Premium plus size retailer, navabi are launching a new campaign called More Plus Please in response to the dire lack of size diversity from the catwalk to the pages of the leading fashion press.
As all fashion eyes are centred on London for Fashion Week, women are rallying on social media to call for more plus size representation in the fashion media.
More than 50% of women are plus size… but when we look at magazines, TV, the catwalk… there are no plus size women.
The Stats
To illustrate the issue, navabi surveyed 12 of the most popular women’s magazines in the UK, all purchased during the same week. They counted the number of ‘model size’ women, and the number of plus size women. Plus size is sometimes defined as 16+, but for the survey they were ‘generous’ in their definition and included curvy women like Holly Willoughby and Kim Kardashian. They also excluded those who fell in between model size and plus size, and excluded any head and shoulder only shots. Here are the results:
The percentage of plus size women is just as poor in ads as it is in articles, in other words: It’s not just an editorial issue. In fact we find many stylists and editors want to feature a fairer representation of women.
The More Plus Please campaign has now launched with a website and video that point to the lack of size diversity, from the catwalk to the pages of the leading fashion press.
It follows a New York Fashion Week that saw an absence of plus size models from the scheduled shows and a month in which the leading fashion monthlies carried 40 times more images of ‘model’ sized women than plus size women, despite the latter being the majority of the population.
The campaign was initiated by navabi, the premium plus size retailer. navabi chief merchant Miriam Lahage commented: There is no one version of beauty and it’s time the industry reflected this. And we’re not talking just one model in a show or publishing a shoot just once a season in a magazine.
“There is a mindset among designers which results in media collateral that totally excludes plus size women – from catwalk imagery to samples. For example, not one single model at the two leading specialist plus size model agencies has been booked for LFW. This needs to change. And we would also invite fashion writers and stylists to take the initiative and challenge the received wisdom. For example, with designers moving to a show and buy concept which will remove the sample tyranny there has never been a greater opportunity for stylists to embrace size diversity in their shoots.”
navabi is committed to celebrating and supporting size diversity. At the end of last year it responded to a fat shaming incident on the London Underground by handing out unbranded cards to women stating ‘You Look Great’.
#moreplusplease
