This Girl Can... Can't She?

Being a member of the plus-size community and a lover of fashion is a difficult thing to do in 2015. And honestly, I can't believe I even need to write that. 

Things are better than they used to be; gone are shapeless swathes of drab and misery that fat people were conditioned to hide in for twice the price of straight-sized clothing (unless you're looking at Lisa Riley's new line, apparently made for "real women", probably because pretend women don't feel the need to get dressed in very expensive and very boring clothes) and we are actually encouraged to make the most of our bodies, flaunt our curves and dare to dress in bold and beautiful clothing.

So what's the problem? Well, nothing, if you are what the plus-size industry deems an "acceptable fat". If your size 20 body has a flat stomach, wide hips and a small waist, you are the target market of brands like Evans, who boldly cried that Style Has No Size with pictures of women who were around the same height, had not an inch of VBO between them and had slightly larger thighs than a straight-sized model, qualifying them to represent basically none of the customer base of your average Evans store. 

Does Style Have No Size?

Across the pond, at the height of the "we love fat people! My best friend's cousins are fat people!" media storm, Lane Bryant created the hashtag #plusisequal, a tag meant to level the playing field for plus size and straight size shoppers and state the obvious to the retailers of the world: fat people have money to spend on nice clothes too, and shouldn't be excluded from fashion because of their size and shape. Lane Bryant decreed that even women up to a US34 should be celebrated equally in the fashion world, and they topped this off with their own line of t-shirts for all those women who wanted to spread the message. Except that those t-shirts only made it as far as a US28, excluding the top-end of plus-sizes that the entire cause was set up to represent fairly and equally. Unfortunately, Lane Bryant have been made aware of this serious error but stand by it, claiming they don't understand the issue with only providing a limited range of sizes. The hashtag #plusisnotequal was set up in response, as this epic media-fail reminded us, yet again, the restrictive nature of fashion if you dare to be fat and happy.
Of course, if you wanted to lose weight (and I am most certainly not suggesting that anybody should), you'd think that you could actually buy some clothes to exercise in. Guess again. Forever21's range of "Active Wear" peaks at a US14, telling UK women above a size 18 that active clothing is not marketable to somebody of their body type. Feminist marketing campaign "This Girl Can", started by Sport England, encouraged women to love their bodies and celebrate their strength, challenging the stereotype that women were weak and delicate. However, in another marketing failure, a range of fantastic t-shirts have been released to celebrate female strength. Up to a UK22. So apparently this girl can, as long as she is thin enough.

This Girl Can
Tired of constantly being misrepresented and misunderstood by the retailers in the plus-size fashion world (and actually beyond that, because why shouldn't we be allowed to shop in any clothing store?), my friend Katt over at A Curvy Cupcake started the hashtag #thisisplus. The hashtag was created for all plus sized people to speak up about how they felt underrepresented. I don't look at adverts for plus size clothing and campaigns and see somebody who looks like me, I see somebody that the media considers the "best of a bad bunch". I want retailers to see that we are not a bad bunch, we are sassy ladies who love fashion and want to flash our cash just like any other person. To me, #thisisplus is my cry to retailers to look at me, look at my body type, and represent me. And maybe, finally, make being plus-size and loving fashion be a given, not a challenge.