A few months back I decided to update my mag­a­zine sub­scrip­tions to include a few that didn’t pri­mar­ily deal with par­ent­ing or chil­dren. In the last five years the only time I’d actu­ally read a fash­ion mag­a­zine was while I was in the salon, so I fig­ured it was about time I resumed read­ing peri­od­i­cals that I felt reflected the woman-not the mother-but the woman I am today as well as my other inter­ests, (mainly shoes and make-up) while being fun to read. I chose  Glam­our, Marie Claire, and Writer’s Digest.

I received the Novem­ber issue of Glam­our this after­noon. As I was walk­ing back to my house from the mail­box, I could feel a smile begin to play across my lips-because this was a lit­tle indul­gence that was purely,  just for me.

As soon as I could, I tore open the plas­tic it was wrapped in and began flip­ping pages. On the sixth page my atten­tion was cap­tured by two beau­ti­ful women and the ques­tion, “Are these women gor­geous?” I imme­di­ately rec­og­nized one of the mod­els from the Lane Bryant adver­tise­ments so I quickly flipped to page 198, while utter­ing the word “duh”. This is what I saw:

The arti­cle is titled “oh. wow. these bod­ies are beau­ti­ful”, it’s  about way too skinny super­mod­els and how the every day woman is about to change the “def­i­n­i­tion of gor­geous” at least as it is pic­tured in fashion…so it seems.

Per­son­ally I thought the arti­cle lacked real sub­stance. I wished it dealt more with women and their body issues rather than mak­ing up excuses for why we don’t see more aver­age body types in fash­ion mag­a­zines or even pos­ing the ques­tion as to whether or not these women are beau­ti­ful.  Kate Dil­lon, in my opin­ion is one of the most beau­ti­ful peo­ple on the planet-the fact that she’s not skele­tal is nei­ther her nor there in my mind.  Many women, fat, skinny, and aver­age included suf­fer from eat­ing dis­or­ders, low body image and self esteem is more impor­tant. I know plenty of women who are nat­u­rally skinny who wish they could put on a few pounds (I often wished I’d had their prob­lem) who feel they are ridiculed by heav­ier women for not look­ing “nor­mal”. Why do we focus so much on body size instead of the health of our bodies?

I didn’t think the story’s men­tion of  lunch, and how great it was that these women actu­ally ate it–[as com­pared to the skinny super mod­els, whom they made sound like must only sur­vive on air, because they never eat the lunches pro­vided] dur­ing photo shoots was funny. I thought it a lame attempt to show how real and very much like you and me these women really are. I think if those starv­ing mod­els could actu­ally gain a few pounds and not have to fear that they wouldn’t  loose their next audi­tion over a pound or three; they’d prob­a­bly want to chow down on a turkey sub  too.  A point that the edi­tor in chief of British Vogue made while “beg­ging for reform” in a let­ter she penned “to Karl Lager­feld, John Gal­liano and fel­low design­ers at Prada, Ver­sace, Yves Saint Lau­rent, Balen– ciaga and other top fash­ion houses” a por­tion of which was “quoted in The Times of Lon­don as say­ing that even the really well known fash­ion mod­els were not com­fort­able in the sizes of the sam­ples they had to be pho­tographed in.

This entire arti­cle stemmed from a pic­ture of a woman with belly fat in their Sep­tem­ber issue named Lizzie Miller (pic­tured above front and cen­ter) who sat “au naturel-confident, sexy and clearly uncon­cerned about a lit­tle belly over hang”. Accord­ing to Glam­our for some unknown rea­son  this pho­to­graph hit a nerve with read­ers even though they’ve pic­tured plus size mod­els in their pages a num­ber of times in the past-including Queen Lat­i­fah who was pic­tured on their cover. I even spied a Lane Bryant adver­tise­ment in this month’s issue-although the model doesn’t look like she’d really fit into any­thing Lane Bryant sells except for maybe a scarf.

This pic­ture of Lizzie Miller set off a dis­cus­sion about beauty and what is con­sid­ered beau­ti­ful; some read­ers liked the fact that they’d fea­tured a woman who looked like they did while oth­ers dis­liked the fact that they’d put an over­weight woman in the mag­a­zine.  She’s over­weight?  Really? Yes, but only by the slight­est of mar­gins– I can tell you about being over­weight. REALLY over­weight–these women aren’t. I can say that now because I am their size-and I don’t feel fat…not like I did any­way, not anymore.

As some­one who has strug­gled with her weight her entire life, I wish I had seen more “nor­mal” women who looked like me when I was younger. Instead I was sub­jected to bone thin women whom I could never, not in a mil­lion years look like. Not that I’ve ever suf­fered from self esteem issues because I didn’t. It just would have been nice to feel that I was rep­re­sented in the pages of Sev­en­teen when I was sev­en­teen. Why do we as a soci­ety feel the need to pre-determine what is beau­ti­ful. I think these women pic­tured above are just as beau­ti­ful as the typ­i­cal fash­ion model or celebrity we see fea­tured in mag­a­zines every­day. I’d like to see them pic­tured more together and not clumped into one cat­e­gory or piled nude on top of each other.

In her famous speech, “Every­body is Free to Wear Sun­screen” Mary Schmich offered up the advice to not read beauty mag­a­zines because they’d make you feel ugly. It’s unfor­tu­nate that for many this state­ment is true. That star­ing at the pages of impos­si­bly skinny, beau­ti­ful peo­ple can make you feel less than. Fash­ion mag­a­zines never made me feel less than, because I never attempted to com­pare myself to the women pic­tured. I think mag­a­zines have come a long way-and the fact that women who aren’t per­fect can illicit such emo­tion, in my mind proves that we want to see all dif­fer­ent types of peo­ple in mag­a­zines and not the aes­thetic that the fash­ion indus­try seems to cling to with an iron fist.

To their credit Glamor says it will fea­ture more women from all aspects of the size and race spec­trum. I’ll believe when I see a true plus size model strut­ting her size 20 Chanel wear­ing self on the cover. No, Chanel doesn’t come in size twenty so put that credit card away ladies — that was part of the point of this arti­cle, but I have hope that maybe one day they will. That one day every woman who flips through the pages of a fash­ion mag­a­zine can say that they don’t make her feel ugly-that infact they have the oppo­site effect-a lofty aspi­ra­tion? Per­haps, but one that is slowly com­ing to fruition.

For this post I quoted the Novem­ber issue of Glam­our Magazine’s arti­cle as well as this Times Online arti­cle.

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