Learning from Lesleigh: Languages of Body Compensation and the Legacy of Fashion Plus
“How can I be anything but a fat, middle-class white queer woman from the Midwest?” Lesleigh asked. My friend and I were interviewing her in a coffee shop in Rapid City, South Dakota for our racial and intersectional literacy project, CHOOSE. “These identities all inform who I am,” she continued. “But how people react to my physicality is especially fundamental to my understanding of how they see me, and then my understanding of myself.”
My conversation with Lesleigh raised my consciousness about how, for everyday women in America, the general body standard is quite narrow: skinny bodies, and only skinny bodies. Lesleigh suggested that “the skinny standard” could be credited to the fashion industry. After all, high-end brands like Gucci and Chanel, as of 2011, only allow their female models to be a maximum of 130 pounds; in an interview with The New York Post, one model confessed how “[we] go through hell to stay skinny,”and that other models frequently eat cotton balls to stay within the industry’s skinny standard — cotton balls expand in the stomach to make you feel full, without actually being full. By promoting such a singular image of what the female body is supposed to be, how are plus-size women like Lesleigh, who dominate 67% of the market as of 2013, supposed to make sense of their bodies?
One of high-fashion’s first attempt at celebrating plus-size bodies was Vogue magazine’s “Fashion Plus” feature. Although “Fashion Plus” only lasted from 1986 to 1988 — until Anna Wintour, who notoriously does “not like fat people,” stepped in as Editor in Chief of Vogue — it was praised for being one of the first major publications that deviated from the typical treatment of plus-size bodies in American high-fashion. This made me wonder: considering that roughly 5,435,000 million women read Vogue today, what precedent did “Fashion Plus” actually leave with its many readers back in the 80s? Is “Fashion Plus,” and other “plus-size” body positivity campaigns following its lead, actually doing the work that they suggest?
When browsing through the 1986 “Fashion Plus” issue, I was hesitant to fully embrace it. I started to notice how conditional and exceptional the plus-size modeling was. It seems to me that, to humanize “fat” female bodies, models must either apologize for their fatness through hiding their authentic bodies or compensate for it by emphasizing stereotypically “feminine” features. What’s more, I realized that this humanizing process might actually work to further distance these bodies from “normal” skinnier models, since their bodies don’t require the same apologetic measures or compensatory “female” embellishments.
On the note of apologizing for their bodies: think about it, plus-size clothing often relies on pose to “render [a model’s] fat body fashionable” by contorting it and hiding it so that it appears skinnier. For example, plus-size women are frequently promoting shapewear, such as Spanx, or posing in weight-loss transformation advertisements. They are either made invisible, through posing in ways to conceal their authentic, larger bodies, or they are made hypervisible through the constant referral to their bodies as objects in need of fixing or improvement.
Using plus-size women in this way — as props for advertising potential betterment — has contributed to some severe dehumanization: as of 2012, implicit weight bias in children ages 9 to 11 was as common as implicit racial bias is among adults. Lesleigh had recounted, tearily, that she is constantly “othered” for her weight.
In “Fashion Plus,” however, as scholar Lauren Downing Peters says, models can be supposedly “liberated” from these norms. Peters stressed how the posing in “Fashion Plus” was a noteworthy change agent: it “encompassed a manner of dressing and carrying oneself that explicitly acknowledged the constructedness of fat identity; it purported to disregard all the rules of large-size dressing, and, perhaps more importantly, undermined fatness as an identity marker that eclipsed the other elements of a woman’s personality.”
In one shoot, for example, models stand alongside Greek sculptures, mimicking their poses, symbolically stating that their beauty is timeless, too. In another shoot, the models seem to need no props or illusionistic poses: they merely stand upright and look fiercely into the camera as they showcase the latest fashion that they’re wearing. Integral to almost all of these plus-size photoshoots in “Fashion Plus” is a nod to the model’s individual personality.
To ensure that its plus-size modeling did not make “fatness,” as Peters says, eclipse “the other elements of a [model’s] personality,” I think that “Fashion Plus” instead made its models’ personalities outshine anything else about themselves. Plus-size modeling became dependent on personality and was eventually even defined by it: an editor at Vogue said “Fashion Plus’s” value is how it illustrates that beauty is not necessarily natural, but rather assumed by taking an “active stance towards the world”; meaning, models can choose how others see them — whether it’s as confident, beautiful, or sexy — by simply choosing how they pose, or, for non-models, by choosing how they present themselves to the world.
But, by having the expectation of taking an “active stance towards the world,” plus-size models also then have the expectation to showcase an extroverted personality, as if to distract from their “fatness.” It seems like plus-size models didn’t have the freedom of showcasing their personality, but rather were burdened with performing one.
This precedent, set in part by “Fashion Plus,” is evident, too, in Amy Schumer’s movie I Feel Pretty. The film is about a woman with low self-esteem who hits her head and — surprise! — is instilled with this bewildering self-confidence, which, in turn, leads her to feeling pretty. Abby Kohn writes in The New York Times, “The idea that a lack of self-confidence can be essentially bootstrapped away — that all we need to combat oppressive forces is the power of positive thinking and a flattering lipstick — is an exhausted, false fairy tale…” Kohn brings up the reality that, for many women, it takes more than a upbeat attitude to feel, or be thought of as, pretty.
In addition to being conditional on showcasing a loud personality, Lesleigh pointed out during our coffee chat in Rapid City how plus-size modeling is also conditional on elevating a model’s stereotypically feminine features. In “Fashion Plus,” the models are mostly white and curvy, and, in the arena of plus size modeling, these women are the norm because whiteness and curviness are both considered to be feminine features. Whiteness is associated with femininity because it is contrasted against blackness, which has historically been warped to be associated with masculinity. In a study of six popular, American magazines, researchers found that “Asian men and black women were underrepresented, potentially due to stereotypes that associate femininity with Asian people and masculinity with black people.”
Lesleigh said, “When I play with my gender performance — like fem it up more — I’ll wear Hello Kitty stuff and all pink and have my hair up in a cute way, or I’ll do some kind of 50s aesthetic with dark red lipstick and a cute dress and cute shoes,” she then pointed at her shiny lipstick and leopard-print jacket. “But I feel like I have more play because I have people in the past whom I can relate to and model myself off of. I know that non-white people have to carve out spaces of femininity, spaces that are traditionally open to me.”
Along with white women, curvy women are also associated with femininity because their curves allude to their sexuality and fertility — features that are stressed because “fat women” are oftentimes perceived as asexual, or as unintelligibly feminine. A few years ago, you might have seen Lane Bryant’s “#ThisBody is Made to Shine Fall 2016” advertisement. In the campaign, plus-size women read and responded to hurtful social-media comments about their bodies, such as “How did you get through the door?” and “You ruined Sports Illustrated.” As the women read, they confidently strut around and pose in lingerie, making it clear that they’re above the hate.
However, while this advertisement is more inclusive to women of color and women over a size eight, unlike “Fashion Plus,” the women are still dependent on establishing their sense of belonging through ways that skinnier models are not. In addition to their personalities being emphasized through their oftentimes sassy or humorous responses to online harassment, their curves are flashed, literally, through the lingerie that they are wearing. The advertisement isn’t even meant to advertise lingerie, but simply Lane Bryant’s fall clothing in general.
All of this is to show that, in 1986, “Fashion Plus” perhaps pioneered the type of plus-size modeling that boldly acknowledged the fat identity and attempted to dismantle it as the defining factor of a woman’s personality; yet, it also made plus-size modeling highly conditional on women having a highly legible personality and prominent feminine features to compensate for their “fatness.”
This language of compensation traveled from the world of high-fashion directly to us. It’s harmful because not only does it tell plus-size bodies that “they are not enough,” as Lesleigh said, but also, according to this language, not every plus-size woman can be accepted as beautiful by simply choosing to pose differently — for white and curvy plus-size women, perhaps, but what about women of color and non-curvy models? What about plus-size women with more introverted personalities? To first humanize and then normalize their “fat” bodies, models should not have to atone for their fatness.
“This idea that not all bodies are adequately beautiful takes a lot of time to unlearn,” Lesleigh said as we finished our coffees. “But I’m trying.”
