Fashioning Fat

Inside Plus-Size Modeling

Amanda M. Czerniawski

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780814770320
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

For two and a half years, Amanda Czerniawski was asociologist turned plus-size model. Journeying into a world where, as a size10, she was not considered an average body type, but rather, for the fashionindustry, “plus-sized,” Czerniawski studied the standards of work and imageproduction in the plus-sized model industry. Fashioning Fat takes us through a model’s day-to-day activities,first at open calls at modeling agencies and then through the fashion shows andphoto shoots. Czerniawski also interviewed 35 plus-size models about theirlives in the world of fashion, bringing to life the strange contradictions ofbeing an object of non-idealized beauty. Fashioning Fat showsus that the mission of many of these models is to challenge our standards ofbeauty that privilege the thin body; they show us that fat can be sexy. Many plus-sizemodels do often succeed in overcoming years of self-loathing and shame overtheir bodies, yet, as Czerniawski shows, these women are not the ones in chargeof beauty’s construction or dissemination. At the corporate level, the fashionindustry perpetuates their objectification. Plus-size models must conform to animage created by fashion’s tastemakers, as their bodies must fit withinnarrowly defined parameters of size and shape—an experience not too differentfrom that of straight-sized models. Ultimately, plus-size models find that theyare still molding their bodies to fit an image instead of molding an image ofbeauty to fit their bodies. A much-needed behind-the-scenes look at thisgrowing industry, Fashioning Fat is afascinating, unique, and important contribution to our understanding of beauty.

1

From Books to Looks

Journeying into Plus-Size Modeling

As the elevator doors opened, the onslaught of hip-hop music and refracted spotlights reminded me that I was far from my ivy-covered home in Morningside Heights. With a quick breath in and a slight adjustment of posture, I headed straight to the reception desk, where a young man tethered to the desk by a telephone headset greeted me. In between answering calls, he shoved a clipboard into my hands with a terse “Fill this out, and give me your photos,” and pointed toward the waiting area to my right.

When confronted by a predator, wildlife experts recommend that you stand your ground and not allow the animal to sense your fear. Here, in one of New York City’s top modeling agencies, I felt like a helplessly naive sheep that wandered off into the wilderness. The fashion wolves were circling and I was in too deep to retreat.

Needless to say, I was out of my element and unprepared for what was to come. I had spent the last two years in mental pursuits, crafting theoretical arguments, and arguing over solutions to society’s major ills as a graduate student. On this day, instead, I was in the gateway to a realm of aesthetics, where the physical reigns. In thirty minutes and two subway lines, I went from books to looks.

This was my attempt to “go native,” as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz would say, into a world inhabited by beautiful people, but not just any beautiful people—beautiful fat people. Here I was, a sociology graduate student turned prospective model, waiting to meet with an agent who represented plus-size models. For professional reasons, I wanted to understand how this niche of plus-size modeling functioned within a larger fashion market that privileges the thin body. For personal reasons, I wanted validation from beauty professionals that I, too, was worthy to be among their ranks. After all, being a sociologist does not provide me with immunity against engendered cultural pressures on women to be attractive. We women, in western culture, are always evaluated on our bodies; I was used to the feeling of being judged on my looks.

Clutching the clipboard in my hands, I cautiously sauntered, in the highest heeled pumps that I owned, over to the plush charcoal leather couch. Look confident, like you are somebody. Already perched at one end of the couch was a plus-size woman dressed in head-to-toe black. She glared at me as I took a seat. By her side lay a black 9×12 portfolio. I was immediately struck by her porcelain skin and long, thick chestnut brown hair. Here, in this waiting room, I was already in the company of beauty. I flashed her one of my killer-because-it’s-so-saccharine smiles, but she ignored me. That brisk fall morning, we were the only two models for the agency’s open call.

As MTV blared on the flat-screen televisions mounted on the mirrored walls of the waiting area, I filled out my contact information and measurements on the form affixed to the clipboard. Bust, waist, hips, dress size, shoe size, height, eye color, hair color—my body, as the bass bounced around me, quantified and categorized. I returned the completed form to reception, along with a couple of snapshots my roommate took of me in a faux photo shoot in our living room.

I waited.

I could not help but stare at the size ten, five feet eight inch, sea blue–eyed, and golden honey blonde reflection before me. Questions of self-doubt popped into my mind, which I quickly rationalized away. Do I have what it takes to be a plus-size model? How hard could it be to strike a pose and walk down a fashion runway? I was a trained dancer with greater than average body awareness. I often walked in heels down the crowded streets of Manhattan. Am I pretty, tall, or curvy enough? I knew I fulfilled the height requirement. I had a perfectly proportional hourglass frame. I was conventionally pretty and photogenic. What about my size? I never shopped in nor even entered a plus-size clothing store. Would my lack of familiarity with plus-size fashions and designers expose me as an imposter? While larger than a typical model who graces the glossy pages of fashion magazines, was I large enough to model as plus-size? Am I strong enough to confront my bodily insecurities? Am I prepared for what awaits me behind this wall? Sitting in that waiting room, I certainly thought I was. I believed my past experiences in the entertainment business would guide my current venture into fashion.

At the awkward and impressionable age of twelve, I was “discovered” by an acting coach and soon signed with a manager who sent me out on auditions in the New York City film and television circuit. I quickly booked my first acting job in an educational video and spent the next four years juggling a hectic, nonstop schedule of acting lessons, auditions, meetings with agents, film and video shoots, and, of course, school.

As a child actor, my coaches instructed me to enter the audition room with a blazing personality, to show wit and a high social aptitude. They taught me to analyze scripts for placement of the proper emotional inflection and to memorize lines. At castings, I answered questions directed to me with more than one-word responses, no matter how trivial the question. Through line delivery and conversational banter, I flaunted my purposefully peppy personality. Therefore, at this open call for a modeling agency, I fully intended to woo the agents with my dazzling personality and intelligence. According to my mental checklist, I was ready:

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.

What Is Fat?

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.

What Is Plus Size?

Similar to “fat,” “overweight,” and “obese,” plus size is not measured in absolute terms. There is...