W hen you attend a fashion show your name will often be written out in elaborate cursive on a small card to denote your place. Imagine these cards neatly lined along a narrow bench. There are about 3in, if you are lucky, on either side of the card.
Usually, especially in Milan and Paris, they are comically close to each other. As someone whose bottom often takes up a couple of allocated spaces, my career as a fashion editor on the front row has always been a tight fit. Vanishingly few of my peers experience this.
It is true that the fashion industry is fatphobic, but I hadn’t really thought this had affected my career much. Except perhaps when I look back and recall my Cyrano de Balenciaga era, when an editor made me ghost write first-person features to run alongside pictures of my thinner colleague proffering advice on how to get dressed. There was also the time, when applying for a job, that I was asked to send pictures of myself “in a few looks”, rather than samples of my work.
I didn’t get an interview. They hired a skinny blonde..
