The June issue of British Vogue is the body issue. Usually when fashion magazines put forth these figure-themed issues, they make a show of placing extra emphasis on people with non-model figures. The curvaceous Beyoncé was on the cover of Vogue’s shape issue this year (though they were a bit off-message with Gisele on the shape-issue cover last year). The message is supposed to be that all women — not just models — are lovely and worth celebrating! Well, once a year, anyway. But British Vogue put supermodel Natalia Vodianova naked on the cover of next month’s issue, as if to remind the world of how perfect her figure is. Inside the magazine, she “talks about her body hang-ups.” So readers are supposed to feel better about their own figure hang-ups, knowing these are shared by women who look like Natalia?
“My agency thought that I might never do shows, because I was a bit shorter and not skinny enough,” Vodianova revealed of her early career. “But what happened was; when I gave birth to my first son I was 19, so I lost a lot of weight. I guess the stress on the body was extreme and I suddenly just turned into this stick — just the way designers love models — and after Lucas was born that’s when my career took off. I opened a lot of shows on the runway and that’s where stars are made in my industry.”
Lucas was her third child, born in December of 2001. She was back on the runway two months and 21 days later. So the woman is a freak of nature. A stunningly beautiful, gazellelike freak of nature, but a freak of nature nonetheless. Leave it to Vogue to make women everywhere feel better about themselves.
Vogue Laid Bare [British Vogue]
Russian Revelations [British Vogue]
Related: Natalia Vodianova’s Hips Do Lie
