A while back I blogged about Charlotte Coyle and the documentary that she was doing to shed a positive light on plus size women in Great Britan. As a result of the documentary she has decided to do a beauty contest for ladies size 16 and up called Beauty Reborn.
I just hate that I will probably never see this show, but for those in Scotland you will be able to view it on local station channel 4. Coyle who originally gave up her US work visa to find more modeling opportunities in the UK during the filming of her documentary found the same problems that models in the US deal with.
“What started out as an attempt to make a documentary about seeing curves in a positive way,” as Coyle puts it, soon became a revealing exposé on just how resistant the British fashion industry seems to be about embracing the idea that anyone over a size 12 could possibly want to dress fashionably.”
Over 200 ladies auditioned for the beauty contest with those selected being from size 16 to 24. With any plus size competition of this type the ladies had to stand up before all and be in the spot light. I’m sure that for most of the ladies they where not only dealing with stage fright but with the fact that they had people staring at them becasue they where plus size. I am a big man and have become accustomed to people calling me “big man” but I’m not even sure I would have the courage to do what these ladies did.
Plus size celebrity and fellow blogger Amy Lamé spoke on some of the size acceptance issues surrounding the contest and I must say that I agree with her saying; “We’re constantly told that you can’t be fat and beautiful, that if you’re big you’re automatically lazy, ugly and unglamorous. Yet there are more fat people now than there ever were before. This issue isn’t going away.”
With contests like this and Mo’Nique’s F.A.T. Chance it is for sure raising awareness of plus size women world wide. I hope to see more contests like this coming out in the near future to not only bring plus size modeling out of the shadows but to point out the size acceptance issues that are going on in both the United States and Great Britan.
If someone like Charlotte Coyle who is a proven model in the industry had a hard time finding advertisers to sign on to her project that says that there are still a lot of issues that are going on in the fashion industry. They are simply not looking at the fact that the average size of a woman in the US is a 16 and an 18 in the UK but fashion magazines routinely feature ladies that are size 14-16, yet those that shop for these clothes can easily be up to a size 28-30. Fashion designers though coming around are still slow to recognize that ladies today are bigger than in years past.
Congratulations to all those that where involed in Beauty Reborn. Keep up the good work and know that there are people from around the world that are cheering you on.
To whom it may concern.
How does someone apply to model for you????
Many thanks
Robyn Sutherland x
Robyn,
I am just a blogger having a fun contest to show support and love for plus size women. All I can do is point you to modeling companies.