Tara Moss strips down to her undies at 45
Author Tara Moss does not want to be ageist about anyone — including herself. That’s why the 45-year-old is willing to strip down to her undies, stretch marks and all, for a good cause.
Stellar
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“I have stretch marks, you can call them stretch marks,” says Tara Moss, over Skype, throwing her head back with a full-bellied laugh.
The Canadian-Australian author and model is speaking with Stellar about baring her body for a new underwear campaign that shows off not just organic and fair trade cotton smalls, but also, yes, the white marks running up her thighs.
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“I am 45 now,” laughs Moss, “so it’s not, like, big on my list of things to get in my undies in front of people. But if asked, I’m going to rock up because I would’ve done it at 25, and I just don’t want to be ageist about other people, and that includes me.”
But this being Tara Moss, her latest appearance in her underwear is not just about encouraging middle-aged women to feel at ease in their own skin.
As a vocal advocate for social change, she sees her support of Mighty Good Undies’s Bare for Good campaign as a role that “shines a light on sustainable and fairtrade practices that I would like to see become standard in the fashion industry.
“I’m someone who loves fashion, I do love clothes, and I’m trying to do my best at being more conscious and responsible in terms of what I wear and buy, and how I act as a consumer, like a lot of us,” says Moss.
Mighty Good Undies — one of the only pioneering ethical Australian brands with reach overseas and which was recently awarded an A+ rating from the Baptist World Aid Australia Behind the Barcode Ethical Fashion Report for 2019 — manufactures its underwear in factories that provide safe working conditions and fair pay, and timed the shoot to support the sixth anniversary of Fashion Revolution, a global, not-for profit movement fighting for greater transparency in the fashion industry.
“I’m very passionate about human rights, and something like 80 per cent of garment industry workers are women; I know a lot of them are working in appalling conditions and that’s just not OK,” says Moss.
Moss has a long history of championing the way things should be, after having suffered from the way things should never be.
For instance, rather than retreating after she was on the receiving end of relentless online trolling, Moss went on to host, co-write, and co-executive produce the 2017 anti-bullying ABC TV series Cyberhate With Tara Moss.
And she channelled her experiences with surviving rape, numerous assaults and a “super isolating” miscarriage into her bestselling 2014 book The Fictional Woman, a celebrated memoir and critical analysis of the societal forces that often shrink women’s lives.
“I didn’t see it coming, wasn’t expecting it, hadn’t really heard women talk about it,” says Moss of her first miscarriage, which she felt was shrouded in silence and taboo. “All that did not serve me.”
But writing about her experiences did. Many relationships deepened, she says, after a number of close friends disclosed they, too, had miscarried.
“It’s actually very positive to know you’re not alone, to have those connections with people we love,” she says, adding that strangers still approach her daily to share their own stories.
It’s a desire for greater connection that has prompted some changes in Moss’s life — and a push to make every moment count. When she was 16, Moss lost her mother Janni — aged just 43 — to cancer.
At the moment, she is working on two books (her 12th and 13th) concurrently, one of them the fourth in her Pandora English series. That one is due out in October; the other, set in 1940s Sydney, will land next year.
“I guess [it’s] combining my love of history and crime fiction, and of incredible kick-ass women.”
Her voice is throaty, and her accent distinctively Canadian, perhaps more so now she lives there again full-time.
In 2018, after 23 years in Australia, Moss returned home, her photographer/author husband Berndt Sellheim and their eight-year-old daughter Sapphira at her side.
“You know, my dad’s got to see Sapphira every year,” says Moss. “[But] it’s not the same, a couple of weeks over Christmas. It’s important to make those connections strong, and give everyone involved more memories. Because you can’t replace those.”
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Originally published as Tara Moss strips down to her undies at 45
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