So I was clicking through Style.com’s “12 Reasons to be Cheerful in 2010” with a bit of fear and loathing. Conde Nast is not historically a friend of the fatly, so I was interested to see three of their reasons –that’s a full 25% in some quarters– had something to do with fashion beyond the double-zeros.
First there was the downer we discussed yesterday, which was all about how Prada refused to design for non-model extras as the costume designer of the Met’s production of Attila. Bah and humbug and, as you may recall, suck it.
Then there was the bit about Mark Fast scoring a line with Topshop. Fast, if you’ll recall, was the young buck who used to make his clothes only in one size but who sent down three plus-sized models the runway for Spring 2010, causing two of his stylists to quit.
I very much Do Not Love his clothes, but I love Mr Fast for using plus size models as models, not as tokens in his ultra-shredded sexpot show.
Then there was a note –and this is the most hopeful of all– about how models like Lara Stone (a size 4 sometimes 6) and Catherine McNeil –who has been getting a lot of flack for gaining weight and now looks to be a size 4– are getting tons and tons of work as the trend swings away from stick-thin and back to merely very slim.
According to style.com:
“If McNeil, Stone, and Gemma Ward—another reemerging catwalker dealing with negative body-image hype—were the new prototypes for healthier-looking models, we’d be much relieved. For now, there’s always Crystal Renn.”
This is exciting. This is REALLY exciting. Because one size 12 model in a lineup of thirty double-naughts is a gimmick, this is CHANGE. If we can get back to where a size 6 is model-normal, then maybe a size 12 model won’t seem so out of the ordinary. Maybe young girls won’t be so likely to develop eating disorders to starve themselves into a shape they’ll never EVER naturally be. We’ve been in Waif World for about 15 years now –remember when Kate Moss was the thinnest model on the runway?– and there’s a change in the air. Whee!
