“It’s simply bizarre that ‘normal’ is the new overweight. We’ve seen that super-skinny women can be as unhappy as the fattest fat girl.”


When he met Crystal Renn for the first time last September , Stephen Gan, the influential creative director of fashion magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and Visionaire, had the same reaction as virtually everyone who comes face to face with the industry’s reigning plus-size model.

“You’re not big,” Mr. Gan said. Ms. Renn - 23 years old, 1.5 meters and 23 centimeters tall, bra 38C, waist 76 centimeters, hips 107 centimeters, hair and eyes brown - is an American size 12. Mr. Gan half expected Mae West. Photographs in the international editions of Bazaar and Vogue had emphasized Ms. Renn’s curves, and sometimes exaggerated them with lighting and digital manipulation, that he imagined her to be much larger, rather than the breathtaking but normal woman who had come to tell him her story.

So-called plus-size models are constantly being told by editors and designers that they don’t look fat, which is meant to be a compliment, Ms. Renn said in her recently published memoir, “Hungry.” Still, it does become tiresome for a model who aspires to wrest fragrance and beauty contracts from women who are size 2 or smaller, she said. “It’s simply bizarre that ‘normal’ is the new overweight,” she wrote. “We’ve seen that super-skinny women can be as unhappy as the fattest fat girl. We know how awful it is to obsess about every calorie. We’ve just opted not to make ourselves crazy.”

Magazines are making a point to include more diverse body types . It has not gone unnoticed by Ms. Renn and the fashion industry that the backlash against skinny models has, in effect, given her career a major boost.

She is, from a high-fashion standpoint, “far and away” the most successful model in the plus-size division of Ford Models, said her agent, Gary Dakin.

For all the appearance of success, Ms. Renn has had darker days, as chronicled in her book, in which she describes starving herself to be a “straight size” model, the industry term for girls who meet the prevailing standard of beauty, which is to say extremely thin.

Many plus-size models complain that their images are often retouched as routinely as celebrity covers ? only to make them look bigger. Ms. Renn said that she had seen images in which weight was added to make her appear to be a size 20, to be more appealing to larger customers. In her book, she describes this as the fetishization of fat. “W

hen designers and editors choose one fat girl to salivate over, and revel in her avoirdupois, I’m not sure how much it advances the cause of using girls of all sizes in a magazine,” she wrote. What she would like to see, in the interest of fairness, is those photographers and magazines making a point of not showing an image of a model whose ribs are showing. “I’m fighting for something,” Ms. Renn said. “I believe fashion can be a place of diversity. It’s not going to happen overnight, but do you want it to?”


By ERIC WILSON