size 20

I’m a little late in talking about this, I know. The Daily Mail wrote on the story on October 4th. I was thinking about this, though, since the moment I saw the photograph and read the article.

This is the thing, in case you haven’t heard. The fashion designer, Jean Paul Gaultier, decided to use ONE size 20 model in his runway show (you can click on the image to the left to see the image in a larger size). Okay. This is good and fine. EXCEPT, he used ONE larger model and the rest were all size 0.

Not only did he only use one plus size model BUT his show was focused around aerobics. Reuters reports:

“…Gaultier again took the audience by surprise as he turned a catwalk into a fitness room, equipped with glittery exercise machines, sending models racing along in elaborate training suits, pumped up by songs such as Diana Ross’s 1982 hit “Muscles” and excerpts from aerobics classes.

Wearing eyeshades and high-heeled Converse shoes, models paraded in baseball jackets in embroidered satin with shorts reading Gaultier on the buttocks as a recorded voice screamed encouragingly: “Now, we all want to have thighs of steel.”

While I couldn’t find a comment from Gaultier to explain his reason for using one larger sized model, I find this to be a mockery of women who are larger than a size 0. And…what is a size 0 anyway? It makes me think of the Emperor’s Clothing where they would really be naked because 0 means nada.

And why care about what size you are when the highly regarded (ahem) Hewlett-Packard is so willing to make a camera that slims us down automatically?

And do you notice how all of this is aimed at women? Not one man in the HP ad. Not one man in the catwalks is being mocked or disregarded.

Women are the whipping posts for the weight issue. It’s easy to make fun of women because we seem to buy into it so much more. We seem to feed into the furor that arises over weight and feel that we have to meet some ideal look in order to be desireable. And many men feed into that by focusing so much on a woman’s weight.

Sure, being overweight is unhealthy. I completely agree. Being underweight is also unhealthy.

Every person has a weight that is healthier for her or him and it isn’t often in the size 20 or the size 0 areas. It’s in-between. And finding that weight is more important than fitting into designer clothes or buying into a camera that makes us look like something we’re not.

I’d rather be me, fat and all, than be anyone else or try to fit some ideal that is not only dangerous but unattainable.