What The Fashion – Plus Size Beauty

Riley Hartwell <br\> Features Editor
Riley Hartwell Features Editor

Turn on the television and 9 out of 10 times you’ll see some major T & A from the Victoria Secret commercials to other various swimsuit and lingerie commercials. So why is it that in recent news Fox and ABC has banned a certain Lane Bryant lingerie commercial?

Well, unfortunately we live in a world where a size 8 is considered plus size and a double 0 should be the norm, beautiful, and most of all acceptable for viewers.

The Lane Bryant commercial that was banned from ABC and Fox primetime television features a beautiful plus size (more like normal size) woman strutting around in various bras and little night gowns. The commercial was set to air during American Idol on Fox and during Dancing with the Stars on ABC and both networks decided to put the kibosh on airing the “racy” commercial.

This coming from the same networks that show scantily clad dancers shaking it on Dancing with the Stars and Desperate Housewives sexing it up for every guy on the block – wonderful.

Yeah,  just about every week Dancing with the Stars shows Bay Watch babe Pam Anderson and her Double D’s hanging out while she dances seductively, Pussycat doll  Nicole Scherzinger in next to nothing doing the Rumba, and a slow motion shot of T.V. personality  Niecy Nashes’s “jiggly parts” bouncing about.

Really classy, NBC.

So really let’s ban this commercial trying to sell bras for real women with a real woman modeling them because she has a little more cleavage than the average starving Victoria Secret model. News flash people, this is what real women look like.

And let’s not start to regress from what little progress we’ve already made regarding the matter. It’s taken this long for plus size women to be successful in the fashion industry and they’ve really been working hard to change the norm that these tiny fashion models and designers are creating. Banning this Lane Bryant commercial is taking society three steps back from how far we’ve come with trying to decrease the body image issues young women have today.

The model, Ashley Graham, in this commercial is telling girls everywhere to be beautiful and comfortable in their skin and showing girls that women with a “little extra”, as Graham put it, are normal and Fox and NBC are censoring this empowering moment.

These networks are just as bad as the designers that only cast rail thin models that we see pouting down the catwalk. Recently in Australia, the plus size models have stood up for themselves and normal women everywhere and protested the Rosemount Australian Fashion Week after being completely shut out and not included in any of the individual designer’s shows. Australia is again joining NBC and FOX by taking away the progress they made last year with their use of 18 plus size models and completely leaving them out.