All Woman Project
A BODY DIVERSITY REVOLUTION
Are you aware of the sharp borders of the fashion industry? Think about it, how often do you see models of different shapes, ages or races? We all know the answer: the fashion industry is not that equitable. The lopsided part of the industry revealed itself once again with Charli Howard’s open letter to her ex-modeling agency. She broke silence over the industry’s impossible standards and moved to New York, creating the “All Women Project” with Clémentine Desseaux (a body-positive model-blogger) to flip the standards of beauty in the fashion industry and beyond. Now, it’s time to encourage diversity in fashion.
Beauty and self-confidence could be the keywords when you are working as a model. “Once you start loving your body, your beauty and confidence shines through,” say Howard and Desseaux. They learned to love their body. “Once you stop pressuring yourself to look aesthetically perfect, you start to see your body as something stronger and more powerful.”
“We all have parts of our bodies that are imperfect and that’s what makes us real.”
Howard and Desseaux add, “All body shapes and ethnicities deserve to be represented in fashion and in the media.” Starting from that point, they define All Woman Project: “ We feel that as a consumer, you deserve to feel represented by fashion. We wanted to create images where you could see yourself represented, whether a model shared your personality, body shape or ethnicity. We plan on making a lot more of these in the future so more girls feel represented.”
To get rid of the unrealistic expectations of the fashion industry, All Woman Project do their own campaign, #IAmAllWoman. The campaign is lead by an array of models – including Charli Howard, Clementine Desseaux, Leaf, Victoria Brito, Denise Bidot, Kamie Crawford, Iskra Lawrence, Barbie Ferriera, Elliott Sailors and Shivani Persad. Each picked because of their own vocal stance on body image and willingness on being photographed without getting retouched. “We looked for our model friends who spoke up about diversity in fashion to take part. Not only were they beautiful, but they had voices and opinions too. To us, that is beauty.”
The campaign emphasis realness. “We want girls to realize their ‘flaws’ are not flaws at all. Women are more similar than we actually think. We all have parts of our bodies that are imperfect and that’s what makes us real.” say Howard and Desseaux. They have courage to bring “equality” to the fashion industry and invite people to be open minded enough to change and to appreciate beauty in lots of different ways.
For Howard and Desseaux, being a woman means, “Being kind, strong, sensual, feminine & powerful.” They say, “We can do anything!” We just want to say “No doubt!” (loudly) and hope to see women to do the same.