Sports Illustrated feature curvy women in swimsuit parade
THE last place you would expect to see a genuine representation of curvy women is a Sports Illustrated swimsuit parade, but that’s exactly where a small group of ‘real women’ have strut their stuff.
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A LOT of fashion festivals pay lip service to including women of all shapes and sizes, parading a size 12 glamour girl (or gasp… even the occasional size 14), as the poster girls for plus size fashion.
The last place you would expect to see a genuine representation of curvy women is a Sports Illustrated swimsuit parade, but that’s exactly where a small group of ‘real women’ strut their stuff overnight at Miami Swim Week.
According to reports, tears flowed from many in the catwalk crowd surprised to see the cast of curvy beauties confidently baring their bodies in an array of swimsuit styles.
Sports Illustrated, famous for its annual swimsuit edition featuring barely-there-bikinis on impossibly gorgeous beach babes, is attempting to shift the sands in how the media represents, and consumers perceive, beauty.
Editor MJ Day, an older, curvy woman herself, was so passionate about featuring beauty and bodies in all their forms she donned a bikini and posted herself on Instagram encouraging women to love their bodies.
“I’m determined to get out the message that there’s not a singular definition of beauty,” she says.
She has walked the talk with the glamour show overnight featuring curvy models alongside the standard stunners.
“[People in the crowd] lost their minds when the curvy girls came out,” she told the New York Post.
“I think they were shocked because you don’t typically see that at fashion week … especially at swim fashion week. Some people [in the audience] were moved to tears because they saw themselves represented on the runway, which they never thought they would.”
Our very own Melbourne Fashion Week has made diversity on the catwalk its catchcry for this year, with the plan to feature culturally and physically diverse talent in its shows.
It comes on the back of Mercedes Benz Fashion Week and Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival taking a more responsible and real view of the talent in their parades.
It’s taken a very long time, but it does feel like the tide is genuinely changing in the world of fashion to reflect images of beauty in all its forms.
It’s not a complete cultural shift, we are never going to see the end of skinny models in high end fashion shows.
But it’s a positive step forward in the mainstream that will hopefully help women become more accepting of their bodies.
And the flow on affect may even ring out in the registers of retailers struggling to survive if we can see more inspirational real women represented on the catwalk, rather than impossible images most have little chance of achieving.
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