Celebrities are tired of being labeled. Recently, many famous women have been speaking their minds about the labeling of models and clothing as “plus sized,” which leads to the separation of women based on numbers on a scale.
Melissa McCarthy, who recently launched a badass clothing line for women, told Refinery29, “Seventy percent of women in the US are a size 14 or above and that’s technically ‘plus-size,’ so you’re taking your biggest category of people and telling them, ‘You’re not really worthy.” Her new line, Melissa McCarthy Seven7, is available in sizes 4 – 28, but just to be clear Melissa wants you to know, “I make clothes for women. I’m not making a plus size line.”
A lot of attention to the topic began when Kate Upton, two-time Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover girl spoke with E! News about the recent cover of SI, featuring Ashley Graham, who is considered a “plus size” model. She told E! that even though having Graham on the cover is a huge leap for curvy girls and that showing a variety of body types is important to our society, she is not a fan of having to label them anything other than models and stated, “No one should be labeled by their body size.”
via Sports Illustrated
In the world of fashion and modeling plus size begins at a size 8. Graham, who is a size 16, is the first “plus size” model to grace not only the cover of Sports Illustrated, but also a recent issue of Maxim. And she doesn’t understand why there is a need to separate her from any other model in the industry. During a panel at SXSW she told the crowd, “I think the word ‘plus-sized’ is totally outdated.”
And while some women do find the phrase to be empowering, the voices of those who are being labeled against their will deserve to be heard. Women cannot (and should not) be separated into tiny, perfectly organized boxes of who and what they are to be seen as, especially when the categories on those boxes are as superficial as the circumference of a thigh.
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