“When I see celebrities that look like me still held in the same marginalized place with limited roles and limited closets, I am livid.”
Can We Dismantle Fat Phobia on the Red Carpet?
I am only here for the red carpet looks has been my response to anyone wondering why I’ve been watching award shows from 2005 till present. I want the glamour. I want to be swept up in the pageantry of garments made for a once-in-a-lifetime event, and mostly, I want to live vicariously for a moment in the world of celebrity and spectacle. Over the last decade, it has filled me with such joy to see the diverse body representation at award shows only grow from year to year. It brings the glorious existence of celebrities that look like me, wearing the gowns my teenage dreams were made of. Shannon Purser at the 2017 Emmys wearing Sachin & Babi, Danielle Brooks at The 49th Annual NAACP Image Awards in Michael Costello, and Beanie Feldstein at the 2020 Golden Globes in Oscar De La Renta. What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the discomfort and cognitive dissonance of both rooting for plus size celebrities to exist in stardom, while simultaneously feeling entitled to deem their fashion choices as pass or fail.
I felt this acutely during the Golden Globes, when I came across a tweet that Amanda Richards, the creator and host of Big Calf podcast, wrote about Nicola Coughlan. “The fat girl from Bridgerton is wearing a black cardigan at the Golden Globes, bc no matter how hot and stylish you are, if you’re a fat girl there will always be a black cardigan you think about wearing, then decide against, but ultimately wear bc you feel like you have to.”
I didn’t question the personal bias of her words, or pause over the possible reasoning why Nicola (and her stylist Aimée Croysdill) preferred the look of the Molly Goddard buttercup-yellow tulle dress topped with a black cardigan. I was too preoccupied remembering the precise moment I started to fear my arms. The sticky summer day in my early twenties when I caught the reflection of my bare arms in the rearview mirror, and the way they looked pressed against my body, tumbling out of the sleeveless black and white striped Marc Jacobs sundress I was wearing. And I remember thinking, despite the sweltering heat, that I really should be wearing a black cardigan.
That was the moment I decided my arms weren’t suitable for public consumption, heralding in a period of deep body shame that dictated what I SHOULD wear. (Nearly a decade later, I entered the ‘burn-your-cardigans’ period of defiant self love and remained there). So when I saw another fat person calling out the fashion choice of a celebrity as one rooted in obligatory shame and not sartorial choice, I didn’t see the harm in speculating motivation or frankly passing judgement on what a celebrity chose to wear to an award show. I just felt the quiet kinship of being fat, reflexive dressing habits that I still carry like a vestigial organ since that hot July afternoon.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Marielle Elizabeth
