America’s Next Top Plus-Size Models, Karl Lagerfeld wants nothing to do with you. He doesn’t want to see you gracefully walk down runways reserved for size zeros or twos. “No one wants to see curvy women,” he told Focus magazine. “You’ve got fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly,” he added.
As the debate over whether models are too thin rages on in every major fashion capital, and Photoshop is being given the ol’ pitchfork treatment for what it does to girls’ self-esteem, the fashion realm has embraced the concept of using plus-size girls. (Who are we kidding — anything above a size 4 is considered plus-size in the world of modeling.) German mag Brigitte announced last week that they won’t use super-skinny girls in their pages anymore, and Glamour’s been delivering on its promise of more plus-size/normal-size girls as models. (On a side note, can we stop calling normal-size girls plus-size? Thanks.) Of course, the poster girl for this whole movement, if you want to call it that, was the one and only Beth Ditto, who shines from covers, debuted her own line, and even played the Fendi party last season. (“I know that one year Karl Lagerfeld was refusing to make clothes for women of a certain size, and the next year he was asking me to play the Fendi party,” she’s noted.) But is all this kumbaya we-love-all-sizes just posturing on fashion’s end? After Cintra Wilson’s infamous takedown of JCPenney (remember those “obese” mannequins?) and British GQ’s Alex Blimes’s oh-so-eloquent screed in which he called Ditto a “porker,” maybe it’s best to admit the industry still hates fat. And we shouldn’t be so shocked when the Kaiser comes out against bigger girls.
No one wants to see curvy women’: German designer [Independent UK]
