The History of Fashion and Plus Size Women

As everyone has come to know BBW stands for the size positive phrase Big Beautiful Women. In the middle ages up until the 1920’s big beautiful body was associated with health and wealth. Men looked for these curvaceous beauties. Painters glorified them, rich men ogled them other women admired them. But in the 1920’s the flat chested no hips look like a boy look became popular.

Men seeking sex looked for women with no curves. Women with breasts often times bandaged them so that they appeared flat and could then wear the latest fashions. Women like Marlene Dietrich made the transformation from Rubenesque German starlet in Blue Angel to slinky slim and trim Hollywood star when she got to America. This was a period in America’s life when a big beautiful body was a sign of low class. Immigrants ate large hand cut bread sandwiches and fatty hearty meals Americans ate the manufactured consistently cut white bread with thin slices of bologna and thing not thin was not beautiful. Even architecture slimmed down cutting away all the gingerbread.

After WWII plus sized women were again revered. They appeared in fashion photographs, films, and paintings. But in the late 1960s Twiggy hit the runways. Her child like sweet big eyes and slender frame were all the rage and women began dieting to achieve the same look. To an older generation Twiggy looked like she was starving and needed to be fed. But perhaps that was part of the appeal, going against everything the older generation said and stood for. Women found that by extreme dieting they were able to wear bright and fashionable clothing where the options for plus size BBW was more tent like exaggerating the fat woman’s dimensions.

If men were doing any bbw sex searches they were very underground. BBW were largely ignored until the 1990s. Curvy women were tired of advertising agency idea of perfection. Now in the 2000s BBWs are seen as possibly being healthier than underweight women. Unfortunately the line still exits between BBW plus size and other women and as long as that distinction exists the diet and fashion mongers have an upper hand.