Fashionable Fat

Temple University Sociologist Amanda Czerniawski is interested in how fatness functions in contemporary culture, and especially in contemporary understanding of beauty. Considering herself a vivacious, attractive plus-size woman, and with some acting experience under her belt, she decided to become an under-cover sociologist in the plus-size modeling world. Her forthcoming Fashioning Fat is the result.

Plus-sized models swim against the current of the fashion industry, attempting to undo cultural stigmas. Czerniawski draws from Naomi Wolf’s claim that standards of beauty are tools of power, and from studies that highlight the implicit “disembodiment” of the fashion industry. Some treat their bodies as treated as passive objects to admire; others see their bodies as enemies that can never be defeated (“My body hates me!”). In these and other scenarios, people make a sharp distinction between self and body. Call it the Cartesian foundation of the fashion industry.

One of Czerniawski’s findings is that plus-size models don’t really challenge the assumptions of the fashion industry at a fundamental level. They engage in similar efforts to control weight, shape, and size, and these “technologies” only serve to “reinforce their sense of disembodiment.” Given the way “thin aesthetics” commands the field, she is skeptical that “plus-size models can reclaim their embodiment through this craft.”

We need, she suggests, not models of different size and shape, but a more fundamental questioning of the fashion industry itself and its current domination of our conceptions of beauty, especially the beauty of women.