Fashion is one of the most significant prevailing ways in which we think about and present the
body in the West and increasingly all over the world.
Dress is the form, it's the major form in which we make our body's social.
Fashion to me means transformative or transformation
and I liked the idea of trying to convey your image or your design or your identity in a different form.
When it comes to the relationship of dress and the body,
I think of clothing as a second skin.
This idea of oneness and authenticity when it comes to the body.
When you're not in a good place with your body or you've been advertised to believe
that you don't fit into a certain brand or lifestyle aesthetic
it makes you feel like you're not good enough.
That's not okay.
Everyone deserves to wear what they want.
It's not about a dress.
It's not about a piece of fabric.
It's about the person that's wearing it
and I think a good garment enhances who you are.
Finding a dress should be fun.
That should be the best part of your day, not the worst.
That should be the exciting, great thing to wake up and go shopping
or order a dress online or whatever it is.
It's not just about the clothes, it can't at this point just be about the clothes.
It has to also be very much about who's wearing them.
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So I did a project looking at fashion buying.
It's prêt-à-porter collections that I was following really,
so quite high end, and there is
quite uniform style of body amongst the agents themselves.
It is a kind of white, slim, young world.
It's fairly un-diverse.
We have a fashion industry that is operating on a system of oppression and it hasn't been
addressed and so we see this kind of bleed into the modeling industry or bleed into the
retail industry and the cosmetic industry.
I get a little frustrated when you see a supermodel
on the cover of Glamour in a bikini and she's a size 12
and we're supposed to say "Oh! Look at this revolutionary cover. The industry is so different now."
Not really.
You're still seeing mostly white casts of 17 year old size zero girls.
The language and the discourse that surrounds plus size fashion today feels in a lot of ways very new.
Like the fashion industry is for the first time discovering the plus sized woman.
But whenever you really look back through media sources including industry trade journals
like Women's Wear Daily or high fashion magazines like Vogue and Harper's Bazaar,
you see these conversations flair up every few decades or so.
One thing I would love to see is just more sample sizes.
Like, as simple as that.
When I went into Siriano's showroom and I saw that there was gowns in all different sizes,
that's mind blowing.
I want the customers who are buying the clothes to see that they would look good on them.
I hate when people say, "Ugh, that won't look good on me. It's on a size two."
No. That's not true.
Just because you're seeing in a small form doesn't mean it won't look great on you.
If fashion designers actually thought outside, you know, the conventions of dressing appropriately
or dressing to look slender, I think that they could really level the playing field
and, you know, really earnestly make fashion much more democratic for all consumers.
If you look in these stores, if you look at where the clothing are for plus size women,
they're in horrible places.
They're in the basement or they're up in the attic somewhere.
It should be merchandised together.
Girls should be able to shop together.
At the end of the day, this is an industry, this a business and surely you want to be
more inclusive.
not just because that's trendy, but because there's a real market opportunity there.
We're having a great time working with Moda Operandi.
But Moda Operandi sizes had stopped at 16
and we said, well, we would like our sizes to go up to 26.
They didn't even have that built in their algorithm for their company to do that yet.
But we got them to, which was amazing.
So, we were the first brand to offer sizes up to a size 26.
Where is Gucci? Where is Dior?
Where are the massive brands that have millions of millions of dollars?
They could do anything they want.
And everyone's going bankrupt?
That's why you're going bankrupt.
You don't have clothes for lots of women.
You are missing a market that could really expand.
I really see this immortalization of beauty and youth
and it's kind of static at a point in your life
and I think it could be portrayed much wider or broader
to beautifully encompass all of our stages.
Fashion media is hugely important in terms of
how the fashion aesthetic is disseminated.
People, I think, have a very wide diet now of
where they consume fashion
and where they get their fashion influence from.
Right now, the media and social media -
that is how we are deciding what we buy and what we wear.
I'd rather watch a girl online wearing her outfit of the day
and seeing it in situ,
rather than just seeing something shot in studio
that I maybe can't relate to as much.
What I'm seeing through social, how it is providing
the grassroots for cultivating these communities
that are addressing and trying to tackle problems
in the fashion industry head on.
We're seeing these courageous voices using or mobilizing
social media through tagging, linking, and posting
and you have mainstream media kind of piggybacking on the courage
of the people who are posting, linking, and tagging and then sort of co-opting it and
then sort of using it to address issues in the industry.
It used to be that the fashion ideal came
through designers, to journalists, through the magazines
and there was a kind of control, an editorial control.
Now we have a kind of a democratization of that fashion message.
And that's kind of opened up the kind of range
of fashion voices and sort of challenged the dominance
of the fashion journalist.
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The biggest step forward
and how we will move forward is listening.
But it's also compassion.
We have to remember every time we design something,
every time we post a picture, every time we
put out a marketing campaign, who we are speaking to.
I think that, instead of designing with this singular goal in mind
of how to make a large body appear more slender,
that fashion designers can instead think beyond
the boundaries of the body
and think about the potentials of fashion design
to create interesting silhouettes, to kind of play with the body
instead of hiding the body, instead of trying to fit all bodies
into this one idealized mold of what a "good" body is.
I think it's important that every emerging fashion professional,
particularly ones of color, find themselves a mentor.
When we have courageous individuals
in an industry that is predominantly white,
taking a chance on someone of color
and taking them under their wing
or cracking the door open a little bit for them
can help that person to realize goals
that they didn't even know were possible.
It's an interesting time for fashion because I think
there is a kind of opening up and recognition of alternatives bodies.
We clearly need fashion to be more inclusive
and to start to recognize different body types, styles, and aesthetics.
It will only happen to a greater extent
when we have people in places of influence and
positions of influence in the fashion industry
who don't conform to that.