14 DAY TRIAL // In Hollywood, Jennifer Lawrence is somewhat of a rarity as far as body shape and attitude go: she’s not stick thin and she refuses to diet to become this way, she has hips and breasts and a bum, and she not only eats a lot (carbs, too!) but she also brags about it.
Because she’s unlike most other actresses and because the industry loves nothing more than to stick labels on people, she’s been dubbed “curvy” and embraced like a much-needed and welcome breath of fresh air on the scene.
The only problem is that Jennifer is not curvy.
Ashley Graham pens essay
Ashley Graham is a size 14 and she’s one of the most famous and in-demand plus size models. Size 14 might not mean “plus size” in everyday life, but in fashion, where the norm is either a size 0 or 2 at the most, she is just that. She too, just like all other plus size models, is still a rarity in fashion.
Graham has been featured in several major trade publications, including Vogue and Elle, and has starred in the “controversial” and banned ad for Lane Bryant lingerie in 2010, which you can check out below. She is using her platform to open the discussion on a topic close to her heart: this need to label a certain body type as beautiful, to the point of the complete exclusion of all others.
We need more body diversity in the media, Graham writes in an essay for Net-a-Porter’s online magazine, The Edit. We need to have bodies of all shapes and sizes in film, fashion, music and entertainment in general, because this is the only way in which regular women can learn that real beauty lies in this diversity.
“I think that you can be healthy at any size and my goal is to help and educate women on that. It doesn’t matter if you’re a size 2 or 22 as long as you’re taking care of your body, working out, and telling yourself, ‘I love you’ instead of taking in the negativity of beauty standards,” Graham writes.
Reevaluate old and unrealistic concepts
Education has to start somewhere, and Graham takes issue with the glorification of Jennifer Lawrence as “curvy,” because she’s anything but that. It’s true, her body is not something that we see too much in showbiz, but that doesn’t mean that it’s curvy. It just means that all other body types, most of them attained through severe dieting, long workouts and who knows what else, are not realistic, not attainable for the average woman.
“Young girls don’t have much to look at, curvy women are not on covers of magazines, they’re not talked about on social media as much as other celebrities. Jennifer Lawrence is the media’s poster girl for curves — she’s tiny!” Graham says.
She’s right about that: Lawrence is a beautiful woman and she’s definitely more relatable to women than her acting peers, but she’s not curvy. She’s a fit, healthy woman, who, unlike those celebrities who starve and put themselves through hell, still has breasts and hips and a pert derriere.
Graham isn’t blasting Lawrence or anything like that, but she seems very bent on making everyone understand that we need to reevaluate some of our long-established notions, with “curvy” among them.
