My love affair with fashion shifted when the size of my body changed

I’ve always loved having fun with fashion. In the family album is a picture of five-year-old me astride my first bicycle, posing while draped in dozens of plastic bracelets and necklaces. I’d donned every piece of jewellery I owned before the photograph was taken. Coco Chanel clearly didn’t know what she was talking about.

My fashion love affair shifted when the size of my body fluctuated wildly in my early 20s, when food choices evolved beyond what Mum cooked for dinner and I discovered beer. My size fluctuated around childbirth, and again when I became disabled in my 30s.

Jamila Rizvi: It’s with cold clarity that I am witnessing the rise (again) of the waif-thin model.Credit: iStock

As a result, I’ve periodically lost the freedom and delight I usually get from dressing up. I am, after all, a child of the America’s Next Top Model generation, raised on lite yoghurt and diet everything. Body angst is my special subject. But through all those changes, I have been able to take going to a shop and finding clothes in my size for granted.

For a shamefully long time, I was blissfully unaware of the fat-phobia and discrimination perpetrated by the labels I loved. Fast-forward to today, and it’s with cold clarity that I am witnessing the rise (again) of the waif-thin model, and fashion built for her body and hers alone.

Think about the clothes gracing catwalks, fashion blogs and Instagram street accounts over the past 18 months. There are jeans that hang off hips, crop tops, corsets, miniskirts and cut-outs. So many cut-outs. (Can we please stop with the cut-outs?) Very, very thin is back.

This time around, though, thin is accompanied by the small but joyous inclusion of fat models on (some) catwalks. There is no denying the progress of shows devoted to brands that design specifically for curve models and celebrate bodies that we certainly never got to see in the ’90s.

What we see on catwalks is “acceptable” fatness. Fatness that is not actually very fat at all.

JAMILA RIZVI

But at the same time, data reveals how painfully slow that progress is. Dominique Norman, a New York City writer and academic, recently released research conducted in collaboration with her students. Together they reviewed 34,500 fashion images taken in New York, London, Milan and Paris in late 2022. Of those, only 134, or 0.4 per cent, featured plus-size people.

April Hélène-Horton is an Australian writer, speaker and model known on social media as The Bodzilla. She told me that “the constant referral to bodies that deviate from the hyper-thin ideal as ‘curve models’ is still a problem. Industry terms such as ‘curve’, where they really mean ‘not thin’ … tell us we haven’t made a long-term impact.” The word “fat”, it seems, is still a bit too much for the fashion world.

Five-year-old Jamila Rizvi donned every piece of jewellery she owned before this photograph was taken.

Bodies on plus-size or curve catwalks are also largely similarly shaped: classic hourglass figures with large breasts and hips but tiny waists and barely a hint of belly. What we see on catwalks is “acceptable” fatness. Fatness that is not actually very fat at all. Fatness that the fashion industry deems worthy of being seen – or at least 0.4 per cent of the time.

There are, of course, greater challenges for the fat community than fashion: access to public spaces, workplace discrimination and equal medical care come to mind. There is, for example, extensive evidence that fat people are short-changed by doctors, who treat how their body looks and not the underlying medical concern.

Nonetheless, clothes matter. Partly because everyone should be entitled to wear clothes that fit them and that they like. And also because fashion is a cultural trendsetter, its values shaping the values of a community that glamorises and idealises the people who wear its products.

Then there are those in the fashion industry hijacking body diversity as a marketing tool – but not living up to their promise. Author, podcaster and actor Rosie Waterland told me about fashion brands that run “big, self-congratulatory campaigns saying, ‘We love all bodies so we’re extending our sizes!’ ” but don’t make clothes beyond a size 18.

Asked if some progress is better than nothing, Waterland argues that “to be told, ‘It’s so important to include all women but not you, fatty’, is corporate gaslighting”. She adds that brands which market themselves as being inclusive of bigger bodies but still exclude so many shapes and sizes “can ironically have a profoundly negative impact on people’s body image”.

It’s well past time for brands to do better by everyone’s bodies.

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