Rosy-cheeked and curvy, Madame de St.-Maurice smiles complacently on visitors to the 80WSE Gallery at New York University. The subject of a late-18th-century portrait by Joseph Siffred Duplessis, she flaunts multiple chins, her fleshy arms and bosom becomingly veiled in a demi-sheer frock.
When the original canvas was exhibited, “it was praised for its truthfulness,” said Tracy Jenkins, the curatorial director of “Beyond Measure: Fashion and the Plus-Size Woman,” the new student exhibition showcasing the work. Sure the sitter was chubby. So what?
Flash-forward a couple of centuries, and Madame would as likely have been skewered, her frame regarded as an aesthetic, and perhaps even a moral, affront to polite society.
That assumption is at the heart of this small but affecting exhibition, one that encompasses photographs, mannequins, video and advertising imagery. Organized by graduate students in the costume studies program at N.Y.U.’s Steinhardt School, the show, which runs though Feb. 3, goes some way toward demonstrating that fat shaming, with roots burrowing deep into the 19th century, was, and remains, a freighted issue.
Portrayed in the popular postcards and ads of the late 19th and early 20th century as grotesque, unseemly and out of control, women of size are represented in the gallery by Nettie the Fat Girl, a sideshow attraction shown in an early-20th-century photograph as a bulbous, childlike creature, her tutu and inflated thighs all but bearing her aloft.
Today that image wouldn’t fly, supplanted, in the popular media at least, by “full figured” role models, among them the defiantly outsize performers Beth Ditto and Melissa McCarthy, Adele and the aggressively curvyTess Holliday, touted on the cover of Peoplelast spring as the first size-22 supermodel.
A tentative acceptance of full-figured models that dates from the early 1990s is highlighted in the exhibition by the emergence of Stella Ellis, known as the first large-size model, a divalike figure who strode Jean Paul Gaultier’s runway in 1992 and was featured in his ad campaign, billowy bosom exposed, hair piled high like an opera star’s.
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