Fat shaming through fashion: it’s time to stop it!
This article originally appeared in the May 2023 edition of the journal Comet.
Taylor Swift and I inhabit two different worlds, but there was a momentary cross-over when she hit the headlines. No one could miss seeing what was interpreted as her fatphobia in a 2022 video that she had made to accompany her new song Anti-Hero. This received such negative publicity that she publicly recanted from it and put out a new video as an apology. Nothing there that anyone tuned into the mass (let alone social) media doesn’t know already.
But there is another sort of fat-shaming that is both highly visible and – yet – so subtle that it stays totally under the public radar. I do notice it from time to time, and then fuhgeddaboudit. Until the next time. Which is now. With the announcement by a clothing designer who shall remain nameless (because they are so not alone in this department), that they have brought out a new line of their gear: a “plus size range”. Being someone who has long teetered on the fringes of Size 16, my first reaction was “Oh, good”, because I’d often admired their designs while finding them a tad tight.
But, looking at examples of this new range, appealing though they were, my second reaction kicked in. Why the hell did this set of designs have to be created specifically for those people who are – to varying degrees - larger than the standard range, which generally stops at Size 14, or L?
I ask this as a member of the legion mourning the closing of the clothing stores of the wonderful designer Nicola Waite. Let me press pause on my rant for a moment, to sing her praises. And the singing is entirely appropriate, because she was – in earlier times – an award-winning international opera singer. And to quote from her Linked-In site, she then found a new cause: “to produce cutting edge fashion using exquisite fabrics, innovative styling and polished finishes for the modern/discerning woman, irrespective of whether she is a size 8 or 22.”
It is fair to say that Ms Waite is also of a generous size. And, happily, she also proved to be a woman of initiative, and a design powerhouse. So, “frustrated with what she could find for herself, yet being a lover of ‘fashion’ per se, she launched her self-titled fashion label….in May 2000.” The rest, for a while, was history. I first discovered her store in Sydney’s Paddington some years ago, and became an instant fan. Her styles were fabulous, her fabrics sublime. Unfortunately, that combination did not come cheap. But what she also had were regular sales in her Alexandria warehouse, and – wow – did she know how to discount! The queues for those sales were legendary, and the best strategy, I discovered, was to get there very, very early, well before her doors opened, as groups were progressively allowed in. To the sheer bliss of the wealth of affordable style and choice that she offered. Sans size discrimination. We were women united by a love of her designs for all. Sadly, a few years ago she decided that it was time to close her stores. Fortunately, however, I have a wardrobe full of her clothes and – with her being ahead of her time – her designs are an advertisement for sustainability, being what are now called “forever fashions”, that just don’t date.
So, reverie over, why can’t more designers follow in her footsteps? Why are there whole stores dedicated to the larger sized when it is clear from their designs that they could look good on all sizes? And why, in department stores, do we have – hidden away somewhere discreet, behind pillars – the racks of large-sized and, sadly, often dowdy clothes?
We don’t label the small sizes “skinny size”, and it’s definitely time to lose their opposite numbers’ label of “plus size”. One size doesn’t fit all, but all sizes should have access to the same range of styles, in the same locations.
Anne Ring ©2023