Our girl Kelly Clarkson often comes under fire for being “overweight,” which I find très frustrating, since she’s one of the few real gals in the entire industry.  (Believe me, if faced with the choice between a happy Kelly or a miserable, starving Twig Actress, I’d choose Kelly everytime!)  There’s something refreshing about seeing her kick butt on stage, knowing that she didn’t spend the day nibbling on two carrot sticks and downing seven cups of coffee in a quest to keep the metabolism up.

Even the best of us have off days–it’s easy to get down about your weight when the fit of your jeans is out of sync with your goals or dreams.  But remember that we girls are not one-size-fits-all.  We’re short!  We’re tall!  We have big hips!  We have no hips!  Variety is the spice of life, after all, and your body is the only one you’ve got–so celebrate it!

Those chicks we see on magazine covers and on TV don’t exist in real life–even the most genuinely stunning of them are still airbrushed, glossed, primped, Spanxed, trained, starved, molded and styled like you wouldn’t believe.  (If you’ve never seen it, check out the famous Dove commercial Evolution for a quick primer on what really happens.)

“Even I don’t wake up looking like Cindy Crawford.” — Cindy Crawford

You’ve surely heard about the Vogue Italia issue that features only black models, which sold out and was promptly re-printed by Conde-Nast.  It’s been hailed as a landmark and had everybody buzzing, although I just read an interesting non-fawning take on it in the Guardian:

For although the melanin quotient has been dramatically upped (more than one non-white face in a fashion magazine is, true enough, a major change), glossy homogenisation is still the order of the day. Black models? Sure. But there’s not a “natural” or “kinky” in sight, indeed, barely even a mop of curly hair. This is black girls-as-white girls: all aquiline noses, large eyes, oval faces (bar the standard exception of “unusual” Alek Wek), hair coaxed into silky straightness or carefully turbaned away in shot after shot. As for “black”, it’s more latte than americano. Just in case even these carefully selected beauties fail to actually sell the stuff, the hefty advertisement content uses white models, as does the free runway guide.

Progress is progress, and I think it’s important to stop and acknowledge achievements like this–just as when, say, Glamour or Vogue publish their “body” issues that purport to celebrate women of all sizes.  But when we snap back the very next second to the tired old standard…you realize just how much ground remains to be covered.  Let’s not require magazine issues like this anymore: if editors and publishers would put models in their pages that reflected all real women (so, while, yes, some “real” women are skinny six-foot tall white girls, the majority of us don’t fit that mold in a myriad of ways), and not just as a publicity-savvy one-off, we wouldn’t need to hail it as a revolution.

Photo from People.com

The fold-out cover, featuring Liya Kebede, Sessilee Lopez, Jourdan Dunn and Naomi Campbell