Abstract
In Fashioning Fat: Inside Plus-Size Modeling, Czerniawski examines the world of plus-size modeling first hand. Through two and a half years of ethnographic participant observation, which included working as a model herself, as well as interviews with plus-size models and their agents, Czerniawski explores the experiences of models as they attempt to overcome the stigma that frames their bodies as unworthy of visibility. For many plus-size models, modeling becomes a way for them to redefine and expand definitions of beauty, and to come to a point of greater self-acceptance. However, Czerniawski argues that the increased visibility of plus-size models alone is insufficient to bring about change in the fashion industry and broader culture. Models are treated largely as voiceless objects, subject to the gaze, and to the whims of fashion-industry gatekeepers. This lack of control over their image and labor blunts their potential to challenge the dominant discourse of engendered disembodiment by which women come to feel a lack of ownership over their own bodies.
Czerniawski’s hands-on experience allows her a better look into the backstage of plus-size modeling, particularly the ‘affective, emotional, and physical labor’ (p. 22) through which plus-size women become plus-size models. Contemporary Western culture tends to demonize fatness and stereotype fat people negatively, while rewarding a white, thin aesthetic. In this context, fat women come to see their bodies as objects of revulsion. Plus-size models must negotiate the contradictions between inhabiting a body which is culturally stigmatized as undisciplined, undesirable, and unrepresentable and the realities of modeling, which subjects models to strict bodily discipline as they offer themselves up as desirable bodies for the camera.
Czerniawski contributes to a growing literature (such as Mears, 2011; Wissinger, 2015) on aesthetic labor as she explains the embodied labor models put into maintaining this idealized image. As workers whose livelihood is predicated on self-display, models have very little control over their bodies and their image. Although models actually spend little time in front of the cameras, in coming to see their bodily capital as a source of economic capital, they internalize the disciplinary gaze of the fashion industry. Czerniawski herself describes being taken in by the glamour and validation that comes from being a model. However, this validation is contingent on fulfilling parameters of desirability, and predicated on acceptance by fashion-industry gatekeepers. In contrast with the stereotype of fat women as undisciplined and unrestrained, plus-size models subject themselves to tremendous discipline, gaining and losing weight to keep up with industry demands, sometimes resorting to padding to fill out insufficiently curvy hips or girdles to flatten stomach bulges in order to fit the image demanded by clients. Although plus-size models seek to redefine images of beauty and liberate themselves and other women from the pressure to adhere to thin aesthetics, the reality of aesthetic labor within the plus-size modeling industry requires models to rely on thin aesthetics and embody a work ethic of ‘self-discipline, strength, and diligence’ (p. 23) in order to maintain their body capital.
Furthermore, although the increasing visibility of plus-size models signifies a degree of acceptance of plus-size bodies within the fashion industry, plus-size models remain relegated to a niche market, cast in lower-status commercial shoots and largely omitted from high-fashion campaigns. Although plus-size models seek to change the broader culture, their lack of input into the presentation of their bodies, the aesthetic ideals they are made to conform to, and the segregation of high fashion and plus-size fashion ensures that their capacity to instigate change is even more limited. Although Czerniawski ends on a positive note, noting that visibility is a necessary, if not sufficient, step toward cultural change, she is overall critical of a politics of visibility which stops before the point of fundamentally changing the social institutions through which bodies are made visible.
Despite her discussion of models’ aesthetic labor, Czerniawski does not engage very deeply with the aesthetic labor literature. The experiences Czerniawski elucidates – the insecurity of work and the lack of control over one’s body and livelihood – are not limited to models, and she does little to connect her observations to broader social and economic changes which have transformed aesthetic labor and self-surveillance into increasingly necessary processes to ensure economic viability across a variety of fields. Engaging with this literature would have strengthened her findings, and expanded the book’s potential reach. As it stands, Fashioning Fat is an engaging, well-researched book which provides a much-needed critique of the limitations of a politics of visibility.