How an Instagram Fashion Label Redefined My Relationship with My Body
Hara, the label is a sustainable, ethical, and natural producer of bamboo intimates, made in Melbourne, Australia. I started following @hara_thelabel after a recommendation from my housemate and rapidly fell in love with the brand after buying my first piece of naturally dyed lavender bralette and shorts. But more than that, I fell in love with their Instagram content and the diversity, honesty, and openness about women’s bodies, sexuality, body hair, and period taboos.
The brand’s Instagram content has a frankness about it. It’s not ‘trying’ to be body positive in a way that many new-age marketable brands are. It stands out from lingerie brands which feature mostly thin, white bodies, with one much larger body as an outlier to show to their consumer base, ‘yes, we are progressive and inclusive’. Every single body featured in Hara’s Instagram is different in size, shape, color, and contortion. It shows stretch marks and period-stained undies, armpit hair and tummy rolls, pimply bums, and all the like. It shows the beauty and diversity of the everyday female body that is rarely seen on social media.
Hara makes me want to lounge around in my own underwear, posing for the camera without sucking in my tummy or trying to get the best angle.
There is a naturalness and intimacy to the posts, as well as a sense of empowerment and liberation with women owning and embracing their own bodies. Hara makes me want to lounge around in my own underwear, posing for the camera without sucking in my tummy or trying to get the best angle.
Research has shown that social media networking sites such as Facebook and Instagram, have a negative association with body image and eating disorders. However, body-positive Instagram content has been shown to have a positive effect on women’s body image and mood, according to an Australian study.
When there is so much negative rhetoric of the impact of Instagram and influencer culture on body acceptance and mental health, particularly amongst young girls, brands such as Hara demonstrate the potential of social media to eradicate body insecurity and fatphobia and embrace self and body love.
I am of the belief that to love oneself and one’s body fully is a radical act. My thinking around this has been largely influenced by the works of Adrienne Marie Brown’s, ‘Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good’, and ‘The Body is Not an Apology’ by Sonya Renee Taylor, which views reclaiming pleasure through self-love, particularly for historically oppressed black and brown bodies, as an act of radical self-liberation. To un-normalize body hate in a world where thinness has been glorified is a radical process.
As eloquently put by Sonya Renee Taylor,
Living in a female body, a Black body, an aging body, a fat body, a body with mental illness is to awaken daily to a planet that expects a certain set of apologies to already live on our tongues. There is a level of “not enough” or “too much” sewn into these strands of difference. — The body is not an apology, Sonya Renee Taylor
Radical self-love summons us to be our most expansive selves, knowing that the more unflinchingly powerful we allow ourselves to be, the more unflinchingly powerful others feel capable of being. Our unapologetic embrace of our bodies gives others permission to unapologetically embrace theirs. — The body is not an apology, Sonya Renee Taylor
Largely I think I have a relatively positive relationship with my body. I do not prescribe to toxic diet culture and diet ‘fads’, I exercise frequently because I love it and it makes me feel good and my body feel good. Yet, the swarm of mental negativity hits when I feel I am gaining weight I feel ‘chubby’, ‘undesirable’. I feel the want to hide in my clothes and hide my body rather than flaunt thinness when my body is feeling good.
I still have a lot of my own work to do to silence my internalized fatphobia and fear of weight gain which prevents me from living fully and freely in my own body. Ultimately, there is great power and potential of influencers, artists, the media and our own selves through internal reflection to redefine what a normal and desirable body is and move towards a place where all bodies feel free to occupy equal space in this world.
Thanks, Hara for contributing to that world and my own self-love journey.
PSA: This is in no way sponsored by Hara, nor do I have any affiliation with the brand.
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