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Share“Earlier this year, the editors of V, a magazine so recherché it can make Vogue seem like Redbook, published an issue featuring large models in expensive body-baring clothes. In one photograph, a woman in a strapless bathing suit, cut to reveal three rolls of flesh, grabs at her platform stilettos. In another, Tara Lynn, a size 16 model, is clad in nothing but a pair of Dior sandals.
Mainstream fashion magazines have always purported to embrace diverse images of the female body, publishing periodic “shape” issues that juxtapose the thin and very thin with the moderately fleshy. But only in the last year or so have notably larger women been released from the fringes, appearing not only in magazines and on television but also in the more rarefied world of the runway, including a Chanel show in St.-Tropez this spring. This shift dates, more or less, to last fall, when Glamour ran a small picture of a 5-foot-11, 180-pound model comfortably exposing her paunch. So unusual was the appearance of belly fat in this context that the magazine received thousands of letters and comments, most of them roaring with support. The model, Lizzie Miller, appeared on the “Today” show and was profiled in The Guardian.”
