It’s time for fashion to normalise mid-size women like me

Walk into a newsagent this week, and you might be stopped in your tracks by Victoria Beckham in a bra, cardigan, lace shorts and bunny ears on the cover of Grazia. Beckham, who’s designed a new body-conscious jersey range called VB Body, is talking about her own – and heralding a more inclusive era of body ideals. “It’s an old-fashioned attitude, wanting to be really thin,” she says. “I think women today want to look healthy, and curvy … the curvier you are, the better my VB Body dresses look.”

Curves are chic! Fantastic news, obviously. But … are they really? I fluctuate between sizes 10 and 14, meaning, like most British women, I fall into the “mid size” range which covers bodies from size 10 to 16 (bigger than a 6-8 “straight” sample size, and smaller than plus-size, which is 18 and over). Having written about fashion for the past decade and sat front row at Fashion Week in Paris, Milan, New York and London, I have never felt that my body was chic, or fashionable, or even likely to look good in 90 per cent of the clothes that I write about.

I have been apologetic when my bottom hasn’t fit into the six inches of allotted front row bench space at Fashion Week, and mortified when a sample that I’ve been sent to wear for a shoot didn’t fit me. Even on the high street, where trends have been accessibly watered down – ostensibly to suit the everywoman’s wardrobe – they aren’t made to fit the everywoman’s body. The vast majority of models I see on catwalks and photographed for fashion ad campaigns are still 5’10” and a size 6-8. The average British woman is a size 16, the most popular size at Marks & Spencer is a 14, and 71 per cent of all womenswear sales are in the 10-16 mid-size bracket. So why the disconnect? It makes sense for fashion to celebrate mid size bodies like mine – I just don’t think it has yet.

It’s true that in recent years a second body ideal has emerged – the Kim Kardashian one. Kardashian, and other hourglass-shaped women such as the supermodel Ashley Graham, celebrate their curves in body hugging dresses, like the one first worn by Marilyn Monroe and then dusted off by Kim Kardashian for the Met Gala this month. Yes, OK, the peachy bums that the Kardashians made famous (and a surgical trend called a Brazilian butt lift) are a bit closer to my own body than a Victoria’s Secret Angel’s washboard abs, but this body shape is no more realistic. And I do not look at Kim Kardashian and think: golly, she’s just like me! Personal trainers help her to sculpt her bottom in the gym; I sit on mine most of the day. The ideal bottom might have grown a few sizes – but it’s via squats, not snacks. It’s a “Jennifer Lopez in a catsuit at the Superbowl” bottom, not an “average woman in a tracksuit at the supermarket” one. And, of course, you need a tiny “snatched” waist to emphasise it, something Marilyn and Kim have in common, but most of us never will.

“I think what Victoria Beckham is referring to is that move to a curvier ideal – so yes, big bum and boobs, but still thin leg and arms and a very thin waist,” says influencer and podcaster Alex Light, who advocates for body positivity after recovering from an eating disorder. “It still isn’t considered attractive to have big arms or a big stomach, those things have never ever been in fashion, and at the end of the day this ‘curvy’ ideal is still a totally unattainable body type and shape for the vast majority of us. The problem with this is we’re moving from one body trend to another, and still dictating what women should and shouldn’t look like. It would be far better to embrace women exactly as they are, and make clothes to accommodate that, rather than trying to accommodate a new body trend.”

Plus-size models have become a more common sight on catwalks, shoots and e-commerce sites. Some have argued that this shift is glamorising obesity, and with skinny heroin chic once at the other end of the spectrum, it does seem that fashion continues to worship body extremes, be they size 4 or 24. For me, it’s important to normalise seeing different sized bodies in fashion – and for plus-size women to feel included in this notoriously exclusive world. The luxury market is the worst culprit for that – but things aren’t much better on our high streets, where clothes might be available in a wider range of sizes, but the average mannequin is still a size 8 to 10, and the clothing will usually be advertised on a smaller woman.

Despite Victoria Beckham’s vision, the problem remains that so few of us can actually see reflections of ourselves in shop windows or on the catwalks. Designers create clothes mostly in sizes 6-8, and then models are found to fit into them. When it comes to perfecting them for sale, fit models are used to make sure that clothes really work on the body. Very few brands work with fit models with different body sizes, with most using sample size models, then scaling the clothes up proportionally from there – never mind the fact that bodies tend not to work like that. This explains why mid-size celebrities are the ones left with nothing to wear (given they often rely on borrowing sample sizes from designers).

The Hollywood actress Bryce Dallas Howard once said, “I like having lots of options for a size 6 [a mid-size UK 10], as opposed to one option,” to explain why she buys her own dresses, rather than borrowing them directly from fashion houses like most of her sample-size co-stars do (with racks of options to choose from).

For mid-sized women, there are some signs of progress. Our demographic is increasingly being catered for on the catwalks – at Valentino’s couture show in January, eight mid-sized models walked the catwalk. Alexander McQueen has been including mid-size models in its catwalk shows for years without mention – no whiff of headline-grabbing tokenism here. Probably the most successful mid-size-model of the moment is Jill Kortleve, who has modelled for Chanel and Versace, and appeared on the cover of French Vogue, size 10 to 12.

The drive to normalise the mid-size women is being championed by influencers like Light who share their outfits of the day and unfiltered bikini selfies. Nevertheless, their voices and bodies remain a tiny minority. For every Vogue cover that Ashley Graham appears on, there are hundreds of sample size covers alongside it, and for every mid-model on the catwalk, there are hundreds of their sample-size peers.

The word “model” leaves a lot unspoken. In the same issue of Grazia this week, Emily Ratajkowski mentions being “short for a model”. She isn’t railing against that narrow ideal – it’s mentioned in passing as part of a conversation about heels vs. trainers. She states it as a fact. And that’s how rigid the beauty ideal still is. The model woman still looks a certain way, at least as far as fashion is concerned. There’s an ideal height, an ideal weight – and while a peachy bottom might now be en vogue, we’ve still got a long way to go before fashion embraces a less peachy one … and everything else that comes with it.