Abstract
In this ethnographic study of plus-size fashion models in New York City, I build on previous research that has only examined the staged performance of fat and, instead, focus attention on the “backstage” aesthetic labor process. Using participant observations and interviews, I document an intensive aesthetic labor process, whereby these models continually developed their bodies according to the demands of their fashion employers. Their actions, as part of an aesthetic labor process involving affective, emotional, and physical labor, only served to reify normative imperatives involving female bodies. As aesthetic laborers subject to fashion’s gaze, they engaged in a range of bodily disciplines that relied on thin aesthetics. Consequently, their bodies became both subjects and objects, managed through self-surveillance and corporal discipline. I draw on these findings to highlight a nuanced aesthetic labor process that, rather than challenging discursive constructions of fatness to create a new “fat aesthetic,” reproduced normative imperatives involving female bodies that further perpetuated their sense of disembodiment.
Flash. “Chin up and out.” Flash. “Tilt your head a bit to your left . . . and hold it right [pause] there.” Flash.
I received another instruction from the photographer to shift my pose in some seemingly indiscriminate way. Each flash represented another frame of film. Within less than five minutes, the photographer shot a whole roll of film. Each minute the photographer peered through her camera lens translated to at least an hour of preparation in hair and makeup. But in that immortalized moment, I realized the extent to which a model needs to know her body to be able to command and control each minute muscle, as she contorts herself into positions directed by a photographer. A fashion model needs to know how her body moves, how to camouflage unsightly bits, and which camera angles best flatter the female form in order to capture a desired look.
That day in front of the camera was part of my ethnographic account of becoming a plus-size fashion model. I encountered, firsthand, the struggle to rewrite the self, wherein a woman wittingly objectifies and to a necessary degree celebrates her body—a body of curves and solid flesh that is often an object of scorn in contemporary American society. With society regarding models as walking mannequins or passive hangers for clothes, I examined how it felt to be “just a body,” a body that was average in society but “plus-size” in fashion.
The basic definition of “plus-size” in modeling does not match the cultural image of a fat woman. Most casual observers of plus-size models would not perceive them as “plus-size” or even fat. Indeed, many of these models are of “average” size and weight; retail industry experts estimate that the average American woman weighs approximately one hundred sixty pounds and wears a size fourteen (Vesilind 2009). They are “average” to the ordinary consumer, but, in sharp contrast, they are “plus-size” to the fashion industry. Typically, the industry considers anything over a size eight as “plus-size.”
Yes, according to fashion, these plus-size models are fat and they, too, self-identified as fat. These models acknowledged that they work in an industry that has strict and often extreme bodily standards. For example, designer label Ralph Lauren fired model Filippa Hamilton for being too fat (Melago 2009). Hamilton is five feet ten inches tall, weighs 120 pounds, and wears a woman’s size four. Both Coco Rocha, whom the industry considers “too big” for high fashion at a size four, and Gemma Ward lost work opportunities because of weight gain (Diluna 2010; Horne 2010).
Generally, plus-size models range from a woman’s clothing size ten to size twenty, but most of the models in the top modeling agencies are size ten to size fourteen and must be a minimum height of five feet eight inches, with a usual maximum of six feet tall. In contrast, “straight-size” fashion models (i.e., those we typically see in print advertisements and catalogues), wear a size two through size six, while runway models are smaller and wear between a size zero to size four, depending on each design season’s aesthetics.
The recent emergence of plus-size models onto the mainstream media landscape provides an opportunity to explore whether their work creates a new “fat aesthetic.” Using participant observation and interviews, I document an intensive aesthetic labor process, whereby these models continually develop their bodies according to the demands of their fashion employers. This analysis expands our understanding of aesthetic labor as (1) an ongoing production of the body that involves affective, emotional, and physical labor that (2) depends on preexisting aesthetic ideals that (3) perpetuate women’s sense of disembodiment.
In this article, I argue that previous scholarship on fat performers failed to examine the role of a backstage aesthetic labor process in governing aesthetics. Instead of presenting a counteraesthetic, I find that plus-size models rely on a labor process driven by thin aesthetics, whereby they emulate a work ethic of self-discipline, strength, and diligence. They develop a repertoire of specialized techniques to increase their “model physical capital.” Technologies of control, such as a tape measure, legitimate and normalize this management of the body capital though Foucauldian corporal discipline. In cultivating themselves according to the demands of their profession, plus-size models engage in engendered body projects that not only control their fat but also reinforce their sense of disembodiment.
Fat and the Feminine Aesthetic
As Bordo states, “no body can escape either the imprint of culture or its gendered meanings” (1993, 212). The fat body, too, is not immune to an evaluative cultural lens. Historians note that fat is constantly renegotiated with culture, where our contemporary social stigma of fat is an artifact of the work of nineteenth-century dietary reformers, such as William Banting and Sylvester Graham, who demonized excess flesh (Gilman 2008; Stearns 1997). Early in the twentieth century, life-insurance mortality studies correlated fatness with increased mortality risk and spurred a public health debate whose legacy continues (Czerniawski 2007, 2010). From dietary reforms to actuaries and physicians, fat earned a bad reputation. Contemporary scholars in the field of fat studies, such as Pattie Thomas (Thomas and Wilkerson 2005), now aim to confront many of these myths, for example, fat is unhealthy, a form of mental illness, unwanted, androgynous, asexual, incompetent, jolly, lazy, ugly, and bitchy; fat is read as a defect, a symbol of gluttonous obsessions, unmanaged desires, and moral and physical decay; the fat body is one that is out of control and takes up too much space, a failed body project. These controlling images of fat are rife with moralistic innuendos that place blame on the individual and ignore culture’s impact.
Today, the term “plus-size” evokes controlling images of fat and lazy folk who sit glued to their television screens, as portrayed in the 2008 Pixar film, Wall-E. In the film, humans feed on fast food, have robots cater to them, and hover around on chaise lounges to the detriment of their own muscles that have atrophied to the point of immobility. While this is an exaggeration for movie effect, and plus-size models do not match that level of fatness, these popular images perpetuate fat myths and reaffirm contemporary bodily aesthetics. For example, in the film, the advertisements for the latest red- or blue-centric fashions contained slender models instead of more representative fat ones. Even in the Wall-E universe where everyone is fat, the fashion models must be thin.
This negative reading of the fat body manifests itself as weight bias in lived experience. As empirical studies have shown in detail, fatness is equated with a lack of self-discipline (Hilbert, Rief, and Braehler 2008; Puhl and Brownell 2001), laziness (Roehling 1999; Schwartz et al. 2006), and even stupidity (Puhl and Brownell 2001; Roehling 1999; Schwartz et al. 2006). Experimental studies on weight bias point to the pervasiveness of negative attitudes toward fat in multiple settings including employment, education, health care, and the media, which affect the impressions and expectations others have for fat individuals (Puhl and Brownell 2003). Contemporary American society discriminates against fat, a point made clear in one study where even fat respondents show an implicit preference for thin people, as well as an implicit stereotyping of fat people as lazy (Schwartz et al. 2006). Likewise, in a study of health professionals, obesity specialists exhibited significant anti-fat bias, associating the stereotypes of lazy, stupid, and worthless with fat people (Schwartz et al. 2003). These aforementioned studies highlight the inscription of culture onto “marked bodies,” especially onto those of fat women (Balsamo 1995, 225).
As Bartky (1988, 71) argues, the dominant culture constructs the female body as an object to be watched, whereby women then discipline themselves in order to achieve “the ideal feminine body-subject.” Fashion serves as a cosmetic panopticon, shaping norms and expectation of physical appearance. In this cosmetic panopticon, women face a universal pressure to achieve this ideal at the risk of cultural rejection (Giovanelli and Ostertag 2009, 290). As evidenced by the escalation of techniques aimed at manipulating the physical body (i.e., regimented diet and exercise programs and cosmetic surgery), this cosmetic panopticon rewards compliance with a thin ideal and intensifies the horrors of a fleshy existence. Women must continually toil over their bodies because they have internalized the sense that fashion watches and judges them for their ability to match the ideal aesthetic.
In being watched, Millman argues that all women are prone to disembodiment because “they are taught to regard their bodies as passive objects others should admire” (1980, 202). This disembodiment intensifies in the fat body, where the fat woman resorts to only “live from the neck up.” In response, the field of fat studies calls for a reclamation of one’s embodiment as a form of resistance against undue alienation brought on by the stigma of fat (Cooper 1998; LeBesco 2001; Levy-Navarro 2009; Solovay and Rothblum 2009; Wann 2009). Fat activists and scholars desire to reinscribe fatness with more positive meanings and present a counterdiscourse.
Does this celebration of fat achieve embodiment and create a new “fat aesthetic”? As several studies argue, fat women may achieve this liberation through the physical performance of fat, as documented in studies of burlesque (Asbill 2009; McAllister 2009) and theatre (Jester 2009; Kuppers 2001) performers. Performance reveals and redefines fat. For example, a burlesque performer reclaims her sexual agency on the stage. Her performance “functions to support a new, positive vision of fat sexual embodiment” (Asbill 2009, 300).
Ultimately, to have an effect, according to LeBesco (2001), the performance must sexualize and beautify the fat body without relying on thin aesthetics. This is problematic because, as Murray (2005a, 2005b) argues, fat women continue to live out, and thus reify, the dictates of dominant body ideologies that they have internalized. According to Murray, “fat politics still privileges the thin body and attempts to imitate it. As fat girls, we still want to know what it is to be thin, even if we do not want to alter our fat” (2005b, 161). With fat pool parties and lingerie parties, “we simply reverse the kind of response that fat bodies elicit within a dominant heteronormative framework” and “reproduce the obsession with the visible and the power of aesthetic ideals” (Murray 2005b, 161). There is no counteraesthetic.
While feminist scholarship has focused on the fat body as a site of resistance to patriarchal domination (Bordo 1993; Braziel and LeBesco 2001; Chernin 1981; Hartley 2001; McKinley 1999; Orbach 1978; Rothblum and Solovay 2009) and others have focused on identity politics and social movements by studying the work of groups such as the National Organization to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) (Germov and Williams 1999; LeBesco 2001; Sobal 1999), the literature fails to acknowledge the role of plus-size models, as aesthetic laborers, in negotiating and manipulating cultural interpretations and expectations of women’s bodies. Building on previous research that has only looked at the staged performance of fat, I focus, instead, on the “backstage” aesthetic labor process in order to examine this problematic in the theatricality of fat politics, that is, whether a fat performer can reclaim her embodiment without relying on a labor process driven by thin aesthetics.
Research Method
This personal account of the lived body “under construction” offers new direction in the developing field of carnal sociology, as developed by Loïc Wacquant, and critical insight into the biographical persona of the plus-size model. I took the perspective of the insider, going beyond the traditional ethnographic approach of observation to step into the role of my subject. In this approach, my body became a “tool for inquiry” and a “primary vector of knowledge” as I learned how to walk and pose and transformed from a woman into a model (Wacquant 2004). In the vein of carnal sociology, I drew on the physical experience of the plus-size model as fashion professionals measured, clothed, and posed me. This is a visceral insider account that engaged both the physical and mental nature of modeling. To understand the modeling industry, I learned how to model, for “sociologists who want to understand meaning-making in everyday life have to observe and experience these embodied practices, as they unfold in real time and space, and materialize in real bodies. We, like the people we study, must learn the practices” (Eliasoph 2005, 160).
Fieldwork involves embracing the embodied skills of both the practitioner and the observer. To illustrate, both Wacquant and feminist scholar and sociologist Kandi Stinson offer personal narratives to highlight the embodied experience of corporal discipline within institutional contexts, whether undergoing strenuous physical training to fight in the boxing ring or containing the visceral shame of stepping on the scale at a weight loss meeting. Wacquant (2004) makes the leap in methodological theorization and trains as a boxer at an urban gym on Chicago’s South Side to capture a form of discipline practiced within the black American ghetto. Stinson (2001), by participating in a international, commercial weight loss organization for two years as a paying member, examines how women continually construct meanings and experiences of weight loss amid a backdrop of cultural prejudice against fatness. Essentially, Stinson attempts to understand what it means to try to lose weight by actively and publicly participating in a program that emphasizes lifestyle modification and individual willpower.
As ethnographic studies such as these demonstrate, the fluidity of idealized constructions of embodiment that emerges in ethnographic investigations requires acknowledgement of a body that we no longer view as an object but as an event, where the body becomes an individual project and the site for the construction of identity (Brumberg 1997; Budgeon 2003). In Kathy Davis’s (1995) argument on embodied subjectivity, bodies are not simply objects determined by culture but rather are situated in culture as part of the process of negotiating and renegotiating self-identity. As this study of modeling shows, fashion places emphasis on what the body can do and what it looks like while doing it. Thus, a plus-size model engages in an aesthetic labor process that involves a high degree of self-surveillance and corporal discipline. It is this reflexive process of “becoming” that only ethnographic methods can capture.
Data Collection
This study draws on twenty-two months of ethnographic field research conducted at multiple open calls, go-sees, and castings 1 in New York City, recognized as one of the world’s leading fashion capitals and home to many leading designers and modeling agencies. Given its overall prominence in fashion, New York City is also home to many top plus-size modeling agencies.
During most of my research, I actively pursued modeling work. Combining participant observation and interviews, I met working plus-size models while waiting at castings and jobs and kept field notes on the lived experience of working in the modeling industry. Because of the physical nature of modeling work, I was unable to record observations as they occurred in real time. At the end of a casting session, fitting, or shoot, I retreated to a nearby coffee shop and wrote extensive field notes, relying on my memory to reconstruct events and conversations. While in a casting session or on the job, I was unable to conduct formal interviews with models. Instead, I engaged in informal conversation with them while we waited and then invited them to participate in an open-ended, semi-structured interview either after the casting or at a later scheduled date and time. Conducted in a public place, often a coffee shop, the interviews lasted between one and two hours, with additional follow-up interviews over the course of the study. In this manner, I gathered a snowball sample of thirty-five plus-size models. To maintain confidentiality, I changed names of people, places, and agencies when requested.
I also interviewed four directors of plus-size divisions and four modeling agents in four modeling agencies located in New York City. Two of the agencies primarily dealt with fit and commercial print modeling while the other two dealt exclusively with fashion print. Several of the agents worked at the same agency. The recruited agents participated in open-ended, semi-structured interviews conducted in their place of work and lasted approximately one hour. Some agents solicited for an interview chose not to participate in this study.
A couple of factors aided my entrance into the field. First, at five feet eight inches tall with a proportional women’s size ten frame, I fit the basic bodily requirements of a plus-size model. Second, as a former child actor, I was familiar with standard procedures for interacting with agents and attending castings. I had even modeled in a back-to-school fashion show sponsored by a national teen magazine. My past involvement in entertainment granted me credibility and aided the development of a rapport with other models.
While getting participants for interviews took nominal effort, fitting into a plus-size model crowd posed its own challenges. Often I entered a casting and realized that the other plus-size models grossly outmatched me in terms of experience and amount of curves. Physically, at a size ten, I was at the “small” end of plus-size. At one particular casting, I was, in more blatant descriptive terms, the “token skinny white chick.” Coupling my “smaller” stature with the fact that I was racially and ethnically in the minority, my usual role as marginal insider shifted to that of an outsider amid a roomful of glares from the other models. In this case, my token status served as an advantage, given that several models did not perceive me as their competition for the job and agreed to participate in my study.
Participants
My sample, by design, is limited to those women who entered the field and remained for a period of at least a year. Those exposed to the modeling industry but either chose not to pursue it or left after a short period of time are not included in the sample. There are many reasons why a woman would decide not to pursue a career in modeling. Besides a large financial startup cost and an unpredictable work schedule, models subject themselves to constant visual scrutiny and critical judgment. Agencies may simply drop a model from their rosters if clients do not hire her. The inherent unpredictability of styles and fads in fashion also hinders career development (Godart and Mears 2009; Mears 2008, Mears 2010). If a particular “look” is no longer marketable, the model will not “book” work. Furthermore, structural barriers exist. In order to model, a woman must have specific bodily capital and corporal skills.
The plus-size models interviewed for this study worked in commercial and catalogue print (i.e., promoting clothing and products on billboards, buses, magazines, and newspapers), fit modeling (i.e., a designer or clothing manufacturer hires a model to try on garments at various stages of production to determine fit and appearance on a live person), showrooms (i.e., promoting new fashion designs for clothing buyers at a department store or boutique), and the runway during designer fashion shows or on-air telecasts for the local news and daytime programs. The models self-reported their sizes, which ranged from ten to twenty-two with a mode size of fourteen/sixteen. The women ranged in age from eighteen to thirty-four, with an average age of twenty-seven. These plus-size models were older and larger than straight-size fashion models, who model between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four and normally retire from modeling by the time plus-size women start their own modeling careers. It is not uncommon for plus-size models to work into their forties. Of the thirty-five participants, sixteen identified as white, fifteen as African American, and four as Hispanic. Most had some level of college education and worked outside the modeling industry in some capacity. None of the models I met, whether freelance or represented by an agency, listed modeling as their main source of income. Some worked in related artistic fields, such as performance, design, or sales, while others held jobs in the healthcare or legal professions as nurses or paralegals, for example. Others worked as personal assistants or in temporary clerical positions.
Aesthetic Labor Process Involved in Being “Just a Body”
Given the autonomous, creative, and independent nature of working within a cultural industry, plus-size models engage in aesthetic labor that shapes their work and social identities (Entwistle and Wissinger 2006; Neff, Wissinger, and Zukin 2005). As Entwistle and Wissinger (2006, 777) argue, aesthetic labor is more than just a display and performance at work but is “part of the reproduction of the worker for employment . . . and involves longer-term commitments to bodily projects.” The fashion industry commodifies the bodies of models as goods for market exchange. The aesthetic labor process, which includes a combination of affective, emotional, and physical labor, contributes to an ongoing production of self that extends beyond the confines of modeling work into everyday lived experience.
Affective Labor
At an agency open call, I had my first glimpse at what it felt to be “just a body.” The agent evaluated my potential to model based only on a snapshot, without a word exchanged. I had wanted to talk with her and demonstrate my outgoing personality which, I presumed, would translate well into pictures, but that was an unnecessary part of the audition process. Agents primarily judge models on the basis of a picture.
Shocked by the impersonal nature of this open call, I looked forward to a scheduled meeting with the director at another agency. Surely, I would be able to demonstrate my interpersonal skills during a face-to-face meeting. Needless to say, this peculiar contradiction confronted me again. As I entered the agent’s office, he immediately offered this judgment, “You’re cute and have a good personality.” Without words exchanged beyond a simple salutation, the agent evaluated my personality, again, simply based on my physical appearance.
In her study of affective labor in the fashion modeling industry, Wissinger shares a similar account of a young model accompanied by her mother seeking representation at a New York modeling agency:
An agent came out to meet them, and, using a Polaroid camera, shot a picture of the girl, right there, in the lobby. In a moment, it was done, and, after a very brief exchange with the agent, mother and daughter headed for the elevator and their next appointment, or perhaps this girl’s big break. . . . The fact that it took the agent only a few seconds with a Polaroid camera to evaluate this model, speaks volumes about the criteria for obtaining work in the industry, and what the agencies look for in terms of standards of appearance and behavior. There was no need to actually speak to the girl. (2004, 108-9)
Agents, Wissinger finds, rely on a split-second visceral reaction to determine the presence of the “x” factor and the earnings potential of a new model. Beyond the emotional labor of trying to charm agents and clients (Mears and Finlay 2005), models engage in affective labor by which they develop “a presence that demands attention, is hard to ignore, or stands out” (Wissinger 2004, 211). Differing from emotional labor, defined by Hochschild (1983, 7) as “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display,” affective labor involves the “flow of energy between bodies that stimulates reactions in those bodies” (Wissinger 2004, x).
Many of the models in this study spoke of this flow of energy needed to connect with clients. For example, size sixteen/eighteen commercial print and fit model Joelle described how she engaged in affective labor at a commercial photo shoot:
It was [a] give and take. I was low [in energy], so I fed on the vibe from the room. I channeled it into my posing. . . . With the right energy, I don’t have to think. The camera tells me what to do.
Affective labor involves the model’s ability to emote well in pictures, to work with the camera, and convey emotion using her eyes. This is contingent, according to a veteran agent with twenty-five years of experience, on a model “being happy with whatever size she is in.” This requires a model to be comfortable with her body and a plus-size model to be comfortable with her fat.
Photographs may reveal a model’s level of comfort with her body. To illustrate, one agent showed me the proofs from a recent photo shoot of a prospective model:
Some people, they are just beautiful but don’t photograph well. Here is the perfect example. This girl is so beautiful. She is plus-size. Adorable, gorgeous, but I really don’t like the pictures. She was nervous. She did not do a good job.
The agent gave a vague critique of the photographs, but this is because elements of affective labor can be indescribable. As he discerned from the photographs, this model did not engage in effective affective labor because he did not see any sparkle in her eyes. In the end, the agent did not waste time determining the source of this model’s failure to produce “good” pictures and refused to work with her.
Nervousness or body insecurity can hamper affective labor. As Lea, a size sixteen catalogue print model, confided:
Every time I was posing, I kept thinking about my sausage arms. I briefed the photographer about them [her arms], but I was still worried the retouching wouldn’t be enough.
Lea’s fixation on her arms limited her choice of poses, and, ultimately, took away her ability to connect with the camera.
Emotional Labor
Models require a great deal of emotional labor to charm clients while being scrutinized by them, as well as to juggle an unpredictable schedule of castings, go-sees, and fittings. During the course of my fieldwork, the impersonal nature of castings struck me. At a casting for a runway show, I walked into the room to find a three-person panel. Without the customary exchange of greeting, one on the panel ordered, “Straight walk twice, no turns. Go!” On cue, the music started and I began my walk down an imaginary runway. The cold reception from the panel left me a bit stunned and befuddled, so, consequently, I forgot to monitor my facial expression while my hips were swinging to the rhythm of the music. I failed to maintain my composure given an unexpected interaction with casting. I let my emotions get the better of me.
At another casting, I met Wendy, a size eighteen Latina model who had been working in runway for clients such as Lane Bryant for the past four years. She recounted to me her earlier run-in at a casting that same morning:
I got there fifteen minutes early, so I stuck my head in the door and asked if I could go in. One of the casting directors barked back at me, “We will start at noon.” But I had asked the director of the show if I could come by earlier because I had this casting and he said yes. I waited until noon and stuck my head in again, and they said they were not ready. As I was sitting there I could hear the casting director complaining, “Don’t these models know that noon means noon.” I was so mad that I left without auditioning. I pride myself on being punctual.
Unfortunately, Wendy was not able to rein in her feelings for the casting, but the comments she overheard from the casting director revealed a lopsided opportunity structure. Models must please clients and casting directors by being voiceless, smiling bodies.
Besides the occasional chilling experience at castings, plus-size models must also negotiate any unexpected demands that emerge. When I met Crystal, an African American size sixteen model, she struggled with a schedule filled by multiple rehearsals for an upcoming runway show, difficult directors, and hidden costs for walking the runway:
I have to sell forty-dollar tickets to a [runway] show that I am not being paid for, and he [the director] won’t return my damn calls.
Plus-size models inhabit a low-status niche in fashion. Consequently, fashion directors often require them to sell tickets for runway shows that they participate in. Crystal arrived to a casting heavily burdened by these responsibilities (as well as those of a mother to a rambunctious toddler) but, for the sake of her career, she let her frustration pass before entering the audition room. Always engaged in emotional labor, models must leave negative attitudes and low energy at the door in order to perform and impress clients and casting directors.
Models engage in the most taxing form of emotional labor when they try to maintain composure while receiving criticism, some of which can be unwarranted and destructive. Early in her career, Janice signed with an agent at an agency specializing in plus-size models:
She [the agent] told me to change my hair, weight. She even suggested I get a chin implant! . . . She would call me at all hours, in the middle of the night. . . . After a casting, she would call me to tell me what the client said, like, “She is not pretty enough.” Like that helps!
Since a model depends on her agent to find her work and negotiate with clients on her behalf, she often finds herself in a predicament to appease her agent’s demands. Again, a model must endure the careful management of her feelings and strain to her self-esteem in order to work from day to day, client to client.
Physical Labor
While the participants in this study did not model full-time, they spent a majority of their time finding work and engaging in physical labor to keep their bodies camera-ready. A model must prepare her body for the performance of modeling. Her job is to use her body to strike the right pose and “sell a garment” for a client. In order to effectively do so, a model regulates and disciplines her body. By way of toning and shaping her body through diet and exercise or artificial enhancements, the model prepares her body for the needs of clients.
Contrary to cultural perceptions of fat women, plus-size models are disciplined and engage in constant monitoring and management of their bodily capital. Wacquant utilizes the case of the boxer to explain this concept of bodily capital:
The successful pursuit of a career [in boxing] . . . presupposes a rigorous management of the body, a meticulous maintenance of each one of its parts, an attention of every moment, in and out of the ring, to its proper functioning and protection. . . . The pugilist’s body is at once the tool of his work—an offensive weapon and defensive shield—and the target of his opponent. (2004, 127)
Here, the boxer’s body is a form of commodified physical capital, requiring monitoring and training in order to win a match.
In this way, bodily capital becomes essential to the boxer’s habitus, a bodily state of being that is both a medium and outcome of social practice (Bourdieu 1984). Both Wacquant’s boxers and the plus-size models in this study convert their bodily capital, that is, the shape and active capacity of a body, into economic capital. For the plus-size model, her body is her career. The condition of her body, the size, shape, and muscle tone, determines her chances for employment.
Training the body increases its utility and capital. In their ethnographic study of aging ballet dancers, Wainwright and Turner (2006) refine Bourdieu’s concept of bodily capital. To better describe the athletic nature of the professional dancer, Wainwright and Turner divide the concept of “athletic physical capital” into four criteria: speed, strength, stamina, and suppleness. All four aspects are present in athletes with differing levels of concentrated development. While a dancer may focus on increasing suppleness, a boxer will train to increase strength and speed.
Modeling is similar to other fields, such as sex work, which focus on engendered physical capital, where a worker commodifies her body. For example, both sex workers and fashion models modify their physical appearance to achieve a successful performance of the body. As Wesely (2003) and Murphy (2003) argue, exotic dancers manipulate their bodies via numerous body technologies to prepare themselves for their public performance as sexualized bodies for male clients. For example, it is not uncommon for an exotic dancer to undergo breast augmentation to achieve the “Barbie doll” body and receive more attention and money from her clients.
Likewise, the models in this study undertook rigorous and meticulous means to manage their bodily capital and trained to increase what I argue is their “model physical capital,” measured by body size and shape, runway walk, posing ability, and photogenic features. They cared for their bodies to maintain their buxom figures and participated in ritualistic skin care and grooming regimens. While photographic retouching eliminates the occasional pimple, a model’s complexion must be clear and washed thoroughly after a day on set wearing professional-grade makeup. They invested in their smile, straightening and whitening their teeth. Most turned to artificial bodily enhancements to achieve a desired, proportionate figure.
For models with less than ideal proportions, Larissa Laurel explained a trick of the modeling trade:
Some models, like me, are blessed with big bottoms, but our bust is on the smaller size. So do you know what we do? We stuff our bras with the pillow cups which we lovingly refer to as “chicken cutlets.” One model I personally know wears a padded panty to help her rear end look fuller. (Laurel 2008)
Size fourteen fit model Samantha revealed that she worked with models who, under the advisement of their agents, used padding to add inches to their dimensions in order to book work with potentially more profitable clients. In this way, models secured shoulder pads onto their hips in order to add inches to their measurements. For models, body proportions were more important than size, so they used artificial aids, such as “chicken cutlets,” body shapers such as the popular Spanx, or shoulder pads in unexpected places.
These plus-size fashion models were aware of their bodies. They knew how to put together an outfit that would flatter the appropriate curves. For each casting, they dressed to impress the casting director. They invested in shapeware (i.e., foundation garments worn underneath clothing that slim, flatten, and enhance different areas of the body including the bust, waist, buttocks, hips, and thighs to create a clean silhouette) and “comfortable” two- to three-inch high heels for runway, tradeshow, and showroom appearances and attended classes to learn how to walk. At castings, clients expected these models to wear shapeware or suitable foundation garments underneath a stylish, figure-flattering outfit, wear heels, and generally “be runway ready” with “a touch of gloss and slick hair.”
Controlling appetites and battling eating disorders
Maintaining their model physical capital required self-monitoring and discipline, yet these models acknowledged the role their insatiable appetites had in creating their voluptuous figures and insisted to me that they eat a balanced diet and routinely exercise. As Nicole, a size sixteen African American commercial print and runway model told me, “Girl, you know I have to exercise because I love to eat!”
And eat, they do. At a fashion show rehearsal, a production assistant tantalized us models with the promise of food, and I, surprised by their voracity, followed a pack of hungry plus-size models up the stairs to the feeding area. Much to our chagrin, the food was gone and we headed back downstairs to wait for the fitting. Later, after the show, I followed the same group of plus-size models to the kitchen prep area where they helped themselves to a platter of leftover sandwiches and brownies. While piling a second sandwich onto her plate, size eighteen African American commercial print and runway model Anna appeared conflicted, “I need to watch what I eat.” To which Jackie, size sixteen Latina showroom and runway model, quipped, “Yeah, I watch what I eat . . . as it goes in!”
Underneath the levity of this exchange was an earnest call for self-discipline. Anna recognized that she must negotiate her hunger with the physical requirements of modeling. She realized that, at a size eighteen and already at the end of the marketable range for plus-size models, an increase in size would lead to a steep decline in work opportunities.
Complicating this management of model physical capital, several of the models revealed past disordered eating patterns (such as binge eating, compulsive exercising, or yo-yo dieting). Mary, for example, a size fourteen fit model, spent most of her adolescence loathing her body and tried dieting to correct this “defect”:
I even tried this crazy liquid diet and wore little acupressure balls behind my ears. All I ate was a liter of milk and mushy cabbage. After a month, I only lost twelve pounds, and I had to stop because I was too weak to even move.
With such a strained relationship with food and her body, Mary needed to strike a balance between managing her body and controlling it via excessive means. In turn, Mary focused on long-term solutions to body management, such as a portion-controlled diet and a workout regimen of cardiovascular exercise and weight training.
Similarly, Anna and Janice, both recovering binge eaters and compulsive exercisers, made long-term, sustainable adjustments. In order to continue to cultivate her body and remain competitive, Anna made minor shifts in her lifestyle:
I stopped drinking soda. It was so hard. I was addicted. I drink tons of water, now. I always carry a bottle with me. I heard it helps my skin. But, sometimes I’ll sneak in a can of diet coke.
After eliminating soda from her diet, Anna noticed positive changes to her body and energy level. On the other hand, Janice found that the natural pace of living in Manhattan facilitated a sufficient level of bodily management:
I do not go to the gym. Never again. I walk everywhere, take the subway, [and] live in a fifth floor walkup [apartment].
Every day these models managed their physical capital, from minor adjustments in lifestyle to more intensive body projects involving dermatological and orthodontic treatments. Some had to binge and overeat to increase their size. Unlike athletes who have coaches to monitor their progress, they labored on their own to become “permanent overseers of their own bodies” (Mears and Finlay 2005, 333). Their bodies were both subject and object, mindfully managed through self-monitoring and discipline. For these plus-size models, they were their bodies and their bodies were their careers.
Self-Surveillance with a Tape Measure
Models experience an overt, constant pressure to maintain their figures, since there is always someone, whether an agent or client, present with a tape measure. For example, while a group of plus-size models and I waited in the hallway for an open call with an agency, one freelance model, Caroline, anxiously asked the departing models if they had been measured by the agent during the interview. Once Caroline heard that the agent measured the other models “in over a dozen places no one would expect,” she turned to me in noticeable panic, explaining that her measurements had changed from the ones listed on her composite card (i.e., a model’s business card) since she had gained weight over the holidays. Caroline knew it was common practice for agents to measure models. The act of being measured, itself, did not trouble her. Rather, Caroline feared that the agent would chastise her for her failure to maintain her bodily measurements. Caroline believed that the agent would then perceive her as unprofessional and, thus, refuse to work with her. This level of fear-laden bodily consciousness is not only typical but also necessary for a plus-size model, who is subject to fashion’s gaze.
According to Foucault (1995 [1975], 26-28), power relations define the body in economic terms as both a productive body and a subjected body. Here in this Foucauldian view, the bodies of Caroline and other fashion models are subject to an agent’s gaze. The fashion industry commodifies a model’s body, where each curve determines her economic potential. Consequently, a model tracks her measurements and engages in a number of bodily practices to remain competitive in the field.
A Foucauldian analysis of the body involves mapping the power relations that operate within institutions and ripple down to the individual, affecting daily practices. In this case, the specialization of the modeling industry allows agents to categorize models, subjecting the body to classification. Plus-size models respond to this subjectification by the industry by internalizing the gaze and engaging in new forms of self-discipline. Here, the tape measure is an institutionalized tool of regulation as it measures and evaluates a model’s body. No longer confined to the sole possession of an agent or a fashion designer, models also use a tape measure to track their bodies. Working within this web of power relations, models become “docile” bodies to fit the desired image of a plus-size model.
Appearance plays a key role in gendered subjectivity, where “doing looks” is integral to the production of gendered social identity (Frost 2005). Bordo (1993), in Foucauldian fashion, acknowledges the productive role women have in bodily pursuits but ultimately concedes that they become “docile” bodies disciplined to survey and improve their bodies, duped into adhering to idealized constructions of feminine embodiment discursively mediated by the culture through a cosmetic panopticon. An internalized sense of disciplinary power, exercised by self-surveillance and self-policing, maintains a model’s gendered subjectivity, resulting in her pursuit of an aesthetic ideal established by fashion. These models internalize a normalizing gaze and, by use of individualized disciplinary practices, reproduce the “subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (Foucault 1995 [1975], 138). Here, these models actively work on their bodies to achieve a look mandated by the cosmetic panopticon. They judge their bodies through fashion’s eyes and according to fashion’s criteria. When they fail, they experience a sense of shame and insecurity similar to that of Caroline.
As we see from this aesthetic labor process, these women went from “doing looks” to “doing plus-size.” Working within an institution that places a high economic value on the physical body, these models wage a personal battle to control and discipline their bodies. This pressure intensified for those women who work as fit models.
Case of Fit Models
Twelve of the plus-size models I encountered primarily worked as fit models. Fashion designers and clothing manufacturers hire fit models to try on garments at various stages of production to determine the fit and appearance of the garment on a live person. Thus, a fit model’s job is to comment on the material and the cut of the garment with respect to its fit and feel as the model moves about as the customer would in the future. The model gives this feedback to the designer before the garment is mass produced. As one agent described to me, the fit model is the designer’s muse. Fit modeling jobs are billed hourly, with New York City rates ranging from one hundred twenty-five dollars up to three hundred dollars, and designers prefer to use the same model throughout a design season; hence, the hours can add up to profitable work. For example, one fit model in my sample earned on average twenty-seven thousand dollars a year from fit clients alone.
Essential to this process, the model’s measurements must remain constant in order to ensure a consistency of sizing and fit in garment production. As a fit model warned:
If she [the model] is bloated and they [the designers] fit the garment larger, women [in the stores] will think they lost weight.
While based on a form, the true fit and size of a garment is dependent on the fit model used during fittings. Therefore, the model must maintain specific dimensions and proportions, often to within an inch of those she had when she started working for the client. Changes in her dimensions and proportions could mean lost jobs. Clients often fired models whose weight fluctuated. Sarah explained to me that she had a recurring working relationship with one designer until she lost ten pounds. Those ten pounds meant the end of her steady work opportunity. So, throughout the process, clients record and track every inch of a model’s body.
For some models, this amplified pressure to maintain one’s exact measurements in fit modeling countered the financial benefits. Heather, a size sixteen commercial print and runway model, refused to work fit jobs because of her history with an eating disorder:
I know I can make some good money but the last thing that I’m gonna do is worry like that. I can keep this [body] in check but I’m not gonna worry about every pound.
Heather successfully disciplined her body so that she maintains her size in order to work in commercial print and runway, but she feared that the added strain of working as a fit model would trigger an eating disorder relapse.
The Shame of Losing Weight
What happens if a model fails to maintain her weight? The case of a fit model, Janice, offers a telling tale of what can happen when a plus-size model loses weight. When I spoke to Janice, she had recently lost weight as an unintended consequence from an attempt at a bodily improvement. She invested (i.e., an out-of-pocket expense since she does not have health insurance) in a retainer to straighten her teeth; however, it was not until after the retainer was made that the doctor instructed her that she would have to wear it for twenty-three hours a day. In order to eat, she would have to remove it and then brush her teeth before she put it back on.
Because of the inconvenience of this orthodontic treatment, Janice lost twenty pounds in a matter of weeks. When she went to her fitting jobs, she noticed a marked difference in the reactions of the clients, who disapproved of her weight loss. A designer client, who hired Janice to fit dresses, sweaters, and shirts for the past three years, stood in horror and exclaimed, “I am going to have to measure you. You lost weight.”
To Janice’s own amazement, she had lost three inches in her waist and four inches in her bust and hips. The client replaced Janice with some other “big girl.” Because of this dramatic weight loss, Janice no longer fit the position as fit model, losing an average of five thousand dollars a year from this one fit client alone. Having lost the weight and a well-regarded job opportunity, Janice experienced a shame equivalent to that one feels after gaining weight, “I hate being told it [the weight loss] is wrong. It is my body.”
At another job doing line work for a nationwide retailer, where fit models of various sizes literally line up to model the latest design collection for corporate directors, Janice tried on her usual size eighteen pant, but after buttoning the waist, the pants fell to the floor. She was immediately given a smaller size pant:
I felt like I was being arrested. The looks I got from these people. I started to give a monologue to the directors, saying I had just had food poisoning and made cracks about eating muffins to gain the weight back.
Conflicted by the demand from her clients that she needed to gain back ten pounds and worry about paying bills, Janice broke down under the pressure and bought weight-gaining powder.
In an industry where the body is a commodified object, a model may sometimes need to engage in deviant behaviors to remain marketable. As in the aforementioned case, when fit clients fired Janice because she lost too much weight, she returned to the binge mentality she learned of years ago while in college, where she would binge on carbohydrates and cheese and then exercise the next day. This time, however, she did not exercise the next day but, instead, “walked slow” and carried a jar of peanut butter in her bag, consuming it by the spoonful. Janice suffered flashbacks from that previous episode in her life and could no longer stomach her daily Ensure shakes mixed with strawberries and ice cream.
As a newly slimmed down plus-size model, Janice experienced resistance from fit clients, who demanded that she return to her larger size. Janice struggled with the issue of having to gain weight in an unhealthy manner, something she never thought she would have to do as a plus-size model. Here, the fit clients demanded a specific body that Janice could not provide. They required this body without thought as to how Janice might go about achieving this sudden weight gain. This push toward fatness and gaining weight is counter to what contemporary American culture dictates about women’s bodies. While fashion urges everyday women to lose weight, fashion urges plus-size models, at times, to gain weight. Models push their bodies to extremes. Fashion allowed these women to be fat and occasionally urged them to get fatter in order to build their model physical capital.
Conclusions
This study presents us with a unique example of how labor processes can extend beyond the confines of work, affect the social identity of workers, and aid in the production of fantasy. Other body-centric professionals (i.e., dancers, athletes, exotic dancers, and fitness instructors) adopt techniques of bodily control that affect not only their performance of work but their lived experience. Yet, contrary to a dancer or boxer who trains his or her body toward an established aesthetic (i.e., an athletic, lean, and strong body), plus-size models work within the confines of a cultural field of tastemakers to create aesthetics. As such, they have an active role in molding cultural constructions of fatness.
From affective, emotional, to physical labor, the work process of plus-size models not only increases the utility of a body but also presents an opportunity to craft an image. Further analysis of how race and class intersect with gender and bodies is necessary to uncover the multiple markets within the fashion industry and their role in shaping aesthetics. Specifically, my initial study points to the presence of multiple markets within the fashion industry, markets defined by size and divided by race and class. It is not simply a model’s body size and shape that determine her ability to find representation with an agency, which in turn leads to job opportunities. Her racial and ethnic status is also key to determining the quantity and quality of work available to her. High-profile modeling agencies, with access to high-status clients and well-paying jobs, prefer to work with models on the smaller size spectrum of “plus-size,” who also happen to be predominantly white or light-skinned. This preference leaves the growing number of African American and Latina models, who tend to be larger in size, searching for representation with less prestigious, boutique-style agencies that have limited access to clients. This suggests a persistent inequality in fashion that “knows no [size] bounds.”
Because of their size, we assume plus-size models suffer from a “sin by omission”—that is, failure to keep up with necessary engendered bodily devotional practices (Baudrillard 2005, 278). However, as this work demonstrates, they discipline themselves and engage in regimented practices as part of an aesthetic labor process. They utilize their body as capital, embark on a variety of body projects, and, ultimately, reproduce heteronormative imperatives involving female bodies.
Normative values dominate their aesthetic labor process. Even if they are fat, plus-size models emulate a work ethic of self-discipline, strength, and diligence. As women, plus-size models continue to manage and manipulate their bodies in hopes of appealing to fashion’s elite. In cultivating themselves as plus-size models, they engage in engendered body projects designed to control their fat. Ultimately, these projects serve to reinforce their sense of disembodiment.
As “docile” bodies, plus-size models engage in a constant battle to control and discipline their bodies. They develop a repertoire of specialized professional techniques to increase their “model physical capital.” Technologies of control, such as a tape measure, legitimize and normalize this constant surveillance of the body. As part of the physical strategies employed by plus-size models to remain marketable to clients, models track each measurement and manipulate their bodies by either invasive or noninvasive techniques, ranging from strict dieting and exercise to wearing padding in the appropriate places.
Plus-size models become products that clients fix up and dress up to present a desirable package. Agents sell these manufactured packages to clients, who in turn resell them to consumers. These models are bodies with dyeable hair and fixable features. If their measurements are not in perfect proportion, some stick padding onto their hips, “chicken cutlets” onto their breasts, and squeeze themselves into a pair of Spanx. Photoshop eliminates any remaining imperfections, such as acne, cellulite, and extra rolls of flesh. Agents take their plus-size models to dinner, encouraging them to eat and gain weight. If a fit model loses weight, clients tell her to do whatever it takes to gain the weight back before the next fitting, even if that means binging on fat-laden foods that can wreak havoc on any individual’s body.
Plus-size models labor over their body landscapes, haunted by a continual sense of imperfection. Whether their bodies are sources of embarrassment and shame or prideful accomplishments, they are treated overwhelmingly as things to control and master. They become objects within the spectacle of fashion. Thus, a plus-sized model’s reclamation of embodiment is an illusion. Only ethnographic methods could capture this discrepancy between a staged performance of fat and the backstage aesthetic labor process.
Throughout the course of this study when I was photographed or walked down the runway, I was seduced by a fantasy. As a model pampered and dressed in the latest fashions, I attest to the ease with which a model could get lost in a moment and feel liberated from a stigma. Under the spell of a “cultural goal of becoming photographable,” I no longer felt like an ordinary woman (Blum 2003, 101). As a model, I believed that I was special, a standout among the crowd, and no longer burdened by fatness. As models of resistance against a negative cultural discourse surrounding the fat body, these women expose their bodies of curves without shame. For those brief moments, they emerge victorious, reclaim their femininity, and feel empowered.
Beyond the performance, however, fashion marginalized these plus-size models within a system of work embedded in a complex web of power relations and practices. The self-surveillance and corporeal discipline required of an aesthetic labor process is antithetical to the task of reclaiming one’s embodiment because the body is still an object that the model must control and master. While these plus-size models invest in their bodies, they alienate the self and transform their bodies into manipulated and consumed objects, thereby reproducing prevailing gender ideologies and inequalities. There is no subversion. Preexisting aesthetic ideals direct this process of self-cultivation. Plus-size models try to claim their space in fashion without presenting a counteraesthetic.
After all their aesthetic labor, plus-size models are still fat bodies. Their work is no different from any other model of any size in fashion. All models must control and discipline their bodies. Plus-size models remain disembodied.
Footnotes
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.