Glamour, Body Image, and the Loving Your Body Revolution.

Photo by Matthias Vriens-McGrath in Novem­ber 2009 issue of Glamour

Glam­our mag­a­zine in its Novem­ber 2009 edi­tion, on stands now, has decided to fea­ture a spread of “plus sized” mod­els. I put quo­ta­tions around plus sized because in the mod­el­ing & fash­ion world that is really any­thing about a size 6. Talk about unre­al­is­tic stan­dards & for a mag­a­zine like Glam­our we aren’t talk­ing mod­el­ing high cou­ture fash­ion that is directed toward a more high art sense of fash­ion this fash­ion to actu­ally wear. It’s mar­keted toward the “aver­age” per­son but still the stan­dards that have been part of the indus­try are any­thing but average.

The fea­ture of these women in Glam­our was sparked by Lizzi Miller’s pic­ture on page 194 in the Sep­tem­ber issue. When I wrote it about that  I was hop­ing it would trans­late into some­thing real and sus­tain­able in the mar­ket­ing & sell­ing of beauty.  I don’t fault nat­u­rally thin women for being fea­tured in media.  I believe those bod­ies are equally beau­ti­ful when they are nat­ural & I don’t want thin women to go any­where (love your thin self!).

How­ever, there are a lot of women in all forms of media & fash­ion who have to actively con­trol every­thing they eat, hide food, or deny them­selves food in order to meet unre­al­is­tic expec­ta­tions.  Women in every­day life do the same thing, that is not healthy or beau­ti­ful.  It can even be an extremely seri­ous dis­or­der. I believe unre­al­is­tic pres­sures & expec­ta­tions of women hav­ing to meet a rigid body image & beauty fea­tured in media (one that is con­structed through pho­to­shop, mind you) doesn’t help any­one.  Media helps to reflect and shape cul­tural atti­tudes, it’s a major social insti­tu­tion.  We can’t deny the power it can have in the dis­course on body image.

There­fore, I am happy to see this fea­ture. I believe that the fea­ture spread of mod­els who are not the “fash­ion world norm” is a step, but it’s a long way from see­ing body diver­sity in media.  I mean all out body diver­sity, not just some able-bodied size 10–14 women who looked like Glama­zons. Instead, fea­tur­ing the wide range of beauty and bod­ies that exist in the world could really open up how we con­struct beauty ideals in the 21st century.

I don’t think a fea­ture like Glam­our has done will do this auto­mat­i­cally.  I’m not naive & know that money will ulti­mately do the talk­ing. If peo­ple buy it, more diverse images will be shown.  But still it’s a step, a step toward see­ing a reflec­tion of the real­ity that beauty comes in a lot of dif­fer­ent bod­ies.  And maybe, just maybe, the world won’t come to a screech­ing halt if peo­ple see that real­ity of diverse body beauty in the mag­a­zines, com­mer­cials, shows, and other media out­lets they inter­act with.

What do you think about it? Will you buy the magazine?

Tagged as: body image, fashion, glamour, lizzi miller, media, plus sized, semi-nude natural body