From #effyourbeautystandards to #droptheplus, there has been an enormous amount of attention on body positivity when it comes to the female form. But what about when it comes to male beauty? Whether it’s the heroin chic hippies you see on the Saint Laurent catwalk or the ripped hunks staring back at you (if you’re lucky) at Astrid Andersen, to make it in the modelling world you’ve got to be LA fit or stick thin. Unless, that is, you’ve got your sights set on Rick Owens, in which case welcome to all the weird and wonderful. But even then, Rick Owens’ models are still pretty slim and kinda hot in a weird way.
Breaking pretty much every convention of beauty that fashion has previously upheld, major modelling agency One Management (home to Victoria’s Secret’s sexiest angels Bar Refaeli and Karolina Kurkova) has just signed Josh Ostrovsky aka The Fat Jew to their men’s board. At first the news came as a quite a shock, but then when you look at the number of curvaceous models, from Barbara Ferreira and Ashley Graham to Myla Dalbesio and Denise Bidot, who are killing it at the moment in mainstream fashion, it starts to make a lot more sense. Perhaps the fashion world is finally listening when it comes to exploring other ideals of beauty? “I just want to inspire people of my size and my gender to be comfortable in their own skin,” The Fat Jew told Style.com, “it’s OK to have a mediocre body and very, very high cholesterol, as long as you look great doing it.” Lol.
But, of course, what makes even more sense is his big fat online following. It’s no secret that to make it as a model in 2015, you have to have tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of followers. Who else can big brands flog their product to if not an army of consumers who would jump off a cliff if their favourite model told them to? “It’s an exciting time,” One Management’s celebrity division head Jeff Schnabolk told Style.com, “The internet allows for anyone with the skill to market themselves to break into arenas where they may not have previously been able to enter.” “He’s kind of a cultural phenomenon at the moment,” added One Management’s CEO, Scott Lipps, “it’s all about tapping into what’s going on with culture.” Whether this heralds the dawn of the plus size male model remains to be seen (here’s hoping!), but what it does signify is the increasingly shrewd minds of model agencies and consumer brands, ever more ruthless in their tapping into what the youth are into.