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[in] the mag
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About Magazine description
[in] the spotlight Body positive celebrities and influencers
[in] focus Exlcusive interviews
[in] style
Fashion industry standards- more plus size models,Inclusivity in brands
about
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[in]secure was created by women for women with the aim to empower women to feel confident about their bodies in every stage of life by showcasing diversity in size and facilitating real conversations about battling insecurities.
We believe : EVERY BODY IS BEAUTIFUL All women deserve to feel confident and comfortable in their own body without pressures from society to achieve the “ideal body image”. WOMEN ARE NOT OBJECTS Women are beautiful but do not exist simply to satisfy the male gaze. THE NUMBER ON THE SCALE DOES NOT DEFINE YOUR SELF WORTH Self worth comes from within..
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[in]
the spotlight Lizzo,Adele, Ashley Graham Influencers to follow
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“I take self-love very seriously…When I was younger, I wanted to change everything about myself. I didn’t love who I was…because I was told I wasn’t lovable by the media, by people at school, by not seeing myself in beauty ads, by not seeing myself in television... by lack of representation.” Lizzo ( singer, rapper, and songwriter ) has become a figure
in the body positivity movement spreading the message of selflove and body positivity using her own methods. This, however, does not go unnoticed with the criticism she has faced throughout her career about her size and appearance- whether what she wears or how she carries herself in the public eye. The release of her song, ‘Rumors’ which features Cardi B should have been a moment of celebration, yet, garnered the attention of critics to overlook her talents, as well as magnify the flaws they see in her physical appearance. Lizzo states that she is not sensitive to the comments but sometimes they go too far. “Sometimes I’m like, the world just don’t love me back,” Lizzo said. “It’s like it doesn’t matter how much positive energy you put into the world you’re still going to have people who have something, something mean to say about you – and for the most part it doesn’t hurt my feelings, I don’t care. I just think when I’m working this hard my tolerance
gets lower. My patience is lower, I’m more sensitive, and it gets to me.” There seems to be a demographic of people that refuses to allow someone to be in acceptance of who they are, and to fully live in their truth. Today’s societal norms place pressure on everyone. So, to “be yourself” in a world where only triumphs are highlighted and losses are hidden, Lizzo’s transparency about herself, her body, and her experiences as a Black woman in the entertainment industry, is many times hard to come by. “I feel like fat is the worst thing people can say about me at this point. This is the biggest insecurity. It’s like, ‘How dare a pop star be fat?’…I had to own that,” Lizzo said in an interview with Zane Lowe on Apple Music’s New Music Daily. “I feel like other people who were put on that pedestal, or who become pop stars, probably have other insecurities or have other flaws, but they can hide it behind a veneer of being sexy and being marketable,” she added.
Diversity is perhaps one of Lizzo’s most powerful messages. In the past, she has often spoken out about the double standard that exists in society in regard to physical appearance, specifically with women of color. While a woman of smaller stature is celebrated for flaunting her body, a person of Lizzo’s size is reprimanded, much like she was by Jillian Michaels in 2020. It is revolutionary to see a thick black woman embrace her curves and declare that she loves herself, not in spite of her curves, but because of them. She doesn’t just speak to body dysmorphia and the damage it has caused her, she brings out full dance crews of curvy black women at her shows to prove anything skinny white girls can do, they can do better. She is openly sexual despite living in a society that has made a habit of shaming women into believing their pleasure should come secondary, if at all. She suffers from anxiety and still finds herself suffering from anxiety attacks mid-performance. And yet, she perseveres. So stop identifying her as “brave” for embracing self-love at her size and start focusing on the timelessness of her songs, the sheer implausibility in today’s streaming music world of having a number one hit from a twoyear-old track, her ability to twerk while simultaneously playing a flute, and her talent at writing pop songs with choruses and verses you actually enjoy getting stuck in your head. Maybe if
we started focusing on those things, you might understand the plethora of reasons she has to love herself that go so far beyond her appearance, a luxury so thoughtlessly afforded to men that Lizzo is now rightfully claiming for herself.
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British singer - songwriter, and Grammy Award-winning artist, Adele has always been body positive. Having been criticised about her weight throughout her career, Adele shared in a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey that she is ‘not fazed’ by the talk about her weight loss. She goes on to say how working out helped combat her struggles with anxiety, giving her a routine for each day. “The gym became my time. I realized that when I was working out, I didn’t have any anxiety. It was never about losing weight. I thought, If I can make my body physically strong, and I can feel that and see that, then maybe one day I can make my emotions and my mind physically strong.” Miele, her trainer, agrees that Adele’s aim “was getting stronger, physically and mentally.” Her anxiety was rooted in her divorce. Adele explains, “I had the most terrifying anxiety attacks after I left my marriage. They paralyzed me completely and made me so confused because I wouldn’t be able to have any control over my body, but I was aware of that happening because it was kind of still very much there while my whole body
was just like, on another planet it felt like,” she said. Adele states that she placed a lot of trust in her trainer and felt more at ease while at the gym. When asked why she didn’t share more about her weight loss journey on social media, Adele told British Vogue “I did it for myself and not anyone else. So why would I ever share it? I don’t find it fascinating. It’s my body.” With her new look, plenty of negative comments have surfaced. However, Adele remains body positive and confident despite it all. “My body’s been objectified my entire career. It’s not just now. I understand why it’s a shock. I understand why some women especially were hurt. ‘Visually I represented a lot of women. But I’m still the same person,” she explained to Vogue. She continues , “People have been talking about my body for 12 years. They used to talk about it before I lost weight. But yeah, whatever, I don’t care,” she said. “You don’t need to be overweight to be body positive, you can be any shape or size.”
And, to Oprah, Adele explained that “it’s not my job to validate how people feel about their bodies.I feel bad that it’s made anyone feel horrible about themselves but that’s not my job. I’m trying to sort my own life out. I can’t add another worry.” Weight loss or not, Adele seems incredibly happy these days. And really, that’s all that matters.
I was body positive then and I'm body positive now
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Ashley Graham is an American model, designer and body positive campaigner. She has hailed Sports Illustrated for challenging narrow and unrealistic perceptions of beauty after being chosen to appear in a groundbreaking front cover in 2016 alongside UFC fighter Ronda Rousey and model Hailey Clauson. Graham was the first UK size 16 woman to grace the front of the magazine’s annual swimsuit edition. Graham highlighted the wider impact of the move, telling Motto: “Sports Illustrated has said, ‘We are the norm, and putting curvy girls on the cover is the norm.’ I think it has catapulted people’s perception of beauty into a whole different place where it doesn’t matter what size a woman is - it matters what she’s doing in the world and how she feels about herself.” Graham has spoken of being ridiculed as a teenager for her weight and gave a TED Talk on how accepting and loving her body as it is helped her succeed within an industry
“that defines perfection from the outside in” and insists on labelling her plus size.
“Nobody looked like me growing up,” says Graham, who was a size 12 by the age of 12 and comes from a bigboned family. “I was told to look up to J. Lo and Marilyn Monroe, because they were two of the more curvy women in society, but J. Lo’s ass is amazing, and Monroe was… maybe a size 6? She definitely wasn’t hitting the double-digits. I never really had anybody but my mother to look up to, and she always told me, ‘You are smart, you are beautiful,’ and she had confidence in her own body as well. It starts in the home. Mothers and fathers are the ones that fuel their children’s desire to be who they want to be.... I, like you, possess a wonderfully unique and diverse physique,” she said in her speech. “Now the fashion industry may persist to label me as ‘plus size’, but I like to think of it as ‘my size.” Speaking to WSJ Magazine, Graham detailed how
frustrating it is constantly answering questions about her figure, and pointed out that she doesn’t know “any man that has to do that”. Instead of being introduced as a “plus-size” woman, she said she’d prefer to simply be referred to as “a woman”, adding: “I hate that I constantly have to discuss my body.” But, she explains, she will continue to talk about it, because she knows how important it is.“This is why I don’t post the ‘perfect’ Instagram photos,” she continued. “I keep it real and raw constantly because I want [people] to know that there are women with cellulite, with back fat, with stretch marks.” “There are a lot of curvy women, plus-size women, fat women, whatever you want to call them.”
[ This cover is for every woman who felt like she wasn’t beautiful
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Despite now being such a bodypositivity role model for many, Graham remembers being told from an early age that she needed to lose weight in order to be successful in her career. She first started modelling at the age of 17. “My self-esteem plummeted, and I had my agents telling me, ‘If you don’t lose weight, then you’re not going to work,” she recalls. “The lowest part of realising that I didn’t get a job because I was ‘too fat’ actually gave me the courage and the ambition to go and fill a void in an industry.” Graham has led calls for the fashion world to look beyond plus size paradigms and has backed the Plus is Equal campaign, which calls for the plussize women who make up 67 per cent of the US to be equally represented in the media and fashion industry.
[Pregnancy]
Graham became a mother for the first time in 2020 after giving birth to her son Isaac Menelik Giovanni, with husband Justin Ervin. She added that she’s not putting any pressure on herself to lose any “baby weight” during the pandemic. “I am a full-fledged 16. I haven’t been a fullfledged 16 since I got married,” she said. “I have like 25 pounds on me that I still have from before I was pregnant. I don’t know one person that actually lost weight in quarantine. So then to go and try to lose baby weight in quarantine is an epic fail.” Graham is now expecting twin boys with husband Justin Ervin, pregnancy has provided an opportunity for her to continue shifting stories around body image, Pregnancy is a process—one that has been happily demystified in recent years with the help of social media.
So this is a PSA to let all the fatphobic bullies and creepers know that you most certainly will not implode from shutting the absolute fuck up.
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o t s r e c n e u fl n i # w o l fol
bryntstagram
It doesn’t feel good when people to praise your weight loss as if you and your body weren’t good enough before. No, weird stranger on the internet, I don’t need to know that you “love the chunk”. It doesn’t help to know that someone thinks you “look like a seal”. What am I supposed to do with that information? We can support people and appreciate their bodies in silence and, more importantly, if we don’t like what we see it is very much possible to say nothing at all. All bodies do the things you were told they shouldn’t do. And that is absolutely okay. We are surrounded by voices telling us to change these things, so if you find accepting them to be hard - you’re not alone. We can work toward acceptance despite what the world has tried to tell us is or isn’t “right”. Remind yourself of what your body has done for you - and not how you can change it to serve an outdated standard of beauty. With time your body will change. It is inevitable and it is okay. Your body deserves patience. Your body deserves respect. Your body deserves peace And while you may not love it (you don’t have to all the time) Your body deserves kindness.
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bryntstagram writes, ‘ If you’ve ever had to endure an uncomfortable comment about your body, whether it be something someone thinks is a compliment or a full blown attack on your appearance, then like me, you’ve probably thought it would’ve been better if this person had just said nothing at all.
jaimmykoroma
It’s taken me a long time to get here. To feel confident and accepting of who I am. As a body positive creator, I don’t ever want you to think I’m just spewing a bunch of fluffy, sunshine, unicorns, “you’re beautiful” propaganda because it is so much more than that. It’s taken a lot of time, some pain, some loss and practice. But with that has come so much joy, life, memories, and the unwavering belief that I am worthy—and that’s what’s beautiful.
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jaimmykoroma writes on Body Positivity or Body Neutrality. She says, “Honestly, I don’t think you have to choose one or the other. I think at the very beginning of your journey of leaving diet culture and societal expectations you might have to pick one, love or neutrality. I mean it’s hard for me to only practice neutrality in a world obsessed with our physicality and it’s hard for me to only choose positivity on days I just frankly can’t be.”
sophthickfitness
For so long I stopped working out, mainly because my #endometriosis & depression became so debilitating, but also because my love for working out was slowly fading. For me, working out had always been attached to either losing weight or tightening my body. It always came from a place of self hatred. My body dysmorphia was out of control & I couldn’t stop tearing myself down. No amount of working out was changing the perception I had of myself. It’s taken months of barely moving my body to finally understand what I deserve. I am MORE than how my body looks. I am deserving of fulfilment and happiness in life. I am worthy of love physically, mentally and emotionally. I bring more to this life than just what my body looks like on the outside. I will be focusing on how my body FEELS from the inside… that’s what’s important
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sophthickfitness writes, “Ever since I can remember, I have viewed my body as a “work in progress”. I’ve never stopped to analyse the beauty I posses in that moment. I’ve always thought that there should be parts of me that need “improving” “changing” “perfecting” … when all my body needed was love. For so long I’ve felt like my body & my mind were at war, like my mind had some form of demonising control over my body. I never felt good enough for my own gaze. I’d seen magazines tearing down female bodies for having cellulite, stretch marks, belly rolls & arm fat. Tv adverts telling me how I can lose 10lbs in 10 days with this “body shaping shake” I was led astray by the media, making me feel like my body was “temporary” & I couldn’t live a happy life until I had a six pack or no leg dimples.
[in] focus Sasha Gaye Edwards Abigay Wilson
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Are you confident in your body? Yes
Have you always been confident or comfortable in/ about your body? Yeah On a scale of 1-10 how confident are you now ? In My body..8 or 9 In general , about a 6 or 7 situations affect how confident I feel Have you battled with insecurities about your body/ yourself? Oh yeah! All my life! I was very aware of my body and how much space I took up.. when I was very young everyone was smaller and I felt like the biggest one there.That started to seem like a problem and it made me insecure. People are mean, they would tell me I’m fat and that’s when I noticed I became insecure about my body and myself in general Does the media influence your self esteem or perception of yourself. If not why? Yeah.We only see stick figures in the media..
How have you moved from being insecure to being so confident and open?
I got fed up. It was exhausting hating myself. I never did anything fun because I was so concerned about what persons would think of my body. When i started college, I decided that i didn’t want to hate myself anymore. Going to Edna Manley College and meeting other creatives, I wanted to put myself in situations that would help me with my confidence. As luck would have it, in my first year a friend of mine had a project where she required me to be in my underwear at palisadoes for a photoshoot and a part of me trying to be more confident was not saying no to things like that. If I was younger, that would’ve never happened, but I told her yes. It was so liberating! Since then, I’ve been putting myself in more situations that wouldn’t normally do and I realised that no one really cared about what I wore so why should I ? I use the word fat freely, but people tend to think that only fat persons are insecure and what I’ve learnt is that insecurity doesn’t come with a specific body type. A lot of persons smaller than I am tell me that they love how confident I am when I think they have the ‘ideal’ body type.
Say something to those struggling with insecurities about their body Stop comparing yourself to other people. Everybody has their own struggles with their body even if they put on a show that they’re confident. Don’t pay attention to other people, ignore social media and whatever beauty standard that they create because it constantly changes . I’ve learnt that self confidence is practice. So, practice telling yourself in the mirror that you look nice or you look beautiful today, and it may sound corny but it works.Practice, practice , practice!
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Are you confident in your body?
Ahh, I have a love-hate relationship with my body. Mostly hate. It’s sad because I love certain parts but as a whole, it’s heavy on the I don’t like it very much. How confident or comfortable are you in/ about your body? Not very confident because every time I feel an ounce of it, something or someone knocks the wind out of it. I am working on it but I have health issues that lead to my body being this way and it’s like what’s the sense? Would you elaborate a bit on the health issues? Sure. I have hormone imbalances as well as depression and anxiety. As a result, my body responds to these hormonal changes and imablances by retaining weight. It’s really hard for me to lose weight. With my mental disorders, I take medication which are my antidepressants and mood stabilizers but if I’m having an overwhelming time, my brain is wired to respond negatively and I’ll hurt myself by overeating or not eating at all.
On a scale of 1-10 how confident are you now ? 3, maybe 4 out of 10... just being honest Have you battled with insecurities about your body/ yourself? All the time. It’s been one of my longest battles - To like my body or to not like it. Does the media influence your self esteem or perception of yourself. If not why? Hmm, I guess it does help to influence my perception of my own body. Seeing all these beautiful women without the belly fat and without the arm fat really gets me low sometimes. I have even unfollowed a few so I wouldn’t obsess (celebrities and IG influencers that is). Even women who are thick and have the fat that I do who are confident doesn’t really help me. It should, but it doesn’t because I just don’t like mine.
Say something to those struggling with insecurities about their body I‘d give the advice I try to give myself and fail many times at it - but - don’t listen to that inner voice telling you you’re not perfect. You’re so perfect (especially if you’re a woman). There are people out there who love and will love every inch of your body.
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[ More plus size models BY JAMIE FELDMAN
Recently I’ve been thinking about the conversation around size inclusivity on the runway, or rather the lack thereof. It seems to me that it has lessened, or become less buzzy if you will, which is a great fear for those who have spent their careers trying to create real change and hoping with every passing season that it’s not just a “fad. ”My concerns coincided with the start of New York Fashion Week, where, as it turns out, there were some things to celebrate this season. According to the FashionSpot’s seasonal diversity report for New York Fashion Week, 68 plus -size models walked a total of 19 shows for spring 2020 - up from the bleak previous season when 37 models walked in 12 shows. Tess Holliday strutted down the Chromat runway wearing a “sample size” dress, perhaps a dig at designers who often blame financial and sample limitations for their refusal to expand their size offerings. And Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty show was a refreshing contrast to Victoria’s Secret’s shows, which only display women of a certain shape and size wearing lingerie. There was Tommy Hilfiger and Zendaya’s show, which prioritized inclusion and representation. And there
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walking Fashion Week
was, as always, Christian Siriano, the unofficial answer to designers unwilling to work with women based on their size and my official hero of inclusivity at fashion week and beyond. It sounds good, right? But here’s the thing. When you break it down by show, there’s a glaring issue: 41 of the 68 were all cast in just three shows: Tommy, Chromat and Siriano. The rest of the castings came in solo or small groups, the highest being Kate Spade New York, Tadashi Shoji, Area and Burnett, which cast three plus-size models each, theFashionSpot points out. It reminded me of this tweet, written by Fashionista editor-in-chief Tyler McCall, which stopped my endless scroll in its tracks during a recent bout of procrastination. “Truly no shade but what are the quote-unquote ‘inclusive’ brands going to do on the runway this season if Ashley Graham is pregnant,” she wondered. And I wondered, too. Graham announced her pregnancy on Instagram in August and has been mostly absent from the runways this season, with the exception of the Tommy Hilfiger and Zendaya show on Sept. 8. McCall’s musing was valid. What would brands do without their star player, the woman who has largely led the charge for the surge in
size inclusivity on the runway in recent years and who is often considered to be the representative of the entire universe of plus-size women? It would be the ultimate test of intentions. Perhaps that’s why even though my original hypothesis that fewer plussize models were included this year was wrong, my instinct was correct. It’s not enough for the optics to look good if optics are just that - optics. Just as it isn’t Graham’s job to represent an entire population, neither is it the job of these three fashion houses to carry the bulk of the responsibility to be inclusive and shift archaic standards of beauty still rife in this industry. And New York is the best-case scenario. Things only get less progressive once you cross the Atlantic. The numbers from London, Paris and Milan are still to come, but last season, not a single non-straight-size model walked in Milan, and nine walked in Paris, seven of which walked in Tommy x Zendaya. Model Hunter McGrady made a commitment this season to only attend shows by or work with brands that prioritize inclusivity for spring 2020. As a result, she recalled in a Glamour piece, she turned down over 30 jobs. “For me, it’s more important to make it known that I’m not going to support somebody who doesn’t support me,” she said. “If you’re not including plus-size people, that’s basically what they’re saying to me. And I’m not OK with that. Hopefully, if enough of us take a stand, it’ll start catching on. We’re no longer supporting exclusivity.”
I salute the progress made by brands like Tommy Hilfiger, which, with the help of Zendaya, has made a major shift over the past two seasons. And I salute McGrady for using her voice to take a stand - even when it means losing a paycheck. But when it comes to designers who we see, season after season, including just one plus-size model in the mix, I wonder how many more times we can see it happen before we take stock of what their inclusion actually means? Are they challenging the status quo because they are sick of it themselves, or are they doing it to create headlines and check a box? I’m not really sure anymore.
BY NADRA NITTLE
Inclusivity in lingerie is about both sizing and skin tone It’s hard to argue that a business can be truly innovative if it’s leaving out large swaths of the marketplace; a fashion brand can hardly call itself mainstream and superior if its size range is too small for the average shopper to wear. In this way, inclusivity has become its own metric for being best in class, and millennials are responding with their dollars. Research shows that the generation, projected to outnumber baby boomers in 2030, respond to marketing that’s relevant and authentic, and reflects the diversity they see in their communities. Because it pays for companies to be inclusive, some brands are making inclusion the entire focus of their product lines. In May, when Rihanna’s lingerie brand Savage x Fenty dropped, featuring an array of shades and sizes, it received applause for being inclusive. Yet some customers didn’t think Savage was quite inclusive enough. During a time when inclusion has become both a selling point and an expectation, companies will continue to face backlash for falling short when it comes to inclusion or for framing themselves as pioneers at it when they’re not. The reality, of course, is that no brand can be all things
to all people, but it’s in the best interest of socially conscious shoppers to distinguish the companies genuinely invested in inclusion from the ones that view it as a means to financial gain. For years, Victoria’s Secret has been a brand based on exclusivity, but in an age when inclusion is widely championed, the lingerie maker has seen its sales slump. The retailer’s mounting irrelevance came to a head when its chief marketing officer, Ed Razek, told Vogue last month that he didn’t think the annual fashion show should include “transsexuals” because the show “is a fantasy.” He also said that no one had any interest in seeing a Victoria’s Secret show for plus sizes and seemingly made a jab at ThirdLove when he quipped, “We’re nobody’s third love. We’re their first love.” The outcry about Razek’s comments grew so loud that the executive attempted to clarify them later, but the damage, it seemed, had been done. ThirdLove, which has billed itself as being inclusive, took out a full-page ad in the New York Times taking Victoria’s Secret to task. “It’s time to stop telling women what makes them sexy — let us decide,” ThirdLove’s CEO Heidi
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[ Brand Inclusivity
While concern grows that companies are embracing inclusion for profit, Barbara Kahn, a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said that advances in manufacturing and technology have allowed businesses to make products with a wider range of customers in mind. “Online marketing allows for more ‘long tail’ service – i.e., people who do not represent a significant proportion of the overall population and have special requirements, because the inventory can be kept in central warehouses and shipped out as needed,” Kahn explained. Prior to the digital age, companies had to rely on the products they could fit on a counter or on the sales floor. That meant they limited how much makeup they displayed or the range of sizes on clothing racks. “Keeping every size in stock was infeasible,” Kahn said. “It’s part of the reason Bonobos started as a showroom or guideshop with subsequent purchasing or ordering online. That way, they could keep a large selection of sizes in the physical showroom but not have to keep all of them in stock in the store, which would be a logistical nightmare.” But she does acknowledge that some brands simply thought it best for their image to have “their clothing to only be worn by certain-size people.” This is called
“brand positioning.” As millennials are poised to become the group with the most spending power, however, brand positioning is shifting from the fantasy espoused by companies like Victoria’s Secret to products made for “real people.” Authenticity, and thus inclusion, is now perceived to be the most marketable. “Advertising used to be more ‘aspirational,’ and people looked to brands to show what people hoped they could be,” Kahn said. “But the younger generation is much more accepting of all kinds of diversity — and that brands are embracing all of these different ideas and allowing people to accept who they are is definitely a selling point.”
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Inclusion may not always be just a marketing trend
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Zak said in the ad. “We’re done with pretending certain sizes don’t exist or aren’t important enough to serve. And please stop insisting that inclusivity is a trend.”
[in] secure
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Body Love Challenge When you think about your body, what’s the first word that comes to mind? What’s something you’re grateful your body has allowed you to do? Name things you really love about your body? Say something nice about your least favourite part of your body. Take a picture of yourself where you feel good about your body.
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I am a self proclaimed foodie and my mother made me self conscious about how much I ate. As I got older and started to gain more weight, the idea of becoming fat gave room to comments such as “I’m not buying clothes for you in extra-large” and if I lost weight then I was praised for looking the way she wanted me to. Body positivity is something that I wish was enforced and taught to us instead of clouding our minds with stigmas and ideals. Body positivity is trending now where brands are becoming more aware, trying to be more diverse and inclusive. I would hope that it makes an impact rather than being seen as a passing trend or something only here for a time. [in] secure was created to help others gain a sense of belonging, worthiness and promote self-confidence. Starting as a passion project as a result of my own experiences and as an attempt to find myself, being comfortable with my fluctuating weight.
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