The fight to make fashion more inclusive and diverse is an ongoing struggle. This September, many fashion magazines showed signs of progress by featuring more black models on their covers—eight in total—than ever before. However, these magazines are still guilty of exclusively casting models that are very thin, Huffington Post reports.
Huffington Post combed through a handful of fashion magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Elle, Harper's Bazaar, InStyle, Marie Claire, Vogue, and W, without finding a single plus-size model.
The average waist size of women aged 20 and older is 37.5 inches, according to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, which would qualify as plus-size at every major retailer. This only makes fashion magazines' lack of plus-size models that much more preposterous because they failed to cast even one model who was in-line with an average American.
This past year has not been kind to plus-size women or models. While the fashion industry has tried to become more inclusive, attempts by Calvin Klein, which tried to advertise a size-10 model as "plus-size," have fallen flat. Elsewhere, retailers, such as Wal-Mart and one Asian retailer, have advertised plus-size products in incredibly offensive ways.
