Why Fashion Culture Should Lose “In” Vs. “Out” Labels
Philosopher Kate Manne discusses how the fashion industry can face fatphobia.
Growing up in Australia, Kate Manne was one of three girls to join an all-boys’ school the year it integrated. She enrolled in order to study for the International Baccalaureate, and became close with a boy named Keiran. Keiran seemed to have a crush on her, and during one of their long phone calls, he rated her attractiveness on a scale of one to ten. Assigning her a seven, he explained, “[Y]ou have nice eyes and hair, but your figure leaves something to be desired.”
Manne was sixteen years old, and that comment stayed with her. “I, like many people, was so afraid of being sexually rejected for my fatness that I’d do almost anything to be smaller,” she writes in her new book Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia. Unshrinking is an excellent follow-up to her previous two books, 2017’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, and 2020’s Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women. She wrote Unshrinking because she found that she couldn’t explain misogyny without talking about anti-fat bias and fatphobia (terms she uses interchangeably). She writes in the book:
This is how misogyny works: take a hierarchy, any hierarchy, and use it to derogate a girl or woman. We value intelligence: so call her stupid, inane, clueless. We value rationality: so call her crazy and hysterical. We value maturity: so call her childish and irresponsible. We value morality: so call her a bad person. We value thinness: so call her fat and, implicitly or explicitly, ugly. We value sexual attractiveness: so make her out to be the kind of person whom no one could ever want.
Now an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell, Manne brings a unique perspective to the topic. She argues that the widely accepted principle that “ought implies can” tells us that the vast majority of fat people, studies of whom have shown can’t change their weight longterm, should not be expected or required to try to shrink themselves.
I talked to her about her book and how she views anti-fat bias in the context of the fashion industry today.
A lot of people have become more educated on anti-fat bias and diet culture in recent years thanks in part to the media fragmenting. We can read your book, we can subscribe to
on Substack, we can listen to the Maintenance Phase podcast. Given all these resources and voices, expanding on the work of early feminist bloggers, how do you think we’re doing generally when it comes to facing anti-fat bias?If you'd asked me a year ago, even six months ago, I would've said that I think we are making significant progress when it comes to at least raising awareness of anti-fat bias. There was a lot of mainstreaming of criticism of diet culture, which says dieting is the means to this end of having a non-fat body, which is what's desirable and valuable.
I think in the last year to six months, we've seen that some of the people who were at least superficially invested in the idea of body liberation or fat justice have been somewhat seduced by this allure of new weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. I don't begrudge any individual the choice to take these drugs, but what does strike me as worrying is this myth that they're going to make all fat people thin, and that fatness is no longer something that we have to deal with humanely. That's just simply not the case. We know that these drugs, by the most optimistic estimates, might take off 15 percent of someone’s starting weight. In one major trial of Wegovy, 60 percent of people took off 10 percent or more of their body weight. It's going to leave many people fat, even very fat. We're still going to have to deal with fat stigma and weight bias. But we're seeing a lot less momentum on this front because people think, well, we “solved this problem,” in scare quotes.
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How far along were you with this book when Ozempic and other semaglutides started becoming a big media story?
Pretty much at the end of it. It's a very odd room to be publishing into. My first book on misogyny hit the week of the #MeToo movement being publicized by Alyssa Milano. That was certainly a moment where people were very sympathetic to the topic. This is the opposite. It's publishing into a room where people are very skeptical of the topic.
What I see in the fashion industry, which I’ve been covering since 2008, is that every so often a designer will embrace “plus-size” models, or a “plus-size” model will come along and everyone will book her and celebrate her, and then her moment will fade. After the social justice movement of 2020, we saw more “plus-size” bodies on runways and in fashion images, but they’re fading away again. Meanwhile, magazines like Vogue, are tallying up the plus-size models on runways and saying designers aren’t doing enough. The industry seems to miss the point that inclusive runway shows won’t obliterate the fashion industry’s anti-fat bias – if you walked into a Chanel store right now, they wouldn’t be able to dress a fat body. What do you make of all this?
I don't follow fashion at all. But it sounds like what you're observing really mirrors that trend in the discourse of the kind of fragile detente that we've made with fat bodies. “Well, if we have to have fat people, then I guess…” But we don't we think of the fat body as something to be appreciated and enjoyed and valued just in and of itself. As I put it in the last chapter of the book, quoting a Twitter user a student directed me to, a fat body might make for dramatic designs in fashion, or you might be able to mold the body in interesting ways that make for cool artistic possibilities. I found that really interesting – the idea that people still weren't thinking about the fat body in more than a superficially accepting way. They certainly weren't thinking of it as something that might have distinctive value and visual interest and possibility.
The socioeconomic status piece of this is worth emphasizing. What we've seen for at least the last century is that as certain bodily states become harder to achieve and more expensive to achieve, which is certainly true of thinness, they become prized and seen as a marker of social caché. The fact that drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy tend to be very expensive without health insurance coverage, which remains rare at the moment, means that a very thin body in certain settings is a sign that you have the money to pay for a body that is especially lean.
I thought your discussion in the book about weight and class was really powerful, particularly as it relates to fashion. If anti-fat bias, which is rooted in racism, connotes class, that has a host of implications for how luxury consumers will view themselves and how luxury brands will market to those consumers. Can you explain further how anti-fat bias ties to capitalism?
I think it's really important to look just at how much money is being made by profiteering off people's insecurities, and by trying to make them do something that is very, very hard for many people to do, namely, to shrink themselves down to an arbitrary size that many of our bodies are not comfortable at. The global revenue for the weight-loss industry is projected to be $400 billion by 2030.
These bodily ideals genuinely determine someone's social capital in the world, and in the dating market, and in employment, and even in things like education and healthcare settings. So someone does have genuine financial incentives to invest in making her body conform, even if they're damaging to her time, energy, bank balance, and other interests, like what she might prefer to spend her time and wherewithal doing. The capitalist profiteering now is being exacerbated by these hugely profitable weight loss drugs. Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer of Ozempic and Wegovy, has [a market cap] that outstrips that of its native Denmark.
What should the fashion media’s role be in talking about anti-fat bias in the industry? Fashion is a very naval gaze-y industry. It's also very small and its members tend to be friends with one another, which I think is why the coverage within the industry tends to be self-congratulatory and strains to be critical.
I wonder how much journalism is being done in this area that highlights the anti-fat biases people are facing in the industry, and what kind of impact that might have on a new generation of particularly girls and women who are looking for fat representation, who are looking for bodies like theirs in the media and perhaps not seeing them.
This is just one example of a case where you saw a little bit of representation and immediate backlash, but Yumi Nu was one of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue cover models in 2022. It generated huge backlash from conservative commentators like Jordan Peterson. And it just highlighted how rare it is to see fat bodies celebrated and embraced.
I am in a way not that interested in beauty as such, but I think it's a no-brainer that fat bodies can be beautiful. The idea that media should be erasing and overlooking these bodies seems to be partly a way of missing out on fat talent.
“Could there be fashion without fashion culture, where we can view clothes as these wonderful forms of self-expression as well as simply covering our nakedness?”
You write in the book, “Fuck beauty culture, along with diet culture.” Do you fold fashion culture into that? I guess you could argue that no one really needs anything from the beauty industry, whereas the fashion industry makes clothing, which is a legitimate need.
People have misunderstood that line to mean fuck the idea of beauty, and we should never call anyone or anything beautiful. And I don't think that at all. I appreciate lots of beauty around me. The beauty culture aspect of it I find really pernicious. By that I mean, the comparative nature of it. Whereas I think looking at bodies in general, and women's bodies in particular, in a non-comparative, non-contrastive appreciative way is possible
I would say something similar about fashion. Could there be fashion without fashion culture, where we can view clothes as these wonderful forms of self-expression as well as simply covering our nakedness? And they can have amazing textures and fabrics and artistic and design possibilities that are really visually arresting and creatively impressive and all sorts of things. But the idea that there should be something inherently comparative about what's in and out, and who is cool or not, and the status aspects of it — my hope would be that divesting ourselves from that might be possible while still, maybe naïve as it sounds, loving clothes and fashion possibilities and the self-expression that can confer on people who want to engage in it.
What you’re articulating is what makes people so intrigued by things like fashion show seating charts and the Met Gala. It’s a physical manifestation of who is “in” or “out.”
That's something that just strikes me as straightforwardly pernicious. I may be missing some kind of value, but in general, if a practice is exclusionary, then it doesn't really help to try to make it a little bit more inclusive incrementally. It really just needs to be abolished.
And there, I'm drawing on the work of the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, who has looked at the way beauty standards are, in her view, designed to exclude Black women in the American context, given the power of misogynoir, which is the intersection of misogyny and anti-Black racism. For any readers who may not have heard that term, that was coined by Moya Bailey. In that context, Tressie McMillan Cottom's view is that beauty culture excludes by design in ways where we can't make it incrementally more just. Its exclusion is its purpose.
“I may be missing some kind of value, but in general, if a practice is exclusionary, then it doesn't really help to try to make it a little bit more inclusive incrementally. It really just needs to be abolished.”
You’re critical in the book of the body positivity movement, and I’d love for you to explain your thinking.
I wouldn't want to begrudge anyone the starting point of body positivity. And if it works for someone, then fantastic. But I do think it's been, to a large extent, co-opted by relatively thin white women on Instagram embracing a mere handful of cellulite or a couple of stretch marks after children. It's not a particularly radical view anymore.
There's an element of it that I find a bit oppressive — be positive about your body or else you are somehow participating in your own oppression, which feels like another standard against which I'm failing when I can't maintain positivity about my own body. That made me think about the option of body neutrality, where we maintain this purely neutral attitude towards our bodies. While that's closer to my own view, I feel like there's something a bit depressing about body neutrality. No praise is dispiriting, praising everything the same feels meaningless.
And then I began to wonder, why do we have to have one monolithic attitude towards our own bodies or that of others? Why do we have to think of bodies as something where I have a positive rating or a neutral attitude or a negative ranking? Why don't we cease to view bodies through this kind of comparative and critical lens, where if there are no numbers, then you don't need the positivity or neutrality?
The mantra that I adopted in this endeavor is my body is for me, your body is for you, and our perspective on our own bodies is the only one that matters. I call that body reflexivity. It's a shift in perspective on who our body is for, which has been the way I've found a kind of body peace and freedom.
Buy Unshrinking and follow Kate Manne on Substack at .
I just wanted to say thank you Amy for talking about body inclusivity and fatphobia; I really enjoyed your previous interviews with Virginia Sole-Smith and now, this interview too! As someone who's fat, it really matters that you talk with actual fat people about well, fat people! I feel like this is one of the few safe(r) spaces in fashion journalism.
Follow the money. The root of all these issues is profit and greed. Fashion, weight loss, food industry – they each thrive on trying to get the most amount of money out of each person. And, in many ways, are banking on individual “failure” to keep the money flowing. (Not stylish enough? Buy “this”) There is no reason why we need to judge or be judged, other than some arbitrary (near impossible) standard that is making someone money. Some interesting resources to check: CNN Sanjay Gupta’s Chasing Life podcast, with obesity specialist Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford who eschews BMI and target weights, and NY Times article about food marketing and food producers - Food Marketing in the Ozempic Age - The New York Times (nytimes.com)