An honest conversation between Cassandra Jones-McBryde & Elisa DeCarlo addressing diversity and cultural differences in the fight For Plus Size Acceptance.
I had the extreme pleasure of attending Full Figured Fashion Week™ (FFF Week) again this year in New York. FFF Week and positive events of its kind clearly are never solely about fashion. With the fact that the United States is predominately plus and still under served, not represented and often times disrespected, the need exists to create events that would cultivate the overall discussion of size acceptance from the inside out. This was well achieved by FFF Week with the addition of panel discussions that took the cause off the runway and brought to relevance the full plight of the plus size woman.
As I glanced around the room during the opening night fashion showcase , I was excited to see so many people in attendance. What surprised me was that there wasn’t a larger cultural mix of plus sized women in attendance. We are all beautiful at any size, any race and the message of size acceptance is universal. I glanced around the room and noticed Elisa DeCarlo, creator of “Diary of a Mad Fashionista“, a blog where Elisa honestly details her perspective on life as a confident and stylish fashionista. She was the only Caucasian that was part of the “Curvy Collective”, a group of bloggers that report on the events surrounding FFF Week. Elisa sat beautiful and proud, visibly excited about the fashion show she was witnessing unfold.
What I didn’t know was while I was pleased to see women at the event that looked like me-plus sized and African American, Elisa was pondering, why wasn’t there more women that looked like her- plus-sized and Caucasian? Are there truly cultural differences when it comes to size acceptance? Is just being plus sized enough to unify us? To examine these questions, I invited Elisa to a candid conversation about cultural diversity in the fight for size acceptance, the perceived historical shift in the size debate and what we can do to bridge the gap. *Please keep in mind these are the perceptions of 2 women, we are not professing to speak for any one race as a whole.
Cassy: OK so lets get started!! How did you feel about “The State of the Curvy Community” panel discussion that you were apart of?
Elisa DeCarlo
Elisa: I felt pretty good about it. My only wish is that we had concentrated less on fashion and more on “what IS the curvy community”?
I saw at FFF Week that the ratio of black women to white women was about 80/20%. That puzzled me. It raises a host of issues.
Cassy: That was how it was last year too! I don’t know why that is. Why do you think that it wasn’t more white people involved as participants?
Elisa: There is a LOT of shame about weight in the white world. Being 25 pounds overweight is a terrible thing. I found that some people I told about it thought it was a joke. The idea of celebrating your body as it is, which I found so joyous and liberating, is not encouraged in white culture. There are a lot of activists out there, but they aren’t heard–they’re looked at and judged. Our role models are unrealistic–when JLo is considered “curvy”, you know you’re in trouble.
Cassy: That is really shocking to me. There are powerhouse organizations that are ran by predominately white people that touch on issues of size acceptance. I wonder if mixing fashion and activism is the issue?
Elisa: You have a point there. Traditional fashion means stick thin, anorexic, whatever the color of the model. I’ve seen many of these models while working NY Fashion Week, and believe me, they are scary! But they’re held up as role models to women. The traditional fashion world thinks size 6 is a plus size!
Marilyn Monroe
Cassy: Fashion itself is superficial really, where as activism goes deeper than. The runway is fantasy for the most part. When you see a black woman on the runway you tend not to think about the fact that she is the only woman of color or that she had to fight to be a part of it in the first place. When you place realism on the runway then you are confronted with real issues of clothing fit and real options. Designers have to work harder to make it work.
Elisa: Yes, but I think you have to tackle the superficial head-on the way Full Figured Fashion Week does. Those models were beautiful. So many women I told about it said, “I wish I could have been there.” Many (white) size activists don’t confront fashion at all because it’s considered superficial. But what is superficial is what dominates the culture at large and the images we’re shown, at least for white women. I could be very wrong, but it seems to me that black-oriented media embraces the larger woman. Do you think so?
Elisa: No, you’re not. Women with virtually no body fat say, “I need to lose weight.” I have yet to meet a white woman who doesn’t think she needs to lose weight. And often it’s so far from the reality it is shocking. You mention plus size and you get the same damn argument thrown back at you: fat is unhealthy, fat people are a drag on the health care industry, fat people are disgusting. Particularly fat women.
Cassy:…. and the argument that it is easier for a designer to dress a hanger than a woman of size. Like Yuliya of IGIGI said on the panel, it does cost more to create garments for a larger frame.
Elisa: I interviewed the fashion designer Vassilios Kostetsos (it’s on my blog) at NY Fashion Week, and he said plus size women should not be allowed to wear his clothes! Most of the designers are disgusted by larger women–he just said what many of them think. Believe me, I’ve seen the looks on their faces when I ask, “Would you ever design for a woman my size?” Too bad, because we have the money to spend on clothing! I don’t want to let designers off the hook (this rant doesn’t include Yuliya). Mid-price designers are perfectly capable of designing clothes for larger bodies. If you look at small-size websites like Newport News, or Spiegel, or Talbots, you’ll see that their clothes are made cheaply with a “one-size-fits-all mentality”. To say it drives up the cost is pure BS. Manufacturers know that plus-sized women will pay more for the same clothes in a larger size because they have fewer choices.
- Mae West
Cassy: Where did the perception of “thin is better” begin I wonder? In the 20′s and 30′s curves were considered sexy. In the 50’s, Marilyn Monroe was a size 14 and she is considered the sexiest, most alluring woman of all time. Then in the 60′s and 70′s Twiggy emerged and the super model began to take shape. It seems that the white community has been driven by the media’s portrayal of beauty. Since blacks rarely saw many people of color in the media, we were not fully swayed by what we saw to a large extent.
Elisa:You make a very good point. I think your community should be proud of not trying to imitate the media images.
Cassy: It has not always been a easy journey to size acceptance for those in the black community either. We didn’t see anyone of color in mainstream media unless we were in service to someone else or performing. Many felt they had no chance of being whatever was portrayed positively in the media because we didn’t look like that image. I am Black and Curvy? I might as well not even try….
Elisa: Women talk about the “diet culture.” Let me ask you, besides Queen Latifah, who DID NOT specify how much weight she lost, how many celebrities of color have you seen on those countless diet commercials? No, it’s Valerie Bertinelli, Marie Osmond, and all of the testimonials, if you look at it, are white women. I never thought about that before. Huh.
There is also the economic point of view that, in cultures where scarcity is the norm, weight is a status symbol. It’s no coincidence that Twiggy became a star in the 1960s, a period of tremendous economic prosperity. When prosperity is the norm, being thin is a status symbol.
Cassy: Maybe that is where the difference lies. Status or lifestyle choice.
Elisa: Yes, the thinner, the better. There’s the old Duchess of Windsor line: “you can never be too rich or too thin.” Now THAT’s a white point of view! In order to imitate the movie stars, models, rich women, we have to be THIN. Really thin.
Cassy: In the black community we celebrate, grieve and sometimes communicate by feeding each other, that closeness feeds the soul.
Elisa: God, I envy that. These days, most white people don’t cook! I cook, and people think I’m strange for actually making my own food. But my Italian parents did it, and to my father, spaghetti and meatballs equaled love. What you are describing is a beautiful thing, and definitely something missing in the white culture. If we all started cooking, Marie Callender and Healthy Choice would go out of business!
Cassy: I have always felt that white people have had more power to effect change when it comes to size acceptance than anyone in the black community. By power I mean since white people are perceived to have control over mainstream media, they have power to change the worlds view of size acceptance.
Elisa: I don’t think that’s quite true, but it’s probably mostly true. Sometimes I think Christina Hendricks is our token “curvy woman.” She has an amazing 1950s body, but for magazine covers and photo shoots they Photoshop her into being thinner. You can contrast and compare by looking at runway candids. I mean, look at those tabloids that have “best and worst beach bodies”! Who cares if Jennifer Aniston has cellulite? She’s middle-aged, for God’s sake! Demi Moore had her KNEES lipo suctioned!
True story: I had a breast reduction. I was a GG/H. The plastic surgeon brought out an album, then looked and said, “This is the wrong album.” He got another album of before and afters, and every woman in it was either black and hispanic. When I asked him why, he said, “white women don’t have breasts like yours.” WHAT??? This white woman did! Lots of white women have naturally really big breasts! The doctors I saw all advised me to go down to a C cup, but you’ve seen me. That was ridiculous. I went for DD. I mean, I’m big, I’m tall, I need big breasts!
Cassy: That is crazy!!! And that was a doctor??
Elisa: Totally serious!! I don’t tell that story too often because I don’t want to be misunderstood, but it was utterly shocking.
Cassy: There are thinner black stars that we aspire to be like also. Music videos didn’t show women with curves until the late 90′s but it is a particular curve that is featured. As long as you had hips you were good but you couldn’t be sizable all over. You only saw women of size in parody for a long time. Thank goodness that is changing!
Coming soon Part 2 with Elisa DeCarlo: What is culture of plus activism? What is the plan of action to unify all of us?
Features Editor, Cassandra Jones-McBryde -- Daily Venus Diva.
It could be because of their lack of confidence, or because they couldn’t make it. There are several variables that could have played a role in this situation, but yes, I would agree as well. I don’t see a lot of confidence in Caucasian women around the area that I live in. Not really sure why, maybe because a lot of the models that they see are Caucasian and they’re so used to only seeing skinny women that they don’t feel beautiful.
As for different ethnicities, I do not see a lot of people in the fashion industry or modeling industry, which I find is sad because there are several talented ethnicities, its just that they haven’t been discovered yet. I don’t see Asian models much, nor do I ever see an Asian plus size model, but then again, not everyone has the same opportunities as others, all in time…
Janika, I think your right about Caucasion plus size women not seeing a reflection of themselves, that may contribute to their confidence. The same can be said about Black people as well with not having an abundance of reflections of who they are.
I actually think that there is a cultural difference. I have to ask if there were many latinas attending, because us latinas have that firey confidence as well. I say about 7 out 10 times that I see a plus size Caucasian woman she exude confidence. The only time that I have ever been around plus size women of every color that were mostly to extremely confident with their body was when I worked at Lane Bryant three years ago. I think being around women the same size gives us all a BIG confidence boost!!! I know that it did for me!
Just a point of clarification – Marilyn Monroe wasn’t a size 14 as we know it today. According to reliable sources, she was probably about a size 8 to 10, but her clothing was custom made so it wasn’t true to a particular size.
http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/fashion/article6044724.ece (also cited in Snopes)
I’m not bashing on size acceptance but I do think it’s important to keep in mind that holding MM out as a model of the idealized and “larger” female body only goes so far, since she was about the same size as today’s more mainstreamed “plus size” models, at about a size 10.
I know that for us, as Caucasian plus size business owners, we tend to find ourselves in the minority in this industry. Our culture has taught us that skinny is good and really skinny is better, that is a big reason that we started la grande dame, to make sure that there are beautiful clothes and positive representations of plus size women of all ethnicities. It is still hard for us to find Caucasian plus size models to use on the site, I think because the white girls don’t feel sexy in their bodies.
Thanks Catherine! It takes efforts like yours to assist in changing the perspective.
I am extremely grateful to Cassandra Jones for initiating this discussion! It’s one of those “hidden but obvious” issues that needs to be brought out. Marilyn was different sizes at different times in her life; she was at her heaviest in “Some Like It Hot.” By the end of her life she was basically living on champagne and pills, and she was extremely thin. But look at how plump and luscious she looks! It’s the look more than anything else that’s important. She is a “real” woman who exercised to keep her figure, not some plastic-surgery-d botoxed stick figure who works out 6 hours every day at the gym and then has a whole body cleanse! We need to change the perspective. It doesn’t help when black celebrities buy into it, the way Jennifer Hudson has.
I think as a society we need to see a better reflection of who and what we really are. When I look at magazines I see very skinny models and it makes me sad. I see designer clothes that I would love to wear but the designers refuse to make a realistic size! I love my curves! I wish that the fashion world would be a little more open minded to the fact that women are not a size 2 we are a size 12 or larger. And yes no dought there are cultural differences when it comes to body image. I see alot of plus size African American models that walk the smaller catwalks but I don’t see any that walk the major catwalks in Paris or NYC? Whats up with that? Are there any famous African American plus sized models out there?
@BWI-thanks for your comment! but to your own point in the link, a size 10 is smaller today than it was in the 50′s. So to be truly accurate, the woman in the Times article would have had to been aware of her own size in 50′s standards and translate that to what she actually is in todays sizing, I would imagine a size 12 in the least. A 14, 12 and even 10 is considered plus in todays standard. Her weight has been in debate for decades, my point is the reasoning BEHIND why her weight is even debated!!
Her eternal allure is certainly not soley due to her curves, but it most assuredly contributed to it.
@Prissy-There are not that many women of color and even fewer of size.I dont know of any African American plus size model that have graced the runways of Paris. Hopefully that will change soon. I know that Toccara Jones was the first plus sized African American to be in Vouge Italy.
Designers are starting to realize that they have to design for curvy women and we are seeing more curvy women on runways. We are showing the fashion world that curvy is important. Not only is curvy beautiful but plus size is the majority and not the minority. The plus size community purchase more clothes and beauty products because there are more of them. That’s why we are getting more popular with our Big Beautiful Women Pageant here in Philly. Although our BBW pageant is not just for women of color they are the ones that enter the most because they are more comfortable with their curves. See more about our BBWP at our web site: wilkesproductions.com
I have always been aware of the predominantly white social make up in NAAFA, but I think partly it is that in the African American and Latina communities being heavy or plump or fat is not an automatic significator of non-person status. From my personal experience of being found attractive by far more Black Men than White Men and what I have read from others on the issue, fat women of color are “expected to be fully participating members of their respective social circles” so to speak. It is also a major class issue, and the saying goes “You can never be Too rich or Too thin” and it usually means white.