How Jennifer Lopez could change fashion forever
The star and her famous figure has made curvy women feel great about themselves, but JLo would struggle to fit into sizes offered by many retailers. She has the power to change that, writes Claire Harvey.
Jennifer Lopez’s bottom is seared into my memory.
It was 1998 and I’d never heard of the woman whose derrière was displayed before me in Vanity Fair.
She was wearing pale pink satin knickers which were smooth and skin-tight and laced up at the back with satin ribbons.
The undies were made by then-unknown Australian designer Collette Dinnigan and the look was Captain Hook at a slumber party. But sexy.
And wow, was she sexy.
She still is. She’s eternal. At 49, she’s still skin-tight satin and swishy hair and chrome-pipe thighs and marshmallow lips and cheekbones like glacial ridges. She’s astonishing.
Which is why it’s so goddamn amazing that still today Jennifer Lopez is just too big for fashion.
She’d struggle to find an outfit to fit her at Miranda Westfield, or Bondi Junction, or even the main drag of Nowra.
One of the reasons Katies and Target are such solid retail performers is that they dress women of “plus-size.” That is, women like J.Lo.
But I would be stunned if J. Lo could get an off-the-rack dress to fit her at Zimmermann, or Sass and Bide, or Rebecca Vallance. Romance Was Born? Maybe, but it’d be a cartoonishly giant knitted skivvy borrowed from the rainbow closet of Jenny Kee. We Are Handsome? Only if she was happy with a tracksuit.
J. Lo claims her Dinnigan satin-panty butt-shot, and the two decades of celebrity that followed, helped change the physical manifestation of the human.
In an interview in Stellar today, J. Lo says “bodies are different now”, and that she’s proud to take credit for the change.
That’s a swipe at Kim Kardashian, I guess, and her sisters, because they are so widely credited with having changed the way society perceives curvy figures.
J. Lo was, of course, the real pioneer. She was doing giant backsides when Kim was still trailing Paris Hilton along Bondi Beach hoping someone would cast her in a porno, and when Kylie was Stormi’s age.
None of these women are actually advocates for women with average bodies (Kim Kardashian promotes corsets and appetite-suppressing lollipops, for God’s sake), but they are, just by being themselves in spray-on pleather, at least a little closer to the body of the average human being than most other famous women.
What they represent is the triumph of grooming, no matter what your size. You can be proud of your curves and invest the money you aren’t allowed to spend at Karen Walker on lipstick instead.
The human body itself hasn’t changed, I’m afraid, J.Lo.
Out here in the real world it’s still closer to a 16 than a zero.
But you and your satin jocks made the size 16-plus girls feel great about themselves for a change, and that’s a huge achievement.
But if you really want to outshine the Kardashians, try showing retailers that women who are bigger than North have money to spend on clothes, and make fashion listen to you.
Claire Harvey is the deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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