Photo by Knape

In the summer of 2020, for all the obvious reasons, I didn’t have much to look forward to—aside from the packages of clothes.

Online shopping was a popular crutch during the harsh days of COVID-19 restrictions, but I felt adamant that my situation was different. I was nothing like the social media influencers showing off their massive hauls to impressionable followers. These women were ordering much more clothing than I was, much more often. They were rich, they were excessive—and they were skinny.

After being what clothing companies nonsensically refer to as straight sized during my youth, I had gained weight in my late teens, and spent years grappling with the reality that this was my new body. I clung to my old wardrobe until the buttons on my blouses popped off and my leggings were worn out to the point I had to keep my legs crossed to hide the bare skin of my thighs peeking through. Most of the stores within my budget went up to only an extra large; and on the rare occasion a piece fit me, it would come with the condition that I refrain from lifting my arms above my head, bending down, or zipping it all the way up. Every single shopping trip involved crying tears of embarrassment in the privacy of the dressing room.

My first foray into the world of ecommerce fast fashion started early on in the pandemic with the long overdue acknowledgement that my body needed plus-size clothing, but quickly snowballed to replacing my entire wardrobe within the course of a few months. It’s impossible to look back at my fast-fashion era as anything more than a cringey, isolation-induced abandonment of my personal values, but it didn’t feel that way in the moment. I knew that buying fast fashion was wrong, but the packages arriving at my door every few weeks offered me respite from the shame I felt shopping in person. For a while, that felt something like empowerment.

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Corporate propaganda videos are rarely as memeable as Dani Carbonari’s. Known to her hundreds of thousands of TikTok followers as Dani DMC, Carbonari is a self-proclaimed “confidence activist” whose online identity strongly hinges upon her status as a fat woman. In 2023, her posts about a sponsored trip to China to explore the facilities of the fast-fashion retailer Shein made her the main character of the Internet, prompting her fervent defence of the company.

In a now-deleted video, Carbonari claimed that the company’s detractors were motivated by xenophobia, as Shein is a Chinese-owned corporation. This claim completely ignores two very important points. As of 2022, the company outsells brick-and-mortar fast-fashion empires like Zara, Old Navy and H&M, and makes up nearly one-fifth of the global fast-fashion market, according to one analysis. If Shein is being targeted, it’s for their objectively singular impact, not their country of origin. Secondly, many, if not most, of Shein’s exploited workers are also Chinese, meaning criticisms of the company’s labour practices are in defence of Chinese workers, rather than xenophobically targeting them.

Carbonari’s co-opting of social justice language didn’t stop there. In another video defending her choice to partner with the company, she described the challenges she had faced as a plus-size content creator, and credited Shein for valuing their partnership and offering a wide range of plus sizes, admittedly a rarity in the fashion industry.

When Teresa Giudice of The Real Housewives of New Jersey fame and three of her daughters received backlash for partnering with Shein on a curated collection, a representative of the family told media an eerily similar narrative, calling the collaboration “size-inclusive” and “made to amplify the voices and creativity of young women.” (Teresa is also a convicted fraudster who has been criticized for marketing weight loss pills, although that’s beside the point).

It’s easy to see how this messaging appeals to plus-size shoppers, who have dealt with a lifetime of being publicly shunned by fashion’s most powerful voices, from Karl Lagerfeld to former Abercrombie & Fitch CEO Mike Jeffries to Lululemon founder Chip Wilson. The majority of women in Canada are not so-called straight sized, and most U.S. women wear at least a size 16 (although the arbitrary sizing of clothing is often its own headache for shoppers to navigate), and fast-fashion brands have taken note of this underserved demographic.

At the same time, it can’t be ignored that fast fashion is responsible for up to 10 percent of global carbon emissions, according to the United Nations, and generally fails to pay its factory workforce a living wage. From top to bottom, Shein (and other fast fashion brands such as ASOS, Zaful, Temu and Fashion Nova) is built on exploitation. The evidence that the industry exploits garment workers, our environment, and independent designers is insurmountable.

When influencers and celebrities jump to defend these brands in the name of body inclusion, they exploit plus-size customers too. They essentially use us, a genuinely marginalized demographic, as a shield from criticism, not unlike the practice of pinkwashing. If the term fatwashing takes off in the next few years (in relation to clothing, not the niche cocktail-making technique), remember you heard it here first.

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According to Heather Govender, an environmental educator with the Hamilton-based non-profit Green Venture, the low-quality nature of fast fashion is about more than cutting corners—it’s also about maximizing profit in the long run. “They’re made quickly and cheaply so that people will buy lots and then throw them out and buy more and more,” she explains.

Govender says that fast-fashion items continue to cause environmental damage throughout their life cycle, even if they don’t end up in a landfill. Due to the plastic fibres used in most fast-fashion clothing, every laundry day produces microplastics that end up being released into the ocean.

If you struggle to find clothes for any reason—whether it be your size, location, budget or anything else—it can be easy to tell yourself that fast fashion is complicated. The more I learned about the industry, however, the more it feels like the only complicated thing about it is how layered and multifaceted its societal harms are. Its entire business model requires a detached, nihilistic worldview—a belief that the planet is melting and there’s nothing we can do to stop it; that every piece of clothing everywhere involved exploitation, so it doesn’t really matter where you shop; that the best you can do in this broken world is find a little bit of happiness in poorly stitched polyester and free shipping.

While fully acknowledging that I once bought into this nonsense, I know now that everyone, including the plus-size community, deserves better than clothes that contain lead and other toxins. We deserve better than to be “included” while simultaneously being othered—log onto any major fast fashion retailer and you’ll find the plus-size section is neatly separated from “Women” and “Men,” insinuating that our size somehow sets us apart from everyone else. We deserve better than fast fashion, and fortunately for us, fat organizers already know this, and are creating budget-friendly, community oriented alternatives to the status quo.

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It’s estimated that at least 80 billion garments are produced each year, yet any fat person can tell you how difficult it is to find clothing that fits. Eco-conscious influencers are quick to recommend thrifting as a way to save money and be gentle to the environment, but for larger people, the pickings are slim. To make matters worse, evidence indicates that weight bias can sharpen the already steep wage gap that women experience in the workplace, leaving shoppers desperate for both options that fit and that they can afford. In my experience, the plus-size selection in thrift stores is particularly minimal, which has always struck me as odd considering the sheer volume of clothing that already exists. This may be changing, though.

Brenna Strohschein, a co-owner of Fat Sisters Vintage, a plus-size consignment shop that recently opened in Victoria, B.C., shares some of her insights into the fraught relationship between plus-size people and donating clothes. “Plus-size folks are hoarding [clothes], because we have a scarcity mentality that we will never find it again,” Strohschein says. “It’s so hard to find a quality piece, so we can never let it go.”

According to Strohschein, creating a safe, welcoming space for plus-size shoppers has helped encourage consignments. To say the least, opening the store has been an emotional process. Every day, customers cry when they discover the abundance of plus-size options. Some tell Strohschein that they finally have the opportunity to explore their personal style, rather than taking a “whatever fits me” approach to shopping.

This hit home for me. I had gone from wearing threadbare clothes from my high school Tumblr era to having infinite options available at my fingertips, and my strategy was to try anything and everything. Instead of allowing me to discover my own style, fast fashion had only encouraged me to chase microtrends and, for the first time in years, fit in with the crowd. The truth is, I still don’t know how to tell the clothes I love from the clothes I’m just relieved to know fit me.

Strohschein’s shop is no accident: she, too, has struggled to find professionally appropriate clothing in her size, leading to fears that any perceived sloppiness would be attributed to her weight. Stories like these are why even well-educated, socially conscious fat people find the allure of fast fashion hard to resist. Nobody likes to wear ill-fitting or unstylish clothes, but the stakes are different for fat people. Too many people already assume that fat people are lazy and unprofessional, leaving many looking to the massive inventories of fast-fashion retailers for a wardrobe that will challenge rather than reaffirm these preconceived notions. The cruel irony is that, while fast-fashion giants might have office-friendly blazers and slacks, the poor quality often leaves many people unable to truly look and feel put together, and in a constant cycle of trying to shop their way out of fat discrimination.

The community efforts to combat fast fashion don’t stop at thrifting, though. Isobel Bemrose-Fetter and Heather Glasgow are the co-founders of the YVR Fat Clothing Swap in Vancouver, a sustainable initiative that aims to dismantle the shame that often comes with occupying a fat body. “We’re about bodies, and seeing bodies and normalizing them—let’s have them be seen,” Bemrose-Fetter said of the swap’s efforts to normalize fatness. “Bodies are inherently neutral.”

Of course, meeting a community’s needs is always an ongoing process. Both the YVR Fat Clothing Swap and Fat Sisters Vintage are actively involved in expanding the options for superfat people, who often face additional barriers when searching for clothing. Govender, who works on a twice-yearly clothing swap for all sizes, says that her organization is also continually looking for new ways to encourage plus-size participation.

Sustainable fashion brands are also slowly catching up and increasing their plus-size offerings. As budget is still a top concern for me, my primary strategy to curb consumption has been to take care of my current wardrobe rather than search for ethical options, but I’ve still stumbled upon resources that can help people of all sizes shop according to their own values. For example, a $2 (U.S.) digital guide from L.A.-based stylist Lakyn has helped me find sustainable brands that cater to a diverse range of sizes and budgets.

Clearly, the fat community has been hard at work to find ethical alternatives to fast fashion. That makes it all the more disgusting to hear the language of fat liberation being twisted by influencers and B-list celebrities to defend multibillion-dollar companies. Fatphobia has shaped my life in so many ways, and I’m still on a journey to get out from under its grip. I can confidently say, however, that indulging in fast fashion hauls won’t be a part of this journey—even if the alternatives do require a little more work.

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While consignment and clothing swaps might not be accessible for everyone, there are plenty of small acts we can take to get us on the right path. For those still looking for a fat community, Glasgow says that there can be power in starting small. “Even if it’s you and two other people and you’re like, let’s swap clothes and be fat together … that’s really all you need. You don’t really need a lot of pre-established community to start building.”

When I think back to the days I spent in my room, trying on clothes all alone, I realize that the only thing fast fashion ever offered me was another form of isolation, a new way to hide from a world that didn’t want me.

Rejecting fast fashion can be scary as a fat person. It means rejecting a scarcity mentality that tells us we need as much as possible, whenever possible, because our resources are finite. But it also means embracing a community that’s eager to support us in finding what we need. It means remembering that our liberation is all tangled up with everyone else’s—we can never achieve fat liberation at the expense of environmental justice or the dignity of garment workers. It means deciding that we all deserve better.

Photo by Natilyn Photography

I am admittedly a formerly pretentious, insecure hater of all things popular, pastel, and mainstream. As a teenager I forced myself to sit down and read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, making long lists of Russian names, trying to keep complex plots straight that were honestly above my paygrade. Though I still think Anna Karenina is a deeply beautiful and sad story that any Ottessa Moshfegh fan would like, I clung to a highly curated, highbrow air that was intertwined with my own internalized misogyny and white supremacy. Me? Listen to pop music? Never. I only listened to indie music I unearthed from the depths of MySpace.

I dedicated myself to becoming “not like the other girls,” or more accurately, “not how I constructed the other girls to be.” I threw myself into what I saw as alternatives: teenage goth Sam with a dyed black pixie cut and eyeliner drawn down to the tops of my cheeks; emo Sam with layered teased hair and off-brand slip-on Vans; pretentious Sam reading Russian literature; and indie-music Sam, worshiping at the altar of the manic pixies. Even into my twenties and my first tastes of adulthood, I threw myself into various alt scenes, making sure my baby bangs were blunt and my distaste for “normies” even blunter. No matter where I landed on the alt spectrum, there were still women I compared myself to, both inside my circles and out. Yet regardless of what armour I was trying to encase myself in, I was wholly in a competition not against other women and girls, but against myself.

Throughout every phase, each carefully curated taste, I found genuine interests. I love getting lost in books; the screamo and emo music of the early aughts is my nostalgic homecalling; I made lifelong friends through arts and music scenes. Through all of this, I never let myself love what I actually love, because deep down I was too scared that if I stepped one toe outside of my imagined line, the fragile house of cards I had built for myself would topple to the ground and leave my true form revealed: a shy, chubby 12-year-old in slacks and a Walmart blouse.

This is not without nuance, and within my own journey there are multiple intersections of class, race, and gender privilege and oppression I both hold and face. Womanhood, in all its complexities, is constructed in ephemera and is a varied experience across communities. I, in my lived experience as a fair-skinned, cisgender Métis woman from rural Northern B.C., performed with the best of them in a theatre of public opinion.

As growing parts of our lives are lived through social media, we are all in some sort of death-knell competition where obsession with liking the right thing is the law and we are all our own jury and executioner. To put it simply: we love to hate. Being a hater is a tongue-in-cheek, relatable identity we slip into that provides us with shallow boundaries, shallow connections, and the idea of control in a world that feels like it’s slipping into chaos. Why rally against capitalism, colonialism, and crumbling Western democracy when we can all rally against Bethany and her ivory Stanley cup? Or point fingers at long lines of eager consumers lining up outside Target to buy the newest Stanley collab? We are all implicated under a crumbling colonial and capitalist empire, and it’s easier to point fingers at others than to look in our own backyards.

Now, before anyone gets the idea that I’m here to defend the harbingers of Christian Girl Autumn with their perfect Utah curl: I’m not. We need to challenge our consumption habits and the ways in which we are all media trained to think “me good, them bad.” Social media has given us a new gateway into fast-moving microtrends that tell us “x is out and y is in” on what feels like a near-weekly basis. Just as fast as the rise of the soft girls, we saw their downfall and the rise of the mob-wife aesthetic, which just happened to coincide with the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos. This is the gears of late-stage capitalism telling us to consume more.

Sure, influencers are showing us unobtainable lifestyles built on consumption, but these are small symptoms of much larger issues of systemic capitalism and hungry empire. It’s easier to look at individuals and see them as the problem than it is to look at the larger structures of oppression, the ways in which we are harmed, and the ways in which we harm.

Coastal grandma, vanilla girl, mob wife, and whatever new viral trend will pop up in the next five to 10 business days all suffer from the same suffocating delicate whiteness that erases the aesthetic and political history of many of these trends. Much of what is “new” today was created within Black and racialized communities. Think Hailey Bieber’s “brownie-glazed lips.” If you grew up around Black and brown women in the 1990s, you recognized this trend instantly. Yet, when these trends were stewarded by racialized people well before the rise of TikTok, they were met with racist backlash. Now, heralded by a new generation of young white women, they are trendy, and cosmetic colours better suited for deeper skin tones— which are already less available— are selling out as a result.

Critique is not hate. None of us are above critique, but we are all socially indoctrinated into thinking that we are better than one another based on the things we enjoy. Boycotting, speaking truth to ignored histories, and fighting against systemic injustices is not being a hater.

Lately, I’ve been trying to ask myself two questions before I throw myself into discourse:

Do I hate this thing everyone loves because I have solid critique or reason, or is it because I am projecting my anger and frustration on something innocuous?

If I hate it because I just don’t like it, do I need to share this publicly?

It feels like we’re in an era where individualist pressure to be “right” surpasses the need to organize along collective lines. Nothing we do is without critique, without us having to live our values, and identify where we need to be accountable. But what if we did this work without also fighting in stan death matches, defending multimillionaire celebrities who are never held to the same standards we hold each other to?

Recently, I’ve started letting myself openly love and enjoy the things I loved in secret: cheesy romance novels, action movies (ask me about the Fast & Furious franchise), all the indie folk you can imagine, and yes, I have a lovely teal Stanley cup. I’ve shed my near-pathological need to try to force myself to only read whatever is being lauded as The Literature of the season, apologize anytime I listen to music out loud insisting it’s only a guilty pleasure, or sit through long arty films that bore me to tears. It’s not that I don’t enjoy these things, but I’m getting far too old and far too exhausted to try and like the right things, to cultivate my personality around them.

If I’m being completely honest, in the last couple of years I’ve been relearning who I am and just letting my interests and desires lead my process. Who knew that I’d end up being a former snob now revelling in romantasy books about fairies and getting too caught up in reality TV dating competitions? Maybe it’s basic, laughed at by people who think they’re better because of the media and art they consume, but I’m learning how to have fun again. And yes, Titanic is my favourite movie, and I have an annual, nostalgia-fueled Twilight rewatch every year. When I was younger, I used to make jokes about basic girls, but deep down, I was a basic bitch with a yearning heart.

This is me officially retiring my hater hat. I simply cannot waste any more energy on what water bottle Midwest momfluencers are using. Sure, there are things I see and need to make jokes about, but I’ve found my people I can do that with—privately.

We are watching untold horrors unfold: genocide, climate collapse, the rise of fascism, and ever-increasing instability. If reading smut and drinking from a fancy water bottle gets you through the day, I love that for you. But let’s be accountable to each other so neither of us get lost in the hypocrisy of capitalism and white supremacy. Let’s hold ourselves to the same standards we hold each other to.

Photo courtesy Kid’s Stuff [Trucs d’enfants]

Gender-neutral clothing is a growing trend in Canadian fashion, and one that is trickling down to the wardrobes of the youngest Canadians.

From chains such as La Tuque, Quebec’s Aubainerie, to small businesses such as Vancouver’s Pley Clothes, options for parents looking to build their children a genderless closet are growing across the country. Brands appear to be thriving in Canada’s larger cities and fashion hubs, including Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto.

Ideas of gendered children’s clothing have been evolving since the 19th century, when pastel colours for children came into fashion. Some historians say the idea of “pink for girls, blue for boys” only fully solidified itself in the public sphere in the 1940s.

Now, it seems these old ideals of gendered colours are being given up in favour of attitudes toward clothing that allow for self-expression in any colour or style, regardless of gender.

The industry is still in its early stages and its numbers can fluctuate due to self-reporting among other factors. While there is not much information available about the value of the market in Canada, industry projections see the global market for genderless clothing reaching a worth of $3.2 billion (U.S.) by 2028. Even A-list celebrities such as Megan Fox and Zoe Saldaña are raising their children to wear what they want, without gender stereotypes.

“Colour, clothing, style—everything can be gender neutral. It’s really up to us as adults to see it differently,” says Mary-Jo Dorval, the designer behind the Montreal-based gender- neutral kids’ clothing line, Trucs d’enfants. “By not labelling my clothes it makes it easier for consumers to see it like that as well.”

Dorval began her business producing alternatives to the highly gendered clothing of the fast-fashion industry seven years ago. She said she was inspired by her friend’s difficulties in finding sustainable, locally made genderless clothing for their children. Her website is chock-full of orange, purple and green shirts, pants and overalls. Most items are made from a cotton or bamboo-modal blend, and are modelled by children of all ages displaying the clothes’ stretch and fit as they play or nap.

“I really wanted to break this ‘black- grey-beige’ idea we have of gender- neutral clothing,” Dorval adds. By giving children genderless clothing, Dorval says, she provides them with the option to choose how to express themselves.

This rings true for Markus Harwood- Jones, a YA author and PhD candidate in gender studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He says the decision to raise and dress his child, River, in a gender-open way was an easy one. He says he wants his child to be able to express themself now, and feel comfortable with their gender expression as they grow up, whoever they grow up to be.

“When they get older, if River is really butch, or really femme, or whatever, we want to just make sure that they have pictures that feel like, ‘oh, that’s me,’” Harwood-Jones says. His family often uses an analogy referencing starting babies on solid foods. “You don’t start your kid on solid foods on day one,” Harwood- Jones says. They want River to express their fashion sense as soon as they are developmentally ready for it, and provide River a wardrobe that helps them do just that.

Harwood-Jones adds that children show their preferences earlier than many would think. When River was six months old, Harwood-Jones, his husband and their co-parent would hold up onesies on the changing table so River could choose what they wanted to wear.

Now, at almost two years old, River takes the lead on shopping excursions, asking for purple dresses and tutus. Harwood-Jones says his family often thrifts clothing to keep costs low, but when they do buy new, they lean toward small businesses that are queer owned or gender neutral.

Dorval believes small businesses will continue to bear the torch of clothing designed for everyone once the mainstream sheen wears off. However, if parents want to ignore gender labels in big-box stores, she says they should go for it.

“You can buy a princess skirt for your little boy,” she says. “It doesn’t matter.”