I spent most of my adolescence with a painful, permanent indentation in my belly, the result of squeezing into jeans that were too tight for me, the button pressing angrily into tender flesh. At 13 I was already wearing the largest size available in the teens section of most of the local stores in Malaysia. By 17 I was wearing the largest available size for adults. At school, in the standard blue pinafores all Malaysian public school girls wore, I felt suffocated; the waist was always too tight. Over the years I learned how to sew just so I could unstitch the pre-sewn clasp and move it to expand the waistband, but even then I would come home at the end of the school day with red welts on my skin from the pinafore digging into me. Outside school, at the mall, other girls wore crop tops to expose defined abs; my tops were cropped because they simply didn’t cover my stomach. As a fat young person, it was always implied that my sartorial options would be limited. It was decreed, by society and by every overbearing aunty in my life, that I would be limited to loose black T-shirts, baggy dark-colored bottoms, and tankini swimsuits—the kind with frilly skirts to hide the offense of having thighs.
In the 2010s, as a 20-something millennial exhausted by the tortures of low-rise jeans, I, like many big girls my age, embraced the body-positivity movement. We followed plus-size fashion bloggers, embraced our curves, urged retailers to begin stocking more plus-size fashion. These changes have continued to push the industry to evolve—in 2021 the women’s plus-size market accounted for almost one fifth of women’s apparel sales in the US. Women above a size 14 have gone on to become successful and visible, something inconceivable when I was growing up. Ashley Graham, a size 16 host and model, continues to walk on runways and has hosted major red carpets. Paloma Elsesser, an African American and Swiss Chilean plus-size model, has become the face of a revitalized and more inclusive Victoria’s Secret. Barbie Ferreira, who at 200-plus pounds would previously only be cast as a fat sidekick, has played the stylish Kat on the acclaimed television show Euphoria. Plus-size talents have finally started making their way into film and television without being the butt of the joke.
In the same years that these women were gaining visibility, I responded to an open casting call from fashion blogger Nicolette Mason, who was looking for a diverse group of plus-size women to model for a segment on national television about fall fashions for the plus-size woman. When the producer from NBC’s Today reached out to me, I leaped into action. I may have been a broke 20-something working as a low-level associate at a PR firm, but it felt like a truly once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I flew across the country, at my own expense, from my then home in San Francisco to New York. I crashed on a friend’s couch. I tried not to think about how I would make the rent that month after incurring this additional expense. I was vibrating with excitement, but I kept it a secret from my coworkers, didn’t even take the day off, praying that no one would schedule any kind of emergency client call while I was getting ready. The NBC town car picked me up in pitch-black darkness for my early call time.
On the Today set, I was surprised at how small the platform was. I worried I would fall off. For a brief five-minute segment, I, alongside four other plus-size women, paraded out in front of host Savannah Guthrie as she and Mason discussed plus-size fashion for the fall live for millions of viewers. The result wasn’t ideal for my television debut: My makeup was terrible, my eyebrows were much too short, and clad in a pair of too-big heels and a leather dress inexplicably labeled “military trend,” my walk was uneven. Still, I was beside myself: I, a fat woman who had spent her life hiding within her clothes, was now getting to model aspirational clothing for all of America. For years afterward, I considered this one of the best moments in my life. But still I kept it a private triumph—I limited the audience on my Facebook post and never even saved the video clip, which has since disappeared on the internet. It all felt illicit, impermissible. Fashion was still not for big girls like me.