Tara, Candice, & Robyn | Steven Meisel | Vogue Italia June 2011

Note that AOC has updated this editorial in 2020.

Italian Vogue editor Franca Sozzani has gone with curvaceous seduction in her June 2011 Steven Meisel cover editorial ‘Belle vere’ featuring Tara Lynn, Candice Huffine and Robyn Lawley.

Models.com says this is the first time voluptuous women have graced the cover since Sophie Dahl, circa 2000.

Sozzani’s comments may be more important than the images —  in a fashion world that doesn’t believe them for one moment:

“Why should these women slim down? Many of the women who have a few extra kilos are especially beautiful and also more feminine”.

Anne of Carversville is devoted to exploring a woman’s world: her ideas, her self-image, the messages fashion sends to women about body image, beauty standards and the expression of her sexuality.

In my extensive personal life experience and my career work on these topics, cultural, political and religious messages are always part of fashion’s impact on a woman’s identity.

Steven Meisel’s editorial, styled by Edward Enninful, are voluptuously beautiful, erotic in the style of Ellen von Unwerth and a gorgeous tribute to Candice Huffine, Tara-Lynn & Robyn Lawley.

These images also honor the millions of women worldwide with hips, a bosom and derriere who seek to feel beautiful and acknowledged in the business of fashion. Its influence so dominates our sense of self at every turn into the mirror that only a dedicated, fully secure and advanced spirit can stay steady under its influence.

Reducing the ideal woman to a size 0 from the more ‘voluptuous’ size 4-6 Turlington, Crawford, Campbell & Co 90s Supermodels is an interesting metaphor for today’s fashion world’s ideal woman.

Sozzani promises to incorporate a wider range of models into future Vogue Italia editorials. She launched Vogue Curvy online and has become a leader in fighting the pro anorexic website movement.Anne

Vogue Italia June 2011 Sogno di Donna by Steven Meisel

Update on 2011-06-06 21:31 by Anne

Franca Sozzani Hopes the Three Plus-Size Models on the Cover of Italian Vogue Make the Industry Reconsider Its Obsession with Teenagers. New York Magazine

Historically you haven’t featured many plus-size models in the magazine. Why are you doing this now?

I’m doing it now because I did this petition against the pro-anorexia websites, and this petition in a way is going up every day, because now 9,000 signed the petition, and most of them, the people anyway in the comments, they say, “Yes, you are doing this petition, but you only use skinny girls on the runway, in the magazines, so what do you want to teach us?” So I said, I will show you, I will use beautiful women — curvy. And so we did it because they all say Italian Vogue would never do it.

(Note from Anne: I am among the people who made this challenge to Franca Sozzani on her website fighting anorexia.)

But why haven’t you — and the rest of the fashion industry, for that matter — featured women who were plus-size with any regularity at all over the past couple of decades? It was skinny, skinny, skinny, and more skinny for so long. Even though plus-size girls are much more visible now than they had been, skinny models unquestionably dominate the casting circuit.

Because I think it’s a mentality. Let’s say, for example in the eighties, beauty was very sporty, very healthy, and we arrived at the supermodels: They had hips and butts, and they were really women, and that started this long wave of teenagers whose bodies are still not shaped, most of them. And immediately they thought the skinnier you are, the more beautiful. All in fashion are victims — the media, even myself, even the runways — of the beauty of the moment.