An odd thought on plus fashion and lifestyle magazines

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I’ve been vaguely bothered by the plus fashion and lifestyle magazines out there – while the clothing is wearable, stuff I want to know about, and for the most part the models are indeed plus (despite one insane model insisting that her stomach must be flat – suggesting that her clients still miss the point of having plus models) the articles almost always lack “oomph.” There are several factors in why I’m trying to pin this down:

fashion magazines

There are several vague things that make me feel not-good about what is intended as positive, feel good articles. At last I think I may have figured it out, and it took me awhile, especially since I’ve spent most of my life among the fat and excluded:

Fat is NOT a lifestyle. Despite public conditioning, it’s not even a lifestyle choice – aside from Renee′ Zellweger, who do you know who has ever deliberately gained weight ? And Zellweger did not size herself out of the mainstream, but into it. Who consciously sizes themselves out of the mainstream? Even the most profoundly lazy person will do a little work – like exercise – to prevent life from being made even more difficult.

This is the main problem I’m having with the plus online magazines out there. I give them credit for trying to serve an underserved market, but there is an undertone that being plus sized is in and of itself a lifestyle and a lifestyle choice. It’s not – fat women still go to work (and struggle to look professional) but otherwise have the same working issues as other women, including being culturally trained not to negotiate, making sacrifices to their career if they have children and bearing the burden of the really crap jobs if they’re single; they still have financial management and dating issues that are the same as other women – not every person who dates a plus woman is a “chubby chaser” and by insisting on addressing the entire situation as “plus dating” instead of just “dating” it relegates women into the role of fetishization, and while I’m glad to see models getting work in an arena where I need to see plus women, they should not be the subject of nearly every article. In fact, interviews with models should only happen a few times a year at most unless it’s a bona fide trade magazine.

Yes, some articles can still be plus specific – the perspective of Igigi’s main designer came from her discovery that women in the United States are expected to conform to sizes, a reality that shocked her and prompted her to start one of the most stylish lines of clothing for plus women available. What do women in other parts of the world wear, and what struggles are they subjected to simply for having a female body of any type? Who is watchdogging the diet corporations that are making billions of dollars off our physical insecurities – and do those corporations also fund any major clothiers?

I think what I’m really craving right now is a fashion and lifestyle magazine that has plus size models as a matter of course and feels no need to say a darned thing about it – and ignores letters of “complaint” about the size of the models, but will print any other criticism out there. I loved Marie Claire before the editors changed and it went downhill, and Bust and Venus magazine have potential, but I actually want my news and fashion just a little mainstream.

In a distant universe, I’d like to do my own magazine but I suspect I’d be in over my head the minute I went beyond web distribution. In the meantime, I’m putting these thoughts out there for someone to pick up in the collaborative universe that is the Internet.