Fashioning Fat: Inside Plus-Size Modeling (2 page)

Personality—check.

Intelligence—check.

Professionalism—check.

Guts—check.

Physique—maybe.

Twenty minutes later, I heard my name. A young woman beckoned me into the recesses of the agency, or so I thought until she led me around the corner to a bench in the hallway. Without hesitation or the usual
exchange of pleasantries, she asserted, “You are not what I need right now, but here is a list of three other agencies you can try,” and scribbled their names on the form on which I had earlier painstakingly bared the truths of my body. The agent made her decision based on the snapshots before she saw me in person, before she called me in, before she spoke to me. Struck by the depersonalized and sterile nature of the exchange, I could merely utter a question about the present status of the modeling market, to which I received another terse reply, “It’s slow.”

Strike one.

After a disappointing turn of events at the open call, I took the agent’s advice and preceded to blitzkrieg the recommended agencies from the list with my snapshots. Two days later, one agency returned my pictures as a sign of disinterest.

Strike two.

Another two days later, I received a call from the assistant to the director of an agency to schedule an appointment. “While I can’t promise anything,” explained the assistant, “we want to meet you. Bring more pictures—full length and headshots. No holding pets or hugging trees.”

“Really? People do that?” I inquired.

“You wouldn’t believe.”

Ball one. At least I had not struck out.

For the next few days, I watched what I ate in order to prevent bloating, kept to my exercise regimen, and scrubbed my face to foil possible eruptions before they surfaced, while maintaining my usual academic responsibilities. This newfound hypervigilance was all in the name of perfecting “my canvas.” I shifted my focus from mental pursuits within the ivy-covered walls of academia to physical ones.

Initially combing advertisements for plus-size models on agency websites, I bravely positioned myself as a hopeful model, attended agency open calls and castings for print and runway work. I soon began working freelance with one agency and then signed a modeling contract with a second. That first open call was the start of my ethnographic account of becoming a plus-size fashion model. I encountered, firsthand, the
struggle to rewrite the self, wherein a woman wittingly objectifies and to a necessary degree celebrates her body—a body of curves and solid flesh that is often an object of scorn in contemporary American society. With society regarding models as walking mannequins or passive hangers for clothes, I examined how it felt to be “just a body,” a body that was average in society but “plus size” in fashion.

As feminist philosopher Susan Bordo states in her seminal work on the impact of popular culture on the female body,
Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body
, “no body can escape either the imprint of culture or its gendered meanings.”
¹
The fat body is part of this evaluative cultural lens. But what qualifies as a “fat body”? Historians and anthropologists note that fat is constantly renegotiated in culture. Specifically, our contemporary social stigma of fat is an artifact of the work of nineteenth-century dietary reformers, such as William Banting and Sylvester Graham, who demonized excess flesh as an undesirable physical state that speaks to the individual’s personal failings.
²
As historian Amy Erdman Farrell documents in
Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture
, a cultural anxiety over fatness developed in response to concerns over social status, not health. For nineteenth – and early twentieth-century thinkers, fatness was proof of one’s inferiority. Thus, the social stigma of fat served to control and civilize American bodies. Early in the twentieth century, life insurance mortality studies correlated fatness with increased mortality risk and spurred a public health debate whose legacy continues.
³

Given the concern over improving the health of communities through education and promotion of healthy lifestyles, healthcare professionals developed a preoccupation with the quantification of fatness. The development of height and weight tables produced a new way of classifying bodies into “underweight,” “overweight,” and “normal” weight categories. Today, the medical community takes precise body measurements
through use of the body mass index (BMI), which relies on a calculation based on an individual’s height and weight, in order to define “overweight” and “obese” weight statuses. This classification scheme, however, is not entirely a by-product of unbiased scientific knowledge. The boundaries between “normal,” “overweight,” and “obese” are subject to revision. The move toward a system of classification based on body weight was driven by the life insurance industry during the first half of the twentieth century with the creation and subsequent modifications of height and weight tables.
⁴
These tables, based on the interaction between actuarial knowledge and historically specific cultural opinions, introduced the notion of “ideal” weight and became a means for practicing social regulation of weight. While the use of the BMI standard for weight classification is not arbitrary, the specified boundaries between one category and another are not absolute, nor are the measurements applicable to all bodies.
⁵

From dietary reforms to actuaries and physicians, fat earned a bad reputation within mainstream America. The word “fat,” itself, is a culturally loaded, derogatory term. Yet, as a cultural fact, fat is not universally scorned. A fat body is not always a maligned one. For example, Nigerian Arabs idealize the fat body, where, through a practice of forced food consumption beginning in childhood, women work to become fat in order to hasten their marriageability.
⁶
They consider rolls of fat, stretch marks, and large behinds desirable and sexy. Within the hip-hop culture in the United Sates, a contingent of male artists celebrates fat as the physical embodiment of success.
⁷
Rappers such as Big Pun, Fat Joe, and Biggie Smalls throw their weight around as a sign of their hypermasculine power. They wear loose, baggy clothes to visually expand their size and take up more space. With a switch of the letter “F” to “PH,” the hip-hop community reclaims the term “phat,” which references a full, rich body that is desirable and sexualized. Additional terms have emerged to describe this larger body, including “thick” and “curvy,” to reflect its more prized status within various ethnic and racial communities.

The nature of size in America is muddled by both medical and cultural discourses. In popular discourse, the terms “fat,” “plus size,” and “overweight/obese” are often used interchangeably. This is problematic because of the historical and cultural specificity of these terms, which refer to three specific and debatable dimensions of weight. While medical professionals quantify overweight and obese status, fatness is harder to measure. Frankly, fat means different things to different people.

In the modeling industry, determining fatness relies on a viewer’s subjective evaluation of another’s body. For example, fashion professionals often have strict and often extreme bodily standards. In April 2009, designer label Ralph Lauren fired model Filippa Hamilton for being too fat.
⁸
At the time, Hamilton was five feet ten inches tall, weighed one hundred twenty pounds, and wore a woman’s size four. While the casual observer viewed her as thin, a fashion professional argued that she was fat. Two other well-known models, Coco Rocha, whom the industry considered “too big” for high fashion at a size four, and Gemma Ward lost work opportunities due to weight gain because they could not fit into the common sample size—a size zero—used for garments in magazine shoots and the runway.
⁹
These cases reveal the range of meanings associated with “fat.” Fashion has one standard and medicine another.

For the purposes of this book, I define the fat body as any body that is beyond the norm within the context of fashion, i.e., plus size. Typically, the industry considers anything over a woman’s size eight as “plus size.” Therefore, according to fashion, these plus-size models are fat.

As the average reader could surmise from a single glance at magazine photos of plus-size models, the basic definition of “plus size” in modeling does not match the cultural image of a fat woman.
¹⁰
Most casual observers of plus-size models would probably not even perceive them as “plus size,” let alone fat.
¹¹
Indeed, many of these models are of “average” size and weight; retail industry experts estimate that the average American woman weighs approximately one hundred sixty pounds and wears a size fourteen.
¹²
They are “average” to the ordinary consumer, but, in sharp contrast, they are “plus size” to the fashion industry.

Size four model Filippa Hamilton alleged designer label Ralph Lauren fired her because she was deemed too fat.

Similar to “fat,” “overweight,” and “obese,” plus size is not measured in absolute terms. There is some inconsistency in the categorization of plus size between the modeling and retail clothing industries, which I discuss further in
chapter 3
. In light of this variation, when discussing plus size, I refer to the retail fashion category defined by the industry itself. Without standardized sizing practices and the added complication of vanity sizing (i.e., size inflation), a static dimensional form of plus size does not exist. Across the booking boards at modeling agencies, plus-size models, too, do not fit a particular mold. This is in sharp contrast to “straight-size” fashion models, whose dimensions must fall within clearly established guidelines.
¹³

While plus size, itself, is a fluid construction that has been created and shaped over time, for the sake of argument, I use the baseline for the quantification of plus size as the woman’s clothing size ten, based on the scale used in modeling agencies with plus-size divisions.
¹⁴
This practice within modeling agencies does not line up with the retail clothing definition of plus size. In clothing retail, plus-size retailers generally start their merchandise at a size fourteen and run through size twenty-four. Super-size apparel begins at size twenty-six or 4X to 6X.
¹⁵
Table 1.1
lists the range of measurements associated with retail clothing sizes.

Generally, plus-size models range from a woman’s clothing size ten to size eighteen and need to be a minimum height of five feet eight inches, with a usual maximum of six feet tall; however, most of the plus-size models in the top modeling agencies are size ten to size fourteen. A combination of bust, waist, and hip measurements determine a model’s size, as illustrated in
table 1.2
. Her measurements need to be in proportion, whereas her hip and waist measurements are at least ten inches apart. For example, the industry standard for a size fourteen model is 44–34–44 inches; few models match this standard exactly. Bodies vary, so the measurements in the table represent the most common measurements associated with each size.

TABLE
1.1 Retail Clothing Size Chart

TABLE
1.2 Model Size Chart