14 DAY TRIAL // Tess Holliday is the largest plus-size model to be signed to a modeling agency and she’s been getting a lot of attention in recent months, both online and in the media. She’s a gorgeous woman, but it’s the fact that she’s a US size 22 that’s attracted more attention than her beautiful face.
Hours ago, Tess stopped by The Today Show to talk about her latest accomplishment, landing the cover of People Magazine, and how she responds to those who criticize her for apparently glamorizing and “promoting” obesity with her modeling work.
“Health is so personal for everybody”
When it comes to signing with MILK, a UK-based plus-size modeling agency, Tess admits that she first thought whoever was on the phone had gotten the wrong number.
She explains (see the video below) that she never lost hope of making it as a model but she didn’t expect it to happen so soon. In her younger years, when she tried to get signed as a plus-size girl, she was repeatedly turned down either because she was too short or too heavy.
At the end of the day, she says, one’s weight and dress size shouldn’t even matter in society’s appreciation of beauty, and she hopes to be able to send this message to all the women in the world.
If you’re heavier and you want to improve yourself by losing weight, then it’s ok. However, it’s just as ok if you’re heavier and you don’t want to lose the extra pounds, as long as you’re happy with yourself and you’re healthy.
Speaking of which, to those criticizing Tess for being obese and positioning herself as a role model, she has this to say: how much she weighs is not your business.
“Health is so personal for everybody,” she says. “It's really my business, and everybody's business what we do with our bodies and what healthy means to us. So I just ignore them and keep living the dream.”
Beauty outside industry’s standards
Tess might be the heaviest plus-size model right now, but she’s not the only heavy woman waging war against preconceived notions of female beauty and industry’s standards from such a public platform.
The fashion and beauty industries have equated beauty with skinny for decades, to the point where everything else outside of this norm was simply not beautiful.
These new role models aim to prove the contrary: real beauty comes in all sizes, all shapes and all colors. It doesn’t know gender or age or any other artificial limitations imposed by man. Thanks to the Internet and social media, these women have now a better shot at making it big in the industry, and thus take their message to a larger platform.
That still doesn’t stop criticism. When you try to deny the validity of one extreme by proposing another, you’re only substituting one evil for another one, and trying to claim it’s not so.
The biggest critics to this new trend say that extremely thin models of beauty are just as unhealthy and damaging to society as extremely heavy ones, like Tess’ case here.