Forgiving Fashion

The picture above is of Felicity Hayward with Anna Shillinglaw the founder of Milk Management a Plus model agency taken for the Times newspaper. I laugh when I type ‘plus’, I’m talking a size 12 upwards. That’s normal right ? yet we label and box people. Felicity is an advocate for loving exactly who you are. She’s received a lot of good and bad feedback on her insta posts. It’s difficult to believe that in this day and age, someone would feel the need to spit out their bile on someone who is changing the way we look at the female body.
Yet Fashion is a funny business, we buy clothes yet don’t consider the landfills. Mountainous clothes, unwanted, worn a few times and discarded. I’m guilty of the constant pleasure of buying clothes on a regular basis. Even buying ‘vintage look’ clothing because I don’t keep things long enough to age. In the 70″s if you wore the knees out in your jeans they’d be repaired with patches. Having a badge that said ‘Go’ stuck to the bum of my favourite jeans because I refused to stop wearing them.
Recently I’ve have got quite bored of the consistent vacuous hamster wheel of new fast fashion. Nothing is new, it’s updated, tweaked, a version of. To be honest I think I’ve constantly bought clothes to make myself feel better, to conform, to fit in society, to make my plus size 14 frame acceptable.
Now my purchases are more considered, treasured and kept. I’m not saying I’m not persuaded by the constant e-mail discounts but I’ve taken control and boy it feels good. X