The changing body of fashion

When People magazine had on their cover a woman they labelled “the world’s first size 22 supermodel”, I had a flash of grief.

Where was she when I was 19 and a size 22? When walking out the door I met taunting high school boys calling me ugly to my face and getting leered at by lecherous grown men.

I was reminded of a moment when in my size 12-ness I found Angie Stone and Jill Scott, gorgeous and glowing in Essence magazine and actually briefly regretted losing weight.

People’s cover was rather like the first sighting of Alek Wek’s and Grace Jones’ polarising, frightening beauty or Iman’s indigenous, exotic brown beauty, all moments in fashion history showing just how much of a unicorn black and female was.

Plus size has been making waves for sometime. So you would think Tess Holliday, the stunning model on People’s cover would ice that cake. Instead, she has made it clearer that black beauty remains something of a fetish.

And that fashion has never been a slice of United Colours of Benetton. Yet that is not why Tess is so fascinating.

SINGULARLY BEAUTIFUL

African American women and their bodies have over the years become subject to a unique conversation. Black women tend to have a higher BMI. Now science is investigating the possibility that this may in fact be their physiology. That perhaps the composition analysis of a black woman’s body needs to take into account the fact that obesity may in fact not be obesity.

That black women are curvier and heavier and this is simply how they come. Imagine living in a world where you think you have to half your thighs, butt, breasts and hips because you have been told that should be your normal.

Imagine living in that skin and shopping for that body. Now imagine looking around you and trying to find a gathering of confident, at-ease women who look just like you in film, music, TV and fashion and failing.

There is an irrepressible human instinct to direct plus sizes to the gym. They are rarely, if ever, accepted for how they look.

It is perceived as a function of sloth. You have to be fierce in a way that supermodels are never asked to be in order to exist as plus-sized in an image conscious world. As a woman grows older, her greatest duty to fashion is to wrest from its hands, and everybody else’s hands, her own idea of beauty. She has to reclaim herself, an introspective, painful, individual process that will inform her sense of style in the coming years.

Every happy woman must come to a point where she has to decide the thing that makes her, and only her, singularly beautiful.

Men don’t seem to require this degree of validation. And not only because apparently women find men with bellies attractive.

So much so that there is a word for it – dadbods – a lived in body that looks like a dad who’s pleasantly resigned himself to his squishiness.

The leading icon for this is Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio who has an ecstatically documented history of dating only supermodels.

MORE SIGNIFICANT ENDORSEMENT

Aside from this rousing endorsement is an even more significant one. Men with bellies were in a 2014 study found to have more sexual stamina than men with a six-pack, outlasting them by six minutes. Women simply do not have such exciting incentives to let themselves go!

Rewards diminish as our waistlines expand. That starts with the amount of fashion a woman can access, how attractive she is to her mate right down to how much money she will earn. A woman’s body will go through several noticeable changes in the course of a decade, unless of course she is Mercy Myra.

When it does go through those changes, and there is a vivid memory of how she used to look, like singer Marya, then the hits just keep coming. Instead of coming to an understanding of new beauty, she is judged as having failed at retaining her old self.

While there is nothing as motivating as baring it all on the cover of a regional magazine to get me out of bed and into the workout room each morning, I confess there is something almost freeing about having a body that does not constantly need to be assessed for damage. A body that does not suffer the anxieties of water weight thanks to hormones.

A body that does not require hours dedicated to measuring, calibrating, mirror-gazing and machine weighing. There’s a beautiful lesson to learn from Tess. And like reclaiming beauty, I think it best as a personal lesson. What’s yours? This was mine.