“We would love for you to attend our fashion month show.”
Me: “Are you providing dressing options?”
“Nothing in your size, sadly, but we do have these really fun earrings!”
In 2019 this was a common conversation I had with most London Fashion Week shows. It became rather tedious and honestly quite offensive.
For many years, as a plus-size woman, I’d been made to feel grateful to even be invited to these fashion-month shows because, quite frankly, I didn’t have the acceptable “fashion-worthy body” that’s so prevalent in the fashion industry—even though I had nearly a decade’s worth of high-end fashion editorials, billboards, beauty campaigns, and articles under my name. My size was definitely still an issue. Plus-size models were definitely still an issue.
You could also see this from the lack of representation on the runways, especially in London. The place that gave birth to punk, the country that has seen decades of fashion trends, artists, and musicians influence the world with their flamboyance, creativity, and punk spirit, but not punk enough to allow bigger bodies to be involved.
That’s when I decided to boycott LFW. Until you include us in the shows, invite us to sit on the front row, and dress us, why should we support you?
Fast-forward to 2023, and we’ve been through a lot. Throughout the pandemic, mental health, well-being, self-love, and self-care have been at the center of our core conversations, alongside the real importance of diversity and inclusion. We’ve seen such a huge change from brands pushing the narrative of including bodies of all sizes across their social media pages, brand campaigns and messaging and ranges from Never Fully Dressed, Karen Millen, Ganni, Anthropologie, and Rixo extended to plus size, showing that they were listening to the current climate on inclusion. Surely that wasn’t just a trend, was it?
With that in mind, I expected big things from the fashion weeks last year. I threw myself back into the fashion week tornado to find out whether any brands actually lived up to that same big inclusive energy. I tracked all the appearances of models that were considered plus or curve during fashion month to see if any improvements had been made for inclusivity. Here’s what I learned.
The Coach Fall 2023 Ready To Wear Fashion Show on February 13, 2023 in New York City.Giovanni Giannoni/Getty Images
NEW YORK FASHION WEEK
New York has always held the trophy for inclusion when it comes to size. Last season it was in the lead for putting curvier models on its catwalk, but this season it did a full 180 and is in third place out of the four fashion capitals.
