14 DAY TRIAL // Precisely one year ago, Glamour magazine introduced women worldwide to plus-size model Lizzie Miller via a small photo in which she, wearing only a thong, smiled brightly despite a roll of fat on her tummy and visible stretch marks.
Her photo, buried deep in the pages of the magazine and almost suffocated by other photos of thin, near-perfect, size 0 models and ads, was welcomed by women as the first time a glossy magazine put up a picture of a real woman.
Since then, Lizzie has been getting more and more offers, including from famous fashion brands in France and Italy. She’s a British size 14 to 16, and she’s happy she had a part to play in the so-called ongoing fashion revolution, she tells the Daily Mail.
At first, she didn’t like the photo that would run in Glamour and thus bring her to international media attention. Then again, she thought, who was going to notice it after all.
She was surprised to learn that this, a photo like hers, was precisely what women all over the world were waiting for, judging by the reactions she got for it.
“Seeing someone not airbrushed, with an average looking body, compared to all those stick-thin pictures of perfection – I guess people thought: ‘Wow! This girl looks like me’,” Lizzie says for the Mail.
Ironically enough, it was precisely that part of her body she’s most insecure of that got the most attention – for never before had a glossy mag included a picture of a woman with an obvious roll of fat on her tummy.
“The part of myself I was most insecure about was my stomach. My weight has been an issue I’ve struggled with all my life. But the response I got made me realize other people out there felt like me,” Lizzie says.
“One girl wrote to me to say her sister had told her she was fat and ugly all her life. Now, when she feels bad about herself, she goes to her computer, looks at a picture of me and she feels better,” the model adds.
Lizzie can relate, for she struggled with her weight all her life. Obesity runs in her family and, when she was just 12, she used to weigh more than she does now.
She was constantly teased and bullied in school, she recalls, with people telling her the meanest and hurtful of things. When a boy told her she’d sprained her ankle because she was too fat to support herself and that she had horrid legs, she decided to take matters into her own hands.
She had her family enlist her with Weight Watchers and shed a many pounds by simply starting to eat right. At 13, she was already a plus size model, after Wilhelmina signed her.
Now, Lizzie hopes to use her own story and example to show that fashion should not be exclusive to thin women – for beauty certainly isn’t.
“It’s crazy that fashion recognizes only one body type and if you don’t fit it, you’re considered fat. We need to be celebrating skinny girls, curvy girls, tall girls, short girls, black girls, Asian girls and all nationalities,” she says.
“I think that would make women feel a lot better about themselves. We have a long way to go until a girl who’s curvy can be in a magazine without a lot of attention being drawn to her,” the model adds.