Are things changing in the fashion industry? Maybe, possibly, hopefully!

Are shifting attitudes in body image the reason curve models are on the rise? Glamour thinks so...

There's a Reason You're Seeing More Curvy Models in Mass-Market Fashion Campaigns

BY ANDREA CHENG

For what feels like forever, the fashion industry ran on a platform of exclusivity, granting entry to a select few by perpetuating an expectation of beauty that can be met by only a certain type of woman: tall, skinny, blond. White. But you probably know this already—you felt it when you flipped through a magazine as an impressionable preteen, or when you put on the TV, or when you passed by any form of advertisement. And after years of blaming the media, of finger-pointing body-altering tools like Photoshop, of seeing only a single body type represented on the runway, finally--finally!—change is starting to manifest. Now it's not uncommon to spot curvy models in commercial fashion campaigns.

About time, right?

Chadrian McKnight, who’s been the casting director of House Casting (a company owned by Milk Group) for eight years, says once 2017 hit, a switch flipped in terms of the mass-market clients that would come in demanding curvy and racially diverse models to front their campaigns. “It felt like it happened literally on January 1,” he says. “A hairdresser friend of mine noticed it earlier, but on my end, we weren’t casting for curvy models in big commercials until this year. It came as a shock—because there was a major push.”

That demand, McKnight says, caused leading modeling agencies to scramble to diversify their boards, while “the agents who already had a solid curve roster were cleaning up—those girls were working so much, but they couldn’t be at two places at once.” He’s talking about places like Natural Model Management, a health-conscious boutique curve agency that McKnight has worked with to place plus models in national commercials and campaigns. To illustrate this substantial spike: A single plus model who would normally land one gig a year booked more than eight jobs within the last four months.

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