more designers are catering to the consumers they previously overlooked.
Sicular tells Emme: “I don't see you as a plus-size woman. I just see you as a beautiful woman.”
Emme agrees. “That's the point. The whole concept of beauty comes in different shapes and sizes. It's not Einstein's theory. It's a logical thing.”
Emme has flaunted her Botticelli proportions on the pages of Glamour, Ladies' Home Journal, and the plus-size magazine, Mode. In 1997, she was named one of Glamour's 10 Women of the Year. That same year, she was selected as one of Ladies' Home Journal's Most Fascinating Women.
“I've been in Swedish Elle and on the cover of New Woman Australia. Other countries don't have that big of a problem having someone above size 6 on their cover.”
Here, she says, “there is a glass ceiling.”
Doctors have hit out at the media and advertisers for encouraging anorexia by portraying skinny supermodels as the beauty ideal instead of ‘more buxom wenches.' The British Medical Association's annual conference in Cardiff voted overwhelmingly for a motion condemning the media obsession with ultra thin supermodels.
Dr. Muriel Broome, a former director of public health, said “the constant image of very thin models” encouraged girls to develop eating disorders. “We urge the media to be more responsible and show more buxom wenches,” she said.
The conference heard an impassioned speech from Dr Ian Bogle, a Liverpool GP, about his daughter's struggle with the eating disorder.
He said that around 10 years ago, when she was in her early 20s, his daughter's weight plummeted from around nine stone to five stone. [One stone=14 lbs. or 6.3 kg—HSG]
He admitted that he had felt powerless to help her, even though he was a GP.
DEVASTATING
“The devastating effects on the sufferer as their weight plummets, the depression associated with loss of self esteem and the black despair will be well understood by you, a medical audience,” he told the conference.
“What hopefully most of you won't have experienced is the consequences on the family—hopelessness, disbelief and guilt. These are not transient effects. In our house it lasted some five years.”
ANOREXICS SUFFER LONG-TERM HEALTH PROBLEMS AND SOME DIE
Dr. Bogle, who is standing for the top job of chair of the BMA's council, said his family had been lucky. “The family has even been strengthened; the sufferer is now happy and apparently cured,” he said.
“Others have not been so lucky. Suicide, a lifetime's recrimination and divorces are not rare.
“I can tell you it is a stark fact that the pursuit of the waif-like figure and the perception that only slimness is attractive and desirable as portrayed in many forms in the media is a major contributory factor in young people developing this disease.”
POWERLESS
Speaking at a press conference after the speech, Dr. Bogle said he had spoken publicly about his experiences to show that even he, an experienced and high profile GP, had been powerless to prevent his daughter and his whole family from suffering.
Dr. Bogle said that, although the problem developed 10 years ago, he would not have been able to speak about his anguish in public until the last three years.
“In severe cases, the idea of suicide is never far away and the low point is seeing somebody so depressed that this is on the agenda,” he said.
He added that people sometimes found it hard to understand how a family could watch a child lose so much weight and appear to accept it.
“If you have girls of that age and try to challege them about things in their life it is a very hazardous thing to do,” he said.
He added that his family only pulled through after seeking specialist help and after realising that no one member was personally to blame.
MEDIA OBSESSION
The BMA overwhelmingly backed a motion condemning the media for its obsession with portraying young, thin girls as role models.
Dr. Vivienne Nathanson, head of research at the BMA, said the association would explore the use of different body types in the media and planned to talk to television companies about a more responsible attitude.
“There are a variety of human forms and we should not be going just for one type of body shape as that propagates the idea that only one type is successful and desirable.”
She added that being too thin was probably more dangerous than being overweight and that anorexics, once they had fallen foul of the disease, needed life-long support.
Meanwhile, the Advertising Standards Authority has warned of unsubstantiated adverts for slimming and beauty products.
It said that, although the number of acceptable adverts had improved over the last year, there had only been a marginal improvement in adverts for slimming and beauty products.
It started with anger.
For years, women berated the clothing industry for ignoring their needs and refusing to put creative energy into clothes that are flattering, contemporary, chic, sexy, affordable…and large.
Without sexy lingerie, demure evening clothes and whimsical sportswear, plus-size women lacked the full complement of stylistic tools that size 8 women enjoyed. Large women could not control the image they presented to the world.
As a result, the nasty stereotypes about them flourished: They were sloppy. They didn't care how they looked. They wouldn't spend money on clothes.
Seventh Avenue mostly ignored the criticism from the size 16s of America. (The average American woman, by the way, is approximately 5 feet 4 and 145 pounds.) Economics, however, began to persuade the industry to rethink its assumptions. The $26 billion plus-size market was too precious a prize to ignore. In the past few years, upscale retailers and bargain-basement manufacturers alike have gradually responded with more varied options.
Lane Bryant, however, was the crucial missing link.
Lane Bryant is the plus-size store of the middle class and of middle America, the chain that, more than any other, defines the way sizes 16, 18 and higher are perceived. With its broad reach and almost 800 stores, Lane Bryant could single-handedly transform the fashion image of full-figured women or keep them mired in a reputation for frumpiness. The company, part of the Limited Inc.'s $9.2 billion retail empire, was founded almost 100 years ago by Lena Bryant.
As recently as two years ago, its image was that of stores trapped in the past. Sales were either dropping or stagnating. And Lane Bryant, with net sales of $907 million a year, was seeing its sizable market share decline.
“We really took a hard look at ourselves about three years ago,” says Jill Dean, president of Lane Bryant. “We knew in speaking with our customers that they were not happy with what was being offered.”
Lane Bryant executives had to update their products to appeal to customers who demanded greater style and quality. In order to increase market share they had to target the growing numbers of young women who wear size 14 and up. Yet for all the challenges these goals presented, catering to a lucrative market would be the easy part.
Most difficult, Lane Bryant bore the burden of transforming perceptions.
“Economically, we're a market they want to tap into,” says plus-size customer Allison Lewis-Smith of Chevy Chase, Md., of fashion retailers. “But I don't think they see the plus-size woman as attractive.”
Most high-end designer merchandise is cut no larger than a size 12. In the plus-size world, trends materialize long after they have run their course in the mainstream collections.
“We were offering pretty inexpensive clothes to the masses, but we also were the only game in town,” says Chris Hanson, Lane Bryant's vice-president of marketing. A plus-size woman went to Lane Bryant, not because the garments were so compelling, but because “she had nowhere else to go.”
As the large-size market increased—it's the fastest growing segment of the women's apparel business—so did the demands of customers. (Today, sales of plus-size fashion represent about 25 percent of total sales; they have the potential to represent 60 percent.) “She won't have to settle for the space in the store upstairs next to the bathroom tucked away in the corner,” Dean says. At the high end, Saks Fifth Avenue expanded and put a gloss on its Salon Z, where it sells plus-size designer clothes. Less expensive retailers such as Target also stepped in, while catalogues including Land's End and Ulla Popken pursued plus-size customers more aggressively. Lane Bryant began to feel the squeeze.
Lane Bryant pulled in outside talent from brands that had undergone similar transformations. It looked to Sears, which had slowly been convincing customers it was more than a purveyor of appliances and tools, and to Oil of Olay, which dusted off its image as a drab beauty potion for matrons.
The prospect of change, Hanson says, “was like turning around the Queen Mary.”
Lane Bryant also wanted to be considered a player in the fashion industry. It needed to be seen as a place where shoppers could expect to find contemporary styles. It needed buzz.
So last summer, the company staged its debut Manhattan fashion show. The presentation was held in June, safely distanced from the April and November competition of Seventh Avenue designers and exceedingly thin models.
The company gathered a group of plus-size models, focused on the company's fashion offerings and drenched the entire presentation in a shower of self-confidence.
“The clothes were so beautiful, the hair, the makeup. The atmosphere felt like a concert. People never sat down once they saw how sexy and vamped we were,” says model Angellika Morton, who was in the show. “People were roaring and screaming and loving our attitude on the runway.”
The clothes were sexy and contemporary: A fitted bodysuit had sheer insets, a black leather blazer topped white jeans, lush scarves were layered over a pinstriped pantsuit and lace peeked from low-cut necklines.
In short, Lane Bryant broke from its formula. “It's not an enlightened territory,” Hanson says. “When people ‘know' a business very well, they have all sorts of rules about the large-size business: You give them black and navy. Don't do anything that hugs the body…Large women don't dry-clean. There were a lot of preconceived ideas about the customer—all negative.”
The company has introduced the Venezia Jeans Clothing Co., a collection of jeans and sportswear that is aimed at a younger customer. It will be promoted in another flashy fashion presentation in August.
The Venezia collection “will take cues from a variety of different sources starting with fashion trade shows both in Europe and (the U.S.),” says Monique Keegan, who has been design director for Lane Bryant for about two years. “We do a great deal of retail shopping; we look for inspiration from magazines. Then, by the time the designer collections come out, we look at that for confirmation. We don't want to be lagging behind…
Allison Lewis-Smith, a 43-year-old Lane Bryant customer, is an attorney and a business consultant.
“They are coming out with the most unbelieveable lingerie,” she says. “Having access to beautiful lingerie does a lot for the image that a young woman has of herself.”
But in categories such as career clothes, Lewis-Smith believes the company falls short with offerings that are too limited. Both she and Morton also note that as the company has embraced sportswear trends with vigor, it has neglected its more mature customers and the needs of professional young women.
Addressing a consumer is easy. It's a matter of supply and demand. The cultural shift, however, is still a dream.
“The large woman is as stylish and sophisticated and smart as any thin woman,” Hanson says.
Lane Bryant executives finally are able to successfully articulate that message to each other. Now they're struggling to make the rest of us listen.
Fashion marketers are beginning to cater to a customer they long spurned: the overweight teen-age girl.
In New York, the Wilhelmina Models agency is for the first time running ads seeking large-size teen-age models.
“It's a new market for us. Our clients never wanted the plus-size teen before, but it's a huge market,” said Peggy Imm, the print booking agent for David & Lee Model and Talent Agency in Cleveland.
Imm said that because the requests have changed, her agency is looking at girls who in the past would never have been considered for modeling assignments.
“I think there is a strong market for that type of teen. They're buyers.”
Marketers are agreeing.
A new magazine called Girl, being launched next month, will target teens of “all shapes, all sizes.” In Los Angeles, jeans maker Michael Caruso & Co. has added sizes 14 to 24 to its teen-oriented Bongo jeans line.
This fall, large-size retailing veteran Lane Bryant plans its first pitch expressly aimed at the college crowd, including a New York fashion show of its revamped casual line, Venezia Jeans. Clothing Co. Among the five celebrity “V-Girls” on the runway will be actress Liv Tyler's full-figured 19-year-old sister, Mia, and the Women's National Basketball Association star Kym Hampton, who wears a size 16.
The Limited Inc. unit also will set up tents on college campuses and hand out discount coupons and credit-card applications to students who have gained the…“freshman 15” pounds.
The main impetus for all this activity has been the recent strong showing of big-sized women's fashions, sales of which now account for a quarter of the entire women's apparel market. Sales in the “plus-size” category, or sizes 16 and up, have grown 20 percent since 1994, to $23 billion last year, according to the NPD Grounp, a marketing information company in Port Washington, N.Y.
NEXT LOGICAL NICHE
Big-size teens were the next logical niche within this niche, marketers say—particularly in light of demographic and health statistics attesting to the size of the market. “There's a huge swell in the population, and there's a lot more opportunity,” says Chris Daniel, vice president of trend merchandising at Dayton Hudson Corp.'s Mervyn's California chain.
The total number of girls ages 10 to 19 is rising, according to the Census Bureau, as the latest baby boom generation reaches adolescence…. People in the fashion business long held that big women—and teens—didn't want stylish, body-revealing clothes. Designers were especially loath to court such customers, for fear of losing cachet with trend-setters. The sweat pants and tent dresses began to give way to more fashionable apparel only when the industry recognized the dimensions of the untapped plus-size market.
FASHIONS THAT FIT
Today, that market also includes teens like Leah Johnson, a 16-year-old from Jacksonville, Fla., who says it is high time apparel makers took notice. Johnson, who wears size 14 or 16, says she feels no need to emulate a reed-slim role model. “I'm really happy with myself,” she says. “I don't want to be a size 5 or something.” But she still has difficulties finding fashions that fit, and has earmarked an entire day this week to shop for jeans. “It's just a pain.”
Apparel makers and retailers are taking note of such complaints. A few fledgling design houses like Kiyonna Klothing in Los Angeles now target plus-size teens. Macy's, a unit of Federated Department Stores Inc., has begun adding larger sizes to its Style & Co. private-label casual line, including items with teen appear like twill pants and woven shirts. Meanwhile, Gap Inc. this year started carrying women's jeans and khakis in size 16 at all of its 1600-plus stories. (One style of size-16 Gap jeans fits a 34-inch waist and 47-inch hips.)
And because feet are growing along with waists and hips, shoe company Candie's Inc. in Purchase, N.Y., recently added sizes 11 and 12 to such popular teen styles as platform sneakers and wood sandals. The company also boosted inventory in sized 9 and 10. The moves have added about 10 percent to Candie's sales, says Neil Cole, chairman and chief executive officer…
Income: $70,000 (last year)
Health Insurance: $118.34/mo.
Rent: $780/mo.
Utilities: $25/mo.
Phone: $116/mo.
Food: $600/mo.
Transportation: $60/mo.
So she was walking down the street one day in Washington, D.C. “and this man told me we're doing a movie and Art Garfunkel is the star and do you want to make $100 a day? At the time I was a receptionist at a hair salon making $150 a week so I said, Of course, and I played a prostitute which I didn't play very well but I tried to do my best.”
The next thing Angellika knew, she was $700 richer.
“I got seven days of film work and I'm 18 and in college and my mom didn't even know I was making this extra money and so I bought these shoes for $129 and I told her they were $29.99 and she said, Wow, you're really managing your money well. I'm thinking I'm $700 up on her but she'll never know.”
This was in 1987. “Then the guy from the movie said, You should pursue modeling. I was a size four then, 115 pounds, no boobs. So I went up to New York to Sue Charney's Faces Agency and I was working the next day, the whole summer. I became like this catalogue queen for Target, Sears. That's when I was a straight-size model.”
She hit at the right time. “It was the ethnic look. There was all this talk about how biracial models were invading the modeling industry.” Angellika, who is Italian-black American, has a red-haired, green-eyed mother from Milan.
“While I was modeling, I was also studying child psychology at Georgetown University. So there I am on the shuttle commuting to New York,” reading child behavior textbooks and throwing back “Coca-Cola and Ruffles potato chips and gum drops—that's all I ate.”
Then her “grandmother's hips started popping out.” She got into plus-size modeling. Once again, she found herself at the right place at the right time: “big-size clothing really boomed two years ago.” Angellika, now a Ford model—“my dream”—is currently all over New York bus kiosks on a huge poster for Mode magazine. “I'm in this slick dress. I'm all out there.”
Angellika said about $50,000 of her $70,000 income comes from modeling—$187.50 an hour. The rest is from investments. “I have stock in my favorite drink, Coca-Cola. My father taught me if you buy stock, to buy what you like the most.” Angellika's father was a big success in the music business. She grew up in great comfort with a lawyer-stepfather, a mother who didn't have to work, two sisters and a brother, and a live-in housekeeper in a l5-room house on Embassy Row in Washington, D.C.
“My parents may have had money, but they raised us to work.” Though when Angellika went to intern at a day-care center while studying for her master's, “I never got past the door. I wasn't ready to give myself to society. I wanted to make money.”
Angellika said she spends about $5000 a year on clothes—Emmanuel Ungaro, Ferragamo handbags, Chanel shoes. “But I shop outlet, sample stores.” Sometimes $100 a day goes toward food because her best friend and hairdresser, André, seduces her to go to Spartina, 2 Seven 7, Savannah's. “We like to eat where we can be seen and I figure if you want to meet men who have money, you've got to go where they can afford to eat. The man I'm looking for must be making more than me. I'm not taking care of any man. I don't do McDonald's. Recently I went out with a model, he's older, very refreshing. He didn't ask me, What do you want to do? He made the reservations. He called the day of the date to confirm. He ordered my meal. I like being a princess. I have no shame. I love that a man just takes control. Get married and give up my modeling career? Oh, no, I still want my own money. You still have to sneak the handbags. They give you $1000. That's like one outfit. But, as you know, you need the shoes and the handbag. That's an additional $2000.”
[Oh well, no one ever said that a model's personality had to be beautiful.—HSG]
Toronto's Liis Windischmann, 27, is Canada's first plus-size model to get the cover of a major U.S. fashion magazine, says Jonathan Furlong of Plus Figure Models in Toronto. Windischmann, who has been represented by Plus Figure Models during the past five years, is featured on the September cover of the New York-based, plus-size fashion magazine Mode.
Furlong says his agency is promoting Windischmann as Canada's answer to Emme, a U.S. supermodel in the plus-size fashion market.
Windischmann, who is currently on a modelling assignment in Germany, has agents in London, New York, Chicago, Dallas, San Francisco and Miami. She currently commands $2,000 a day.
Furlong says the size 14–16 model “has a wonderful presence. She can convey a variety of moods to the camera, from sultry to the girl next door.”
A model is to quit the catwalk at the age of 18, blaming the “rude and impersonal” nature of the fashion world and the ceaseless pressure to be thin. Sarah Thomas, who has spent two years modelling at fashion shows in Paris, New York and Milan, is to concentrate on cosmetic contracts.
Speaking from her home in Swardeston, Norfolk, yesterday Miss Thomas branded the fashion world as sleazy and obsessed with a culture of thinness. she said: “You travel around all these countries to go to castings and stand in a queue of hundreds of girls. Then somebody takes one look at your portfolio, closes it, hands it back, says ‘No thanks' and doesn't even look up to say hello. It's so impersonal. As for Milan, I can't stand it. You have a young driver and he is usually asking you questions about other models. It's all a bit sleazy.”
Miss Thomas, the face of the cosmetics company Cover Girl, claimed that drink, drugs and eating problems added to the often unsavoury atmosphere of international modelling. Young women were going into modelling thinner and smaller than ever before, she said, leading to her willowy 5ft 10in frame being considered over the top by some.
She said: “You see so many horrible things backstage it just makes your job so much harder. They want you to be skinnier. I remember trying something on and it was a bit tight on the hips and someone came up and slapped them. That is hard to take. It is so incredibly rude.”
She said she believed that she had survived the pressures of the catwalk because of her stable home life. She said: “Coming home puts it all into perspective.”
NEW YORK—The phrase “thin is in” was not the guiding sentiment at a recent New York fashion show where Lane Bryant debuted, to ecstatic crowds, its new Venezia collection for plus-sized young women.
The clothing line is a direct response to demands from women age 17 to 25 who say they're tired of dowdy tent dresses and sweat pants. Indeed, the business of outfitting these young plus-sized women in more fashionable clothes is increasing 16 percent every year.
“Our business has really been strong,” says Chris Hanson of Lane Bryant. “Everything we've put into the store that has been sexy, fashionable, trendy is flying out of stores.”
That overwhelming response is making others in the fashion world take notice. Recently, the Wilhelmina modeling agency and Mode magazine held a model search for young women size 10 and above. It was a first for the agency.
Hundreds of young women vied for the chance to redefine the image of beauty—not easy when the public is still bombarded with images of waif-like models.
But plus-size teen models such as Valerie Lefkowitz say they are determined to help break new ground and give big teens their pride back.
“Teens feel so left out, and they're not really happy with themselves because people say, ‘You need to be skinny,'” Lefkowitz says. “But you don't need to be. You just need to be happy with yourself.”
Capitalizing on that new sense of self is Girl magazine, the first multiethnic, multicultural and multisize teen magazine.
Girl's Nancy Lewinter says the magazine “will really say to a teen, ‘You're great the way you are, honey. It's perfect.'”
They're young, sexy, edgy, high-profile young women, some of whom are British and some of whom sing.
They're also size 14—at least.
They're the Girls, the thinking and eating woman's answer to the Spice Girls. They made their official debut today at a Lane Bryant runway show in Manhattan, as they launch the Venezia Jeans Clothing Company, a hip, young collection from Lane Bryant, which specializes in so-called plus-size clothing.
The clothes, and the V Girls, are part of a wave of change taking over the fashion industry.
It's only been during the past few years, with the launch of the plus-size fashion magazine Mode and the skyrocketing career of plus-size model Emme, that the fashion industry discovered larger women, those who wear size 12 and up. All 65 million of them in the U.S., all of whom need clothing.
This summer, the industry's big surprise has been the discovery of plus-size girls—members of Generation Y, who constitute the fastest-growing segment of the plus-size market. According to research done by Lane Bryant, the number of plus-size young women in their teens and early 20s has grown by 16 percent annually since 1993.
So this fall, Mode magazine, whose slogan is “Style Beyond Size,” will launch Girl, a sister publication dedicated to younger women. Bongo, the hip denim line for teens, is launching a plus-sized division.
“I think for many people, Emme paved the way, she was a good starting point—and now the market for plus models is booming. With Mode, which started getting great photographers to shoot real fashions, and everyone could see these women shot beautifully in clothes that fit them—everyone woke up,” says Kristi McCormick, director of special projects at Wilhelmina Models, which represents plus-size stars like Natalie [Laughlin], a model who's been featured on no fewer than six Times Square billboards—long the exclusive domain of the superskinny like Kate Moss.
“The demand for this kind of thing is such that we opened our plus division with four models only a few years ago, and now we're booking over 100 girls.”
And the boom is continuing. Mode and Wilhelmina Models, one of New York's bigger and more powerful modeling agencies, next week kick off a model search for plus-size models that starts at size 10, age 15.
And Lane Bryant brings in Venezia, and the V Girls.
The V Girls include Mia Tyler, sister of Liv, daughter of Steve, and an actress and director in the world of independent film. She looks remarkably like her sister, just bigger.
Two of the V Girls are in fact plus-size models—but Emme, the size-16 blonde from Bergen County who's been lauded for convincing many that a plus-size supermodel was not a contradiction in terms, isn't among them.
Emme, for all her trailblazing, is seen in the industry as your mother's supermodel—not on the cutting edge, into the TV show-hosting rather than runway-strutting part of her career.
So instead, the model V Girls include Sophie Dahl, a 6-foot-2-inch 20-year old who despite her voluptuous size has appeared on mainstream European runways, and Kate Dillon. Dillon, who appeared on the covers of Mademoiselle and Glamour back in her regular model days, quit the business, gained 40 pounds, and came back as a plus-size model. (All this and she's only 22.)
Kym Hampton, a size-16 New York Liberty player whom many remember for belting out the national anthem at the Knicks-Heat semifinal, is “Sporty” V Girl. R&B singer Kelly Price and MTV reporter and Peabody winner Abbie Kearse round out the group.
The women are getting a lot of attention.
“All of a sudden everybody wants to get their hands on me!” exclaims Mia Tyler, who's been doing interviews and television appearances for about a month in support of the Venezia launch.
The V Girls represent her first try at modeling, although she is now meeting with folks at Wilhelmina to discuss continuing this new career after the V Girls. Meanwhile, she says her dad and sister will be at the runway show to see her debut.
“I grew up in New Hampshire, and everybody's kind of big in New Hampshire,” she said.
“So I was always okay with myself. But
