by Caroline Weber

Big girls, don't cry--the fashion world, long inimical to ladies of generous proportions, is finally changing to accommodate you. In so doing, it is making a salutary, if long overdue, shift away from its own suspect involvement in promoting normative, distorting expectations (and the attendant, sometimes deathly insecurities) about the acceptable size and shape of modern femininity. The writing, I am pleased to note, has been on the wall ever since September 2006, when Spain banned underweight models (as determined by body-mass index) from appearing in Fashion Week. Italy, Brazil, and India soon followed suit, and prominent designers--notwithstanding their reputation, wickedly parodied in the movie Zoolander, as chief culprits in the conspiracy against female plumpness--came out in support of the decision. Giorgio Armani declared it the fashion industry's duty to "work together against anorexia," while his compatriot, Valentino Garavani, denounced the ascendancy of size-zero mannequins in even harsher terms. "I think enough is enough with thin model," Valentino proclaimed after his most recent show in Paris. "Recently we have not been watching women on the catwalk, but a parade of skeletons." And although French industry leaders refused to regulate the weight or health of the women walking the Paris shows, Valentino emphasized that he had already taken matters into his own hands: "The models I used were far fleshier, more like normal women." Just last month, the fashion industry made another giant step toward "normalcy" when American Vogue placed the Rubenesque actress Jennifer Hudson on its cover, smilingly showing off cleavage so copious that it probably weighs more than the average, undernourished fashion waif. The image represented nothing less than "history in the making," according to Vogue's Andre Leon Talley, who styled Hudson for the shoot. At very least, and not insignificantly, it changed the history of the feminine beauty ideals disseminated by Vogue, the world's most influential fashion magazine. I call the move significant because, as recently as 1998, Talley's boss, the famously pencil-thin Anna Wintour, decreed that Oprah Winfrey could not be photographed for the magazine's cover without first shedding a significant amount of weight. In the issue featuring Hudson, Wintour adopted a refreshingly more expansive view, writing that "the question of body image is a current one, and I can't think of a more compelling and beautiful argument for the proposition that great fashion looks great on women of all sizes than the sight of Hudson in a Vera Wang dress on the red carpet." Surely such a statement caused the legendary clotheshorse and socialite Nan Kempner--who in December 2000 told W magazine, "I loathe fat people"--to roll over in her grave. But Kempner's time appears to have passed, symbolically as well as literally. By the time the Hudson cover hit newsstands, the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute had already wound down its retrospective on Kempner's fabled collection of designer clothing. This costly array of impossibly tiny jackets, suits, and gowns disappeared from the Institute's galleries, making way for a new retrospective on Paul Poiret, the French couturier remembered above all for having liberated women from the corset. To move from Kempner to Poiret is, excitingly, to recognize that fashion need not demand the punishing abnegation of the female flesh. Elegance and shapeliness can--and do--coexist, even in the Costume Institute's hallowed temple of chic. But if tastemakers have finally gotten the proverbial style memo, I fear that women at large, or larger women, have not yet taken it to heart. This month, the cover of American Vogue features a gaggle of slender, though not frighteningly scrawny, models, all dressed in variations on "the classic white shirt" that a trio of up-and-coming designers recently created for The Gap. Like any self-respecting fashion addict, I rushed to The Gap as soon as I heard about the shirts, which industry insiders are already hailing as instant collectibles. Upon viewing the confections in person, I was surprised to discover: (1) that the three designers, Thakoon, Doo Ri, and Rodarte, had cut them unusually generously (at an athletic, not skeletal, 5'11", I had to take a size small), and (2) that the shirts ran up to size XXL. In these ways, the designers clearly acknowledged that The Gap's customers exist in a broader range of shapes than do, for instance, the carefully starved devotees of Bergdorf's and Barneys, where it is virtually impossible to find anything bigger than a size 8--including in the Thakoon, Doo Ri, and Rodarte signature collections. Yet curvier women seem not to have figured out that these styles have been made precisely with them in mind--that the fashion world, which feminists have tirelessly and rightly accused of conspiring to make the fairer sex feel badly about themselves, is finally doing an about-face. When I brought my Gap selections to the cash register, the clerk ringing them up informed me: "These have got to be the last size smalls in all of New York. These and the extra-smalls all flew off the racks as soon as they hit the stores. All that's left are the extra-large sizes, which nobody seems to want." "Normal women" of the world, unite. You have shopping to do, and history to remake in your own image.