Advertisers Embrace a Plus-Size Reality

 Noted French designer Jean-Paul Gaultier launched an advertising campaign last week featuring plus-size model Crystal Renn.

A model displays a creation by Italian designer Elena Miro showing her fall-winter, 2007-2008 collection during fashion week in Milan Feb. 17, 2007. More recent campaigns are featuring curvier models but is it evidence of a trend?

(Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters)

Always on the cutting edge, Gaultier upped the ante by passing over a long list of the hottest models in favor of Renn. The move was heralded around the Fatosphere (look it up, it's real) as a major breakthrough in the growing acceptance of plus-size models.

Is this the beginning of a major shift in the way women are portrayed in advertising or an attempt to grab the attention of consumers in a down economy? More likely this is merely an accurate reflection of reality in a nation where 60 percent of women are overweight and in the market for size-14 clothing.

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Earlier this year, the Girl Scouts launched a campaign promoting positive body image using successful plus-size models as spokespeople. From the award-winning, long-running Dove Campaign for Real Beauty using real women of all sizes and ages, to recent photo spreads in major fashion magazines such as Vogue and V, heavier, curvier models are everywhere.

It is an interesting dilemma. On one hand we are a nation going the wrong way with respect to weight. Sixty percent of women are overweight and a third obese, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. We want to be healthy and we don't want to promote unhealthy lifestyles.

On the other hand, women are getting larger not just in weight but in height and the reality is, as women become more empowered, they are increasingly rejecting the notion they have to pursue what for many women is an unachievable size and shape.

So, in the face of an apparel industry that has contracted during the recession and the real facts from companies such as Alvanon -- a fitting company with the industry's largest body scan data-base indicating that the plus-size market is underserved -- is advertising beginning to relax the rules and embrace the new American physique?