French Glamour Features Plus-Size Women, Not Models

by Verena von Pfetten | 3:47 pm, May 6th, 2010

Well, this is interesting. After all the hullaballoo yesterday (and this morning!) over Glamour’s June swimsuit issue featuring plus-size model Crystal Renn, Victoria’s Secret angel Alessandra Ambrosio, S.I. Swimsuit Issue covergirl Brooklyn Decker on the front, it turns out that Glamour’s francophone counterpart has gone and done something relatively novel: they’ve featured regular, plus-size people wearing fashionable, plus-size clothing in a four-page spread in the magazine.

So why is this so cool? Well, because while Crystal Renn is beautiful and certainly representative of an underrepresented body type in magazines, the women featured in French Glamour are also beautiful and representative of an even more under-represented body type, which is to say: the average size of the average American woman.

And while, yes, Glamour did feature women of a variety of larger (and smaller) sizes inside their magazine, it wasn’t, as Jezebel calls it, the “splashy, big-picture treatment” the women of French Glamour received.

The Curvy Fashionista, via Jezebel, points out that French Glamour is just one of a group of international magazines — including Italian Vogue and French Elle — which are focusing on a real-life plus-size perspective.

Also, we love that they called the spread, “Vive Les Fatshionistas! Those French, so clever.