ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, March 5, 1997 TAG: 9703050062
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ROBIN GIVHAN THE WASHINGTON POST
It is a sweet kind of revenge, showing someone up on his own turf. The editors of the new Mode magazine and the author of ``Well Rounded'' have proved to the fashion industry that there is much truth to the cliche: Style has no size.
The premiere issue of Mode, which landed on newsstands last week, is aimed at women size 12 and above. It gracefully embraces large thighs, full hips, generous cleavage and wide rear ends.
The photography is slick, creative and artistic. It offers the requisite fantasy attire. But there are no diet tips. And every garment featured, promise the editors, is available up to at least a size 18.
The impetus for the magazine was numerical. According to Women's Wear Daily, approximately half of American women wear a size 12 or larger. Size 14 is the average.
``What inspired us to do this was there were 60 million women out there without a fashion magazine to serve their needs,'' says co-editor Julie Lewit-Nirenberg, who was founding publisher of New York Woman and Mirabella and was most recently publisher of Mademoiselle.
Like any other fashion magazine, Mode is filled with frothy stories about the colors of the season, quotes from sassy women, makeup tips and photographs of up-to-the-minute styles.
``We wanted to literally do a fashion and beauty magazine that was not size-specific,'' says co-editor Nancy Nadler DeWinter, who directed the launch of American Marie Claire and has also had top posts at Glamour, Vogue and Esquire.
What makes the magazine remarkable is its choice of models: gorgeous women with a little meat on their bones. These are not the size 14s and 16s from next door; these are professional models who know how to make the most of a camera angle, play up their best features and exude confidence no matter what they're wearing or what's showing.
``Realistic size and real people are two very different things,'' DeWinter says.
The biggest hurdle in launching the magazine, according to the editors, was not enticing advertisers, which include Dana Buchman, Avon, Liz Claiborne, Revlon and national department stores, but getting fashion professionals - for whom the waif was momentarily the ideal - to embrace the Mode vision.
``In the beginning, we had trouble with some of the photographers not thinking they wanted to shoot what they called `plus-size' models,'' DeWinter says.
So the magazine turned off the beaten track to find photographers who weren't the darlings of the traditional fashion magazines. One of the more striking features in this issue is on actress Fredi Walker of the Broadway musical ``Rent,'' photographed by Tony Duran.
She appears as a lusty, sexy, voluptuous diva leaping through the air - her bare bottom visible as her velvet skirt flies up around her waist. And she is also a soft, larger-than-life tease in a silk, flapper-style dress with its curtain of fringe barely covering her ample legs.
``She gives off this confidence,'' DeWinter says. ``When she walks in the door, she owns the room.''
That Mode even exists speaks to the changes in the way manufacturers are thinking of large women and the ways in which these women think about themselves. Labels such as Marina Rinaldi, Dana Buchman and Emanuel Woman by Emanuel Ungaro offer plus-size women the sort of sophisticated fashion that wasn't available to them 10 years ago.
And people such as plus-size model and ``Well Rounded'' author Catherine Lippincott, who espouses a love-yourself-as-you-are philosophy, encourage large women to find their style now, not after keeping a promise to lose weight.
In her new book Lippincott, who lives in Washington, D.C., encourages women to muster their self-esteem and realize that they can have style as a size 24 as well as a size 6.
``Women sit down and talk about their inadequacies first,'' she says. ``Men were programmed to talk about their attributes first.''
Lippincott, sitting at a dainty tea table in a Washington hotel, is a curvaceous size 16 dressed in luscious black velvet. She spent years working in the fashion industry in New York.
She watched designer friends sketch beautiful clothes that went up only to size 12. She tried all the diets. She felt bad about her weight for years. ``I kept telling myself that all these great things would start happening to me that I thought couldn't happen until I was thin.'' Then she realized that life was already wonderful - the only sorrow was her weight obsession.
``I don't judge my self-worth based on my weight,'' she says. ``I used to.''
Lippincott's book has a touchy-feely bent, but she also has a lot of bottom-line advice.
``Big people get looked at because of their size. They take up more space. You have to decide: Are you going to be a diva or a dud?'' Lippincott says.
Lippincott doesn't refrain from tossing around adjectives such as ``big,'' ``fat,'' ``large.'' She emphasizes that plus-size women have some special needs. ``Big thighs rub together,'' she says. ``We need reinforced seams. ... We hold more body heat. We need fabrics with breathability.''
No need to be embarrassed. Be practical; be a guerilla consumer.
No one is saying that the fashion industry is edging closer to considering a size 12 the standard, as opposed to a size 6 or 8. But with Lippincott and others championing the psychological and fashion needs of plus-size women, and with Mode magazine showing them as glamorous and stylish, the industry will be hard-pressed - and financially foolhardy - not to deliver the goods.
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