Is It Stylish Or… Is She Just Thin?

FYI: It's not skinny shaming to point out that smaller-bodied women receive praise for wearing the same outfits fat people receive derision for. In this essay I will…

A content warning for this piece, which contains references to size, body image, fatphobia and thin privilege, and may be triggering for some people. Please, mind yourself.

Rayne Fisher-Quann @ Twitter

I have a Pinterest board – from when I used to add things to my Pinterest boards, probably the last time I had a full-time job, when pinning things felt like a good use of my spare time and just about work-adjacent enough that no one could ever accuse me of slacking – titled ‘Personal Style Goals’.

There are 132 photographs pinned to the board, most of them taken in the kind of old-school street photography style of Scott Schuman (The Sartorialist) who is arguably, alongside the New York Times’ iconic photographer Bill Cunningham, responsible for a lot of what the fashion Instagrammers of today would term their “aesthetic”.

A lot of the photographs are headless, bringing to mind the terrifying Return to Oz, and Queen Mobhi’s desire to have a different head for each different occasion. Women with long, beachy waves in their hair lounge against brick walls; sit on benches outside what look like expensive coffee shops; appear to walk from one side of the frame to the other.

The predominant colours are grey, white, black and blue – in denim form only. The overarching style, which I considered at the time to be perfection – laidback insouciance by way of masculine tailoring and casually thrown-together accessories – is, in short: Thin Women Wearing Trousers. (I count three dresses and eight skirts. Mostly, the photographs are of Thin Women Wearing Skinny Jeans.

I thought of my Pinterest board again this week, as I considered the inevitable fuss that will be made of Sarah Jessica Parker’s wardrobe in the upcoming revival series of Sex and the City, this time titled And Just Like That… and, crucially, not featuring the stylings of Patricia Field, the wardrobe genius who made Carrie’s iconic wardrobe, well, so iconic. (Please, let’s not talk about the fact that Field is working on Emily in Paris, which is clearly a blip.)

For sure, some of the wardrobe decisions made for Carrie were great. The skintight pink tank top and tutu that became the iconic SATC shot, featuring in the opening credits of every episode; the Dior by John Galliano newspaper-print dress she wore to confront her lover’s wife (honestly, Carrie is THE WORST); the $80,000 Versace gown she wore to fall asleep in while waiting for Petrovsky to come and take her out (he was the SECOND WORST).

But a lot of Carrie’s wardrobe brings to mind the question: is it an outfit or is she just skinny?!

Pic via Karina Gomez on YouTube

I made the mistake of bringing this up on Instagram Stories yesterday, posting various photographs of Carrie Bradshaw wearing various outfits and asking, “Is this stylish or…” etc. Of course, I cherry-picked the examples. (This was a distinctly un-scientific study.) In one, she’s wearing a skirt around her hips, with a matching belt around her bare waist and a teeny tiny crop top. Not a good look on anyone, I’d wager. In another, a fairly run-of-the-mill LBD.

I posited that these “fashionable” ensembles were only fashionable because of the body they were on: thin, with boobs, accessorised with vertiginous heels and the 1990s version of the beachy blow-out.

I received a plethora of responses. “You’re 100% right!” read one, continuing, “I’d never thought about it like that before!” Of course, not everyone agreed with me. “You’re coming across as really bitter,” read another. “Skinny shaming is NOT ok!” read a third.

To be clear: this is not a point, necessarily, about bodies. Sure, it involves bodies, but it’s not explicitly about them. I have nothing to say about Carrie’s body, or my own, except that we could wear the exact same clothing, in the exact same combination and, on her, the outfit would be considered “stunning” whereas, on me… Well. You get my drift.

The conclusion, therefore, is that, in many examples, it’s not the fashion itself that is either “good” or “bad”, but it is the bodies wearing said fashion that we are judging, whether we realise it or not.

And look! I’m not immune to the fatphobia that is absolutely rampant in our society. I have, for years, been talking about how e-commerce sites should show their wares on a variety of bodies. “How will I know what those jeans would look like on me?!” I’d yammer, scrolling endlessly through Asos or H&M or whatever website I was into at the time (probably trying to find the perfect ensemble to achieve my Pinterest-inspired Personal Style Goals aesthetic).

Well, guess what? They did it. Not all websites (hashtag), but a lot, now show their jeans, or underwear, or dresses, on a variety of models. “Jane Doe is 5’ 9” tall and is wearing an XL,” the caption will tell me, and I will scroll from the first photograph (usually a “straight-sized”, i.e. very slim, model) to Jane Doe and I will think, ugh, those jeans do not look half as good on her.

The sad fact is, what I am expressing is my own internalised fatphobia: my deeply held belief that thin women simply look more stylish, no matter what they’re wearing, than fat women. Despite knowing that this is not true – beauty and style are, after all, subjective, and today’s body ideal has not always been thus – I cannot seem to shake my inner dickhead, some kind of amalgam of the personalities of Elle and Now! and J-17 magazines from the late 1990s, when telling teenage girls how to cover their upper arms and draw attention away from their “large” hips was acceptable.

The thing is, though magazines have stopped overtly telling us that we need to lose weight, the entire concept of style and styling is predicated on the notion of there being “good” and “bad” body parts. That X style suits X body and Y style does not is borne of fatphobia and a very limited view of what we, as women, should want other people to notice, or pay attention to, and what, crucially, we should want to keep hidden away.

The end goal of even drawing attention to this phenomenon is not, to be clear, to take away any sense of enjoyment or joy from getting dressed, or even to make you feel guilty for having a particular dress in your wardrobe that you love precisely because it gives the illusion of… I don’t know, thinness or big-booby-ness or long-leggedness. We have all drunk the Kool-Aid while kneeling at the altar of thinness for too long to be able to do a full 180 on a wish and a prayer.

However, it is always worth giving more thought to – well, most things, but especially – the concept of thin privilege, or, how women in smaller bodies are applauded for making fashion choices that would be considered fashion faux pas when seen on almost all of the rest of us.

Good fashion should not be exclusive to the thin; in fact, properly “good” fashion should:

• be available in a vast array of sizes

• fit (objectively) well on all bodies (hi, Zara, and your XXL shirts with XXXS arm holes)

There is a whole extra facet of this conversation to be had around things like crop tops – why, when worn by smaller women, we see the clothing, while on larger women we see the stomach. I could write a 2,000-word diatribe about how and why I have been conditioned to fear the notion of underarm fat! Underarm fat, of all things! Who is my underarm fat hurting?!

This has led to my believing that strapless dresses aren’t “for me”, because the only strapless bras that will stay up on my larger body must dig in (in order to do the aforementioned gravity-defying staying up) and therefore increase said underarm fat… This conversation is nuanced and finnicky and there are a lot of different, moving parts. I don’t have all of the answers.

Oh, but! I do have an answer to the honestly half dozen messages I received telling me that I was wrong because “aShLeY gRaHaM LoOkS gOoD aNd ShE’s PlUs SiZeD!” Ashley Graham is a literal supermodel who may be plus-sized but is also in the narrow category of “acceptable” plus sized, where all of her curves are in what are considered the “right” places; her cellulite, if she has any, is practically invisible; and she has access to clothing and tailoring that most plus-sized women cannot afford. She is also in possession of – wait for it! – pretty privilege. I told you this might be triggering.

P.S. I now accept that nothing on my Personal Style Goals Pinterest board is particularly fashionable, or even stylish. They’re just photographs of thin women wearing jeans. If I scrolled through to the plus-sized version of said jeans, I’d probably find myself grimacing and closing the tab. That’s something I’m working on.