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    AngelaInDetroitMaiysha Kai
    9/08/17 12:23pm

    Posts like this bring out the concern trolls and they irk me.

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      Rooo sez BISH PLZAngelaInDetroit
      9/08/17 1:53pm

      IKR? I was happily reading the article (and half-jelly that Miss Author Girl had also been a model, ‘coz I like her have a couple of Grammy noms but nobody ever waved a Vogue cover in my face) and then scrolled down to comments and now ... here we are. Again.

      And on Black Girl Magic Tennis Ladies Grand Slam Finals week too.

      #mad

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      YeshaRooo sez BISH PLZ
      9/08/17 2:51pm

      Grammy noms? You do? Do tell!

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    sakisaki6Maiysha Kai
    9/08/17 10:52am

    Why does the average American woman reach a size 16 or more? This is actually not normal if you look at American women vs women in the rest of the world. Yes, people get a bit heavier as they grow older, but size 16 and more is ridiculously extreme. No one is born that way.

    And it’s not just the older women. When I go to concerts and meet teenagers (I like Korean boy bands at the age of 43), many of the girls are obese, and for what reason? They’re young with fast metabolism and clearly energetic if all the screaming and jumping and pushing is anything to go by. The obesity makes no sense.

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      Brooklyn_Bruinsakisaki6
      9/08/17 11:17am

      Subsidized wheat, sugar, and corn.

      Food scientists that spend tens of millions on making food more palatable. Decades of neuroscience to study how to make things more addictive.

      An industry of marketers and advertisers, along with an army of people who have few job opportunities, so the food can be affordable.

      A corporate culture that demands perpetual growth.

      Regulators who’ve been captured by industry.

      Both medical field and the fitness industry also profit down stream.

      And most of this really kicks in during the 70-80's if you look at weight studies.

      Just for kicks, also consider all the additional chemicals and modified foods.

      Basically biological warfare for profit.

      Yet Americans point to melamine baby formula scandals in China. How could they!?

      Queue easily, we gave them the playbook

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      OctoberSurprisesakisaki6
      9/08/17 11:26am

      A major part of it is the richness of the diet too many people consume coupled with a sedentary lifestyle, especially as we get older. It would be one thing if we lived agrarian lifestyles where consuming lots of fat helps keep the bodies energy levels high for the daily work we performed, but by and large that is not the case. Too many calories, too much fatty foods, and not enough daily activity.

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    pygmypossumMaiysha Kai
    9/08/17 7:33pm

    Possibly slightly OT plus-size clothing complaint: I JUST WANT WORK/CASUAL BASICS. I don’t care about looking “hot”. I don’t need skintight shit that looks like I should be at the club. I love my bodacious ta-tas but am not interested in displaying them at the office. I just want regular, grown-up, non-adolescent, non-Kardashian-looking, dresses, pants, and shirts that FUCKING FIT ME. I will spend money. I will, in fact, fucking THROW my money at companies that provide these things for me. It shouldn’t be this hard.

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      Flamingo83pygmypossum
      9/09/17 12:33am

      I actually buy my blouses to big and tailor them to fit me. My blouses are fitted but my breasts are not on display.

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    Rewind4ThatBehindMaiysha Kai
    9/08/17 3:43pm

    Just waiting on the day where modeling can include people of all figures & ages.

    I don’t understand why we can’t be realistic about what beauty is given that the traditional sense of beauty is changing.

    I don’t care if she’s paper thin or 400 lbs, if she’s got the skills, let her work. She’s going to inspire someone and help sell products. I don’t get what the constant slow inclusion is supposed to prove.

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      Archaeyopterix Majorus
      9/08/17 7:45pm

      Exclusion seems a dominant human tendency

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    BlackMage2030Maiysha Kai
    9/08/17 11:22am

    For the plus-size industry as someone who was in this category as a teen/young person: the heyday of the older models in plus-size clothing coincided with the time when mainstream (as wealthy folks could always find something eventually) plus-size was fugly asexual clothes that fit poorly and actually made fat women look fatter and less attractive than anything which jived with how that 35+ category viewed themselves as plus sized women according to media/common knowledge. Now that more women are within that 14/16+ category and more are aware of things like sex and femininity at any size there’s been a race to get towards cute and sexy and flirty. Part of the issue is that ‘cute’ and ‘sexy’ and ‘flirty’ is still in the barely-legal-in-all-50-states to 25 mindset - it’s there in the straight sizes too, but there is a luxury of choices in that arena that still isn’t available in the plus-sizes that mitigate the worse of it so that a woman over 35 can find something great and classy.

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    A Drop of Hell, A Touch of StrangeMaiysha Kai
    9/08/17 10:54am

    Hang the clothes on a wire frame mannequin and let CGI do the rest. That takes care of photo shoots, then they’ll only ‘need’ models to walk for the glitterati in New York and Paris.

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      HollylujahA Drop of Hell, A Touch of Strange
      9/08/17 2:41pm

      And y’know, automation will take care of that last ‘need’ soon enough. They make walking robots already, so it’s only a matter of time before they make sashaying robots.

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    anordinarygirlMaiysha Kai
    9/08/17 7:13pm

    One thing that always strikes me is when they put a token old lady in a campaign (she’s always white, usually wearing huge bugeye glasses). They’ll have a bunch of teens and twentysomethings, and drop in one lady in her 70s or 80s.

    I mean, it’s better than nothing, I do appreciate that the older lady is there. It shows the truth that old ladies can look awesome too (my great-aunt was the most stylish women I’ve ever known, even in the nursing home.)

    But um, what about the many decades in between? There are all these 30- to 60- somethings who would like to wear nice clothes to the office and around town, you know?

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    SoonToBeSentToSiberiaMaiysha Kai
    9/08/17 6:58pm

    Not a modeling comment, really, but Universal Standard has great plus-sized clothes (and they do use racially and ethnically diverse models). My daughter is a size 16, and their clothes are awesome — reasonably priced, high quality, all online sales. If you go up or down a size, they will replace your clothes for free. If you’re in NYC, you can make an appointment to try on their samples, helped by the very fabulous Aimee. We visited while we were on vacation there, and it was an amazingly fun and affirming, body-positive experience. My daughter is always very frustrated when it comes to clothes shopping, but she felt very inspired and loved after trying on clothes there. (I am not an employee, for the record.)

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      Tb2125SoonToBeSentToSiberia
      9/08/17 9:26pm

      This is wonderful!

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    Tb2125Maiysha Kai
    9/08/17 9:22pm

    I modeled late eighties through the 90s. Plus size models didn’t exist. I remember when I hit my 30s in the early 2000's I knew I was “over the hill” and my hips were too large. So I picked up my book, went to open call at a very large NY agency on the day they were seeing “plus size” girls/women & crossed my fingers. No go, they told me I was too small. Size 10/12 didn’t cut it for any box, at any agency.

    Now I’m 46 and I’m being asked to think about getting back into the industry because apparently these are good ages for women to consider modeling. But it does seem that for middle-aged models (man I hate that term), they are still using straight size. So even though we might be preparing to slog through menopause, finally coming to terms with our bodies and sometimes even reveling in them, we are still being told to stick to the very boring narrative of what someone thinks an aging woman should look like.

    The whole system is a clusterfuck. But I must admit I get so excited seeing my sisters rocking their gorgeous bodies in major campaigns. It’s a nice change from being told my natural ass needs to go and they don’t care how it’s done.

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    CannedPamMaiysha Kai
    9/09/17 1:08am

    So, is the concern the models or the clothes? Cuz I don’t really care about the age of the models but also, I’m super glad, even at 43, that plus size clothing is skewing younger. I’d rather not dress like my mother, thank you very much. I refuse to wear clothes that just hang like a box and don’t show off my shape. Lane Bryant is great for sexy bras and panties and I can find the occasional cute sweater or skirt but their stuff is quite boxy and they think that a black pair of pants and a button down shirt is “fashion” worthy of the front of a mailer. It was always easy to find plus size work pants and conservative shirts at Macy’s and Nordstrom but I just recently bought a super funky fall jacket at Torrid that I never would have found at the “grown up” stores. Also, I love my Breakfast Club t-shirt and I’ve been living in this:

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