Yesterday, I went out to buy food and got sidetracked (finally, I never did buy the food, so I have to do this today). Anyways, I was on trendy Mont-Royal street when I decided to enter the Aldo shoe store. Just as I entered, the song Big Girl You Are Beautiful by Mika starts playing. Now I suppose that they were just playing the album and it happened that it got to the song, but either way, no one just hit forward to the next song. :)

It would have been even better if Aldo had been selling wider-calf boots, but it's still an almost surreal experience. Of course, it would have been even more surreal in some skinny-size clothing store...

Video: It's Raining Men

Forget about the cover done a few years ago by a scary-looking Ginger Spice. Here's the original video for It's Raining Men, sung by The Weather Girls (who were 2 BBWs). Nowadays, it'd be unthinkable that a pop song, especially one about self-confidence women singing about their love of men, would be done by anyone who's fat in any way.

Then again, a mere few years passed before the pop music industry gave us Milli Vanelli. The official Milli Vanelli were eye candy. The real Milli Vanelli were 2 fat guys...

Montreal Fashion Week: No skinny girls, no under-16!

The organizers of next week's Montreal Fashion Week have announced that they're banning models showing signs of anorexia and models younger than 16 on their catwalk.

This is great news, but I hope this is only the first step. I'm still hoping that one day, organizers of Fashion Weeks will push for more diversity on the catwalk, encouraging designers to include larger models too. Obviously, the fashion world isn't made for the ordinary human being (look at how tall models are compared to the average person...), but not everyone is a size 0 either.

New Dove ad: Onslaught

It's interesting how, right after I posted the video for TLC's Unpretty, I read a blog entry about the new Dove ad, Onslaught, which shows all the beauty industry images that a young girl is exposed to, encouraging parents to talk to their daughters before the beauty industry does (and fucks up her self-esteem).

As it was pointed out elsewhere, yes, there are commercial reasons behind that ad (ie. selling beauty cream), but the ad's message is pretty powerful. If it helps even one girl to develop good self-esteem, then this ad was not made in vain.

Video: Unpretty, by TLC

I've always liked this video and song. I especially like the fat teen in the video, even though this is not covered in the song (well, you can always replace the bit "just a little skinny" by "just a little chubby"...) Nevertheless, this song remains as powerful today as it was 10 years ago, maybe even more so now that the use of Photoshop allows the creation of bodies that don't correspond to the person supposedly photographed (see most ads and magazine photo shoots, especially covers).

This is a great song to listen to on a "blah" body day...