This weekend, Louise France, over at the Times Online profiled Gary Dakin, who manages all of the big name plus size models including Crystal Renn and Tara Lynn – the plus size supermodels.  Check out an exerpt from the article below and let us know what you think.  Are plus size models a trend?  Do you like that La Grande Dame only uses models size 14+? 

Tara Lynn, Plus Size Model, in FR Elle

Gary Dakin runs the plus-size division of Ford Models, one of the world’s best-known and oldest modelling agencies, which has represented everyone from Chanel Iman to Christy Turlington, Elle Macpherson to Alek Wek. On the plus size side of the business, Dakin’s biggest star is Crystal Renn, the world’s first size 14 supermodel, whose career famously took off as soon as she stopped starving herself and began eating again.

Dakin and Renn stand by the buffet table and encourage everyone to try the chocolate sponge with strawberry filling. Renn, the face of Evans, is slimmer than she was the first time we met six months ago, when she was about to publish her memoir, Hungry, but she would still be too large to be a mainstream model. Next to Renn’s big hair and long legs, Dakin looks somehow small in comparison.

“Do you often tell your models to eat?” I ask him. “Absolutely,” he replies. “Some of them have been struggling for so long they don’t know how to eat any more. They don’t know how not to be hungry.”

“Are they psychologically damaged when they come to you?” I wonder. “Yes,” he replies. “For lots of reasons.” When Renn met Dakin she had, by her own admission, almost died of anorexia. At another agency she had barely eaten and exercised manically in a bid to keep her weight down to model requirements. “Mostly there is relief. We’re not saying, ‘What’s your hip measurement?’ We’re like, ‘You gained a pound. You look great.’” Renn, who grew up not knowing who her father was, calls Dakin a father figure. When she got married four years ago he walked her down the aisle…

“A lot of people in the industry didn’t like these kinds of images,” says Dakin. “A lot. They said the girls looked cataloguey, or fat. This is bullshit. These girls look amazing.” In one shoot in the same magazine Crystal Renn was photographed opposite the size 4 model Jacquelyn Jablonski in exactly the same clothes. “Renn wiped the floor with her,” says Dakin. It’s true, Renn did look amazing – though she tells me later that most of the clothes did not do up at the back. (There’s an ongoing debate in the industry that samples – the clothes that designers send out ahead of time for models to pose in for fashion shoots – are too small, and are getting smaller. Tara Lynn tells me: “I spend half my life walking around in clothes with my bottom hanging out. All these gorgeous clothes and nothing fits me. No wonder they always shoot me naked.”)

“It’s been a struggle, for a long time,” he tells me. “Not so long ago people were dismissive. Nobody wanted to shoot the bigger girls. Nobody wanted to give it a go. This year has been the culmination of about ten years of not saying no.” Plus-size models were treated like provincial town football players who knock a ball about on Saturdays, especially since the early Nineties and the emergence of size 0 models. “I wouldn’t even tell people what division I was from. I’d call up the client and say, ‘I’m sending you this great girl!’ and when they’d seen her they would ring back. ‘But she’s plump! Why didn’t you tell us?’”

Plus-size models would be smuggled into catalogue shoots before the so-called straight-size girls turned up (it sounds incongruous but models are always called “girls”, whatever their age or size; it’s another way to keep them small-sounding) to do the glamorous, better-paid editorial shoots. “They had to come with their hair and make-up done already,” recalls Dakin. “No one wanted to clothe them. They were in and out before the straight-size girls got there. Everyone knew the big girls had to be photographed, but for the photographers it was the most boring work on earth. The magazines would not feature them. No one wanted to be the first.” Even catalogue companies who traditionally used plus-size models would sometimes balk at the thought of the bigger bodies and use smaller models, deliberately shooting them to look fatter.

Change really started last year. “I think people got fed up with seeing a rash of unhealthy women and the industry reacted to the unhealthy press they were getting,” says Dakin. “You can be a size 4, or a size 2, and be healthy, but unfortunately not everybody is.

The fashion industry, like any other, is not immune to the recession. Dakin believes that the downturn has forced fashion designers to wake up to the notion that the consumer buying power of women over size 14 far outweighs any other and that all sorts of women can make their clothes look good.

“The numbers are staggering,” says Dakin. “The industry traditionally thought that a woman who wants to lose 10lb is not going to invest in the right clothes. That’s not true.” But are high-end designers likely to embrace the trend? He thinks so. “Michelle Obama is not out looking to lose 10lb. She is a size 12/14. She still wants fashionable clothes. Ashley Graham [a size 18 plus-size model] does not want to be any smaller and she still wants to buy YSL. So give it to her – and not just the bags and the shoes. They actually want everything.” When I call Yves Saint Laurent, they tell me that apart from a few items, the biggest size they do is 14.

Robin Givhan, the fashion commentator who writes in the The Washington Post, says: “It’s hard to know what an acceptable size model is any more. How big is big enough?” Crystal Renn’s ultimate aim is to see plus-size models on a par with so-called straight-size models. “We are all models. Beautiful girls are beautiful girls. Size should not matter. Look in the street and there are all kinds of shapes and sizes. Why are we here? To get people to shop and feel good about themselves. Somehow that has been forgotten. Just because a girl is bigger, she can’t be inspiring? What kind of message is that? And it’s not even true.” Dakin agrees. “They are models, models, models. Stop talking about size.” I suspect we’re some way off yet – but as a curvy size 14, with a bosom, a bottom, and, yes, back fat, it is a seductive thought.

Tags: Crystal Renn, Gary Dakin, plus size models, Tara Lynn