How the K.C. curve fashion scene is destigmatizing bodies on and off the runway | Arts & Culture

Modeling has been a part of Cambre Napier’s life since she was 16 years old. Now as a grown woman, wife and mother, she said that even at her lowest weight, she still struggled to find a place in the modeling industry.

“I was a lot skinnier then, so I pursued it as much as I could,” Napier said. “I had a couple of jobs. But I was a size six to eight and even that was too big then.”

Napier says that since her youth, the modeling and fashion industry has made significant strides to incorporate different body types into the industry due to the mainstream success of the body positivity movement. Body positivity “promotes acceptance of all bodies, regardless of size, shape, skin tone, gender, and physical abilities,” according to Forbes.

Napier’s life eventually went a different route after her teen years, but about five years ago she decided to pursue modeling again.

“I did a photoshoot because I was feeling so down on myself because I became a mother, a wife, and I felt like I lost myself right? So, I decided to book a photoshoot, and it just kind of escalated,” Napier said. “It got posted, they sent it into a magazine, and I got put in a magazine, and then I just loved the way it made me feel. Like I felt so confident after that. And it just grew from there.”

Even though modeling again made Napier feel more confident, she struggled to feel accepted in the industry as someone whose body had changed. She said that she not only experienced body shaming, but also ageism as a 46-year-old woman and a size 14 to 16. 

“I feel like once you are over the age of twenty-five, people and branding like jewelry designers and really anyone, they look down upon you because I guess they think that older people aren’t going to buy their product,” Napier said. 

Dawn Higgins is a photographer who works will models of all body types. When Napier struggled to work with other photographers in the fashion industry, she and Higgins eventually decided to hold their own meetups and photoshoots.

 “We did a fun little candy shop photoshoot, and we included plus-size models, you know midsize models, small models, but we also included older models and younger models,” Higgins said. “Because… I’m sorry, I like to go to the candy store! You know what I mean? I want to do fun things, and so you know when people see it, that’s when they say, ‘Hey yes this is okay!’”

Higgins and Napier then decided to start Curve Network KC for women who did not feel their body was accepted in the traditional modeling industry.

“Curve Network KC is a body positivity mission to include all body types, all shapes and sizes, men or women, and to be a little bit more inclusive in Kansas City,” Napier said. “So, for instance we wanted to see more plus-size, or more average size as I would say, people on the runway, in lifestyle magazines in Kansas City, things like that. So, we started the group in hopes that we could change I guess the outlook on weight and shapes and sizes, and you know our ‘flaws’ I guess I should say.”

Cambre and Higgins are two of the many figures in the Kansas City area working to promote body positivity. LaToya Rozof, owner of a K.C. based plus-size clothing boutique called 79Roze, said in an interview that she started her business in 2016 because she “saw a need for fashionable, affordable, clothes for curvy girls.”

“If I’m a woman with curves, I just can’t go to the Oak Park Mall and buy clothes,” Rozof said. “I can’t walk into any boutique and buy clothes because there’s limited options, and they’re not fashionable. They’re like matronly style.” 

Rozof collaborates with Curve Network KC and other local curve models, to put on fashion shows. She says that 79Roze played a role in opening the doors for body diversity in local fashion shows. For Rozof, while the plus-size fashion scene has expanded since she started, she says that there is still a long way to go for representation of bodies in fashion.

She said that when she began in 2016, there was a stark lack of body diversity on the runway. 

“I just did a big show in September here, and I was a little bit disappointed by the lack of body diversity in the show,” Rozof said. “You know you go to a fashion show, let’s say you have 10 designers, they’ll have maybe one or two [plus-size models].”

According to the BBC, the body positivity movement has a deep history, with roots that trace back to the 1960s. That led to the initial rise of a movement called “fat acceptance,” that focused on ending the culture of fat-shaming and discrimination against people based upon their size or body weight. In the 1980s and 1990s, the movement evolved to focus on the negativity of diet culture and the importance of self-acceptance.

In the 2000s with the rise of social media apps like Instagram, the body positivity movement hit its peak. Plus-size models could post photos and content of themselves without needing to go through an agency and many partnered with brands to create fashionable clothing for all sizes.

But when the body positivity movement transitioned to mainly social media in the early to mid-2000s, there was discourse around the validity of the movement.

The Scientific Journal Obesity published an article in 2018 that discussed the new fashion range called “Curve,” one that aimed to minimize the negative image of plus-size fashion by introducing a new design tailored for plus-size customers.

According to the article, the introduction of curve fashion could “potentially undermine the recognition of being overweight and its health consequences.”

This claim, that the body positivity movement contributes to normalizing poor health habits, has been highly debated. While research shows that obesity can lead to health problems such as diabetes, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease, this isn’t the whole picture. According to Silvana Pannain, associate professor of medicine at UChicago Medicine, you cannot know a person’s health simply by looking at them, and it is possible to be overweight and metabolically healthy.

“I work out all the time. A lot of people think that if you work out you won’t be plus size, that’s not true,” Napier said. “Working out doesn’t always make you skinny. Some people are just built this way.”

In addition to debunking the correlation between weight and health, a new wave of fat activists has taken the movement a step further. These activists believe that health or appearance should not even be considered in the way that a person in society is viewed or treated by others. This framework of thinking has been coined “body neutrality.”

According to Time Magazine, “Body neutrality invites us to understand ourselves and others as whole human beings first, and to form our concept of worth, value, and identity around a person’s internal self instead of their external self. It helps us strip away the many layers of complex social conditioning telling us what different bodies mean.”

Aubrey Gordon, an author, podcaster, and activist against anti-fat bias, writes about how there is no science to support the idea that dieting causes long-term weight loss. However, she also stresses that someone’s health habits should not determine how much respect they receive in society.

 “We need a world that insists upon safety and dignity for all of us—not because we are beautiful, healthy, blameless, exceptional, or beyond reproach, but because we are human beings,” Gordon writes in her book “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat.”

Gordon and other fat activists are becoming more widely recognized in academic spaces that discuss appearance-based discrimination, and its correlation to gender, social hierarchies, and power.

At the University of Kansas, women and gender studies instructor Katie Wade cites Gordon when discussing the “Politics of Physical Appearance” class that she teaches.

“I would absolutely turn to some of the speakers like Aubrey Gordon who have been critical of body positivity before, because body positivity has been very good in terms of like the individual perceptions of body but has not done as much in terms of like the political, social implications of different bodies,” Wade said. 

Body positivity and body neutrality can be beneficial for oneself, depending on which mindset makes them feel more confident and happier. However, body positivity strives to create a space where curvy women can be represented in the fashion and beauty industry and embraces the mindset that all bodies are beautiful.

Body neutrality, in contrast, rejects the need for a beauty standard and suggests that a focus on outward appearance contributes to the enforcing of negative structures of power that have been put upon us as a society.

Studying the correlation between gender and bodies is not just taking place at KU, but across a variety of scholarly spaces. According to an article by Oxford Bibliographies, fields such as anthropology, gender studies, history, philosophy, and sociology, among others have written about gender and bodies.

The article also touches on how some bodies are privileged over others, showing a hierarchy based on various elements of beauty including body size that supplies some with physical capital while disadvantaging others.

“The expectations placed upon women’s physical appearance, are used to subdue, to maybe distract in some ways, or to supply new hierarchies.” Wade said. “For example, I think that we work a lot on trying to place each other in hierarchies rather than looking at the hierarchies that have been placed upon us. And I think that physical appearance is one of the ways that happens.”