DROPTHEPLUS
Writer: Georgina Grogan
I was scrolling through Twitter one sunny morning. I always start my day like this as I like to catch up with everything what’s happening in the plus size fashion and beauty worlds. Normally I see tweets about new and exciting campaigns, beauty bloggers sharing new releases but on this particular morning, I saw that a Plus Size clothing brand wanted to ‘drop the plus’.
As you can imagine it’s quite a startling and confusing thing to see.
Your entire business is making and selling clothes to plus size women, yet you don’t want to call it ‘plus size’ anymore? This particular brand actually invited bloggers to debate with them and create a 1000-2000 word post on why we should ‘Keep the Plus’ for a chance to win a £100 voucher. Now, being a blogger of 3+ years, this is the worst kind of link building there is. Blogging for the ‘chance’ to win something is very annoying and insulting, but that’s not why I’m so angry.
The term ‘plus size’ is how I would even find their company in the first place. It’s why I’d know that I could shop with them. It’s what I’d Google, it’s what their SEO is no doubt keyworded up for and yet, they want to drop the plus?
This particular company at events that I’ve personally seen them at, appear to have no actual fat people working for them. I say ‘appear’ as I don’t know who’s in their actual offices. This brand do not appear to have spoken to the many body positive influencers they work with before creating this campaign, and yet, they go ahead anyway. We’ve seen ‘drop the plus’ from many small fat, barely plus size models who in my opinion, are trying to make ‘plus size’ a negative term, when it fact it’s just a descriptive term that helps fat people find where to shop, find their sizes, find bloggers that look like them and recommend clothes. How could that ever be a bad thing?
What would we even type into Google if ‘plus size’ was abolished? ‘Bigger than 14 clothes’ – we can’t say that because no doubt they’d be a campaign against the word ‘bigger’. ‘Curvysexylicious’ has been suggested by Ashley Graham, which is obviously just ridiculous. When clothes are made in all sizes, at every single shop there is, then we can ‘drop the plus’, we wouldn’t need the ‘plus’ anymore. However, until then, ‘plus size’ is not a negative word, it’s not negative at all, and although most of the world thinks of it as that, we need to campaign and share our voices to stop people trying to get rid of it.
Online plus size influencers, 99.9% of which are against the plus, are in different place to most fat people and we know that. A lot of plus size people hate the term because they hate being fat, but we are slowly trying to change that. By breaking into mainstream media and getting out there with brands, we are trying to show that you can be fat, happy and proud of your body no matter what size. Although they might not be able to see that yet, we who have a voice against ‘dropping the plus’ will continue to shout about how much we need the term ‘plus size’ for as long as it takes.
There’s even been a Twitter page set up for it, @keeptheplus_!
