The idea of dressing for your body type is problematic. Here’s why.

Body type fashion and styling has been aroound for decades, but it is hugely problematic, here's why it is

Rebecca Wright
25th October 2022
Fashion has been dominated by skinny women alone for an uncomfortable amount of time. It’s time we changed that.

When you think of fashion, what springs to mind? If it is Vogue Cover models, size 6 Victoria’s Secret Angels and Kate Moss’s infamous “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, that’s okay. That makes sense. This damaging skinny-or-worthless rhetoric has been plaguing the fashion industry for far too long – leaving an absolutely jaw-dropping array of plus sized models completely out of the picture.

Fortunately, fashion has become a lot more inclusive in recent years. Plus sized models are more common, though it should definitely be noted that there is still a long way to go. I sincerely hope that size-inclusiveness will one day be common practice for clothing websites and fashion shows, rather than just tokenism and reputation laundering, as it is literally the bare minimum for the clothes you’re selling to fit people. I could talk about general fatphobia in the fashion industry for an age, but this article is focused on body-types, and dressing for them.

Dressing ‘for’ your body type implies that there is a way to dress ‘against’ it

Body-types are not a new concept. In fact, the idea of dressing for your body type has been around for as long as clothes themselves have. However, dressing ‘for’ your body type implies that there is a way to dress ‘against’ it – as though you are doing your body a disservice by dressing in a certain way or showing the ‘wrong’ parts.

@diana.dares on Instagram

Now, as a die-hard advocate for body inclusivity, this does not sit right with me. Notice, too, how ‘Apple-shaped’ bodies (i.e. people with large stomachs) are told to wear long, flowy tops in effort to take attention away from their middle, whereas people with a conventionally desirable ‘Hourglass’ figure are told to wear clothes nipped in at the waist. This, transparently, exposes the uglier side of the fashion industry.

Where women are told exactly what they should be self-conscious about, what parts of them they should hide, what gives them worth

How some curves should be flaunted, and others hated. In this way, the fashion industry lets down fat women. First, by not accurately representing them; and then by telling them they can wear that, but no, not this.

How absolutely awful, abhorrent even, to tell a person not only that you hate the way their body looks, but that they should cover it up in the name of ‘fashion’, the very thing supposedly meant to bring an abundance of confidence, boldness and originality. It only takes a quick search on ASOS Curve to expose the dire difference between options for plus sized women, and the rest of the population.

@laurennicolefk on Instagram

I suppose the bottom line is that fashion should not dictate how you choose to dress, and if anything, the relationship is meant to be the other way around. Fashion should be a freeing form of self-expression and a claiming of your own physical identity. The challenge lies in being able to do this with true confidence in a fat-phobic society, simultaneously calling you brave for the clothes you wear, and hell-bent on forcing you into a box labelled ‘other’.

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