I was 25 years old when I saw Vogue Italia’s June 2011 issue. On its cover: Candice Huffine, Robyn Lawley, and Tara Lynn—three of the top plus-size models at the time—wearing black lingerie. Inside the magazine: the boudoir-style photoshoot, where model Marquita Pring was also featured. The brazen sexuality was palpable. In all my years of reading mainstream women’s magazines, I’d never seen anything like it. Four unapologetically curvy women were on the pages of Vogue, shot by Steven Meisel—the same photographer to work with Madonna, Linda Evangelista, and Kate Moss. That Meisel cover felt like an exclusive party that my size-16 self might actually get invited to.
Growing up, I was always in love with fashion yet was always made painfully aware that I didn’t have the right “look” for it. This was implied by omission. Yes, I’d seen plus-size women in ads for matronly stores at the mall or as a punchline in movies, but I’d never seen them anywhere particularly inspiring. When visibility did exist in fashion, I felt it was for provocation, like Crystal Renn’s headline-getting appearance on Jean Paul Gaultier’s 2005 runway or Karl Lagerfeld’s seemingly convenient 2009 love affair with The Gossip’s plus-size front woman Beth Ditto. The same Karl Lagerfeld who, that same year, said, “No one wants to see curvy women” on the catwalk.
Eight years later, I’ve seen progress: Ashley Graham on the cover of Vogue in 2017, a whopping 208 curve appearances clocked during the spring 2018 New York Fashion Week shows, and Lizzo becoming a bonafide style star, to name a few examples. But this progress was particularly visible when I walked on the set of a Glamour shoot and saw five remarkably striking curvy models getting ready to appear on the cover wearing the same designer clothes any other model would wear. No lingerie, no swimsuits, no shock value.
Seynabou Cissé, Iskra Lawrence, Alessandra Garcia Lorido, Yvonne Simone, and Solange van Doorn are powerful, ambitious, and of course, beautiful. But unlike the group that inspired the original supermodel phenomenon of the 1980s and 90s, the new crop are all a size 12 and above. They represent Senegal, England, and the Oneida Nation. They’re immigrants and mixed race. They’re accidental activists and eating-disorder-awareness advocates. They have professional backgrounds in tech and health sciences. Together they’re ascending not just as curve models, but as supermodels for a new age. The New Supers, if you will.