Sunday links, 1/18/15

Fa(t)shion
-Take Nicolette Mason and GabiFresh’s survey and tell them what changes you’d like to see in plus size fashion.
–Dress Profesh is a collection of photos that explore and challenge what “professional” looks like.
–Selma costumes reveal class and consciousness of the movement.
–15 questions with plus size model and blogger Katana Fatale.
-Seattleites, check out Bombsheller’s upcoming plus size fitting party.
–This bride’s pink and white lace dress is everything. Her unicorn fascinator is amazing too! I also love this bride’s long flowing pink tulle dress and flower crown, and her bridesmands’ sequined dresses.
–Katie K activewear sends a plus size fitness coach down the runway at Outdoor Retailer 2015.
–13 pieces of plus size activewear you’ll actually want to have in your closet.
-Valentino’s pre-fall 2015 galactic prints are gorgeous.

I love this video that shows women of varying sizes working out and enjoying themselves:

Monday links, 1/20/14

Female sumo wrestler (source)

Remembering Martin Luther King, Jr.
–Letters from a YSI jail. 
–Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did.
–MLK Boulevard: a snapshot of King’s dream deferred.
–This piece by Ta Nehisi-Coates isn’t directly about MLK, but it’s relevant and so important. 

Fa(t)shion
–An ASOS maternity fit review and a SWAK rant. 
-I’m disappointed but not surprised to hear that ASOS has often stolen designs from indie designers. 
-More tutu options: this shop, which makes custom tutus in any size for an extra $10, and this plus size tutu.
-Re/Dress will soon be carrying menswear/butchwear!
-Skorch’s Royal Issue is now live.
-The Advanced Style hat party looks like so much fun.
-Ragen writes about fashion-bashing and Gabourey Sidibe; Melissa reminds us that it’s ok to cry, that brash indifference to fat hatred can be great but shouldn’t be the only socially acceptable response. 
–San Francisco finds new life for old clothes through a recycling program.
-Evie from Work It, Own It, Use It! is selling some super-cute clothes. I’m especially in love with this floral cardi, but it’s too small for me–one of you should buy it so I can enjoy it vicariously. Same with this Domino Dollhouse bow out skirt, which I love love but wouldn’t wear because I don’t do high waists or zippers.

I love this short documentary about the Sapeurs, a subculture of stylish men in the Congo.

Fat Acceptance
–A world without fat people…
–Chris Christie and pulling the red handle.
–Research, the media, and “obesity”: a case study.
-Melissa debunks yet another myth about fat people, that we want to force everyone to find us attractive. 
-Brodie writes about the lack of fat representation in the media beyond characters who are walking jokes.

Things that give me hope

1.) New York’s Youth Poet Laureate, Ramya Ramana, reading her poem titled “New York City” at Mayor Bill de Blasio’s inauguration (transcript available here):

When I watch this young woman read, I can almost believe that change is possible. That the tides are turning. That we, the people, can and will rise.

Not just because of the beauty and fierceness and demand for justice that shines so clearly through her performance–although that alone is enough to blow me away.

But because this beauty and fierceness and demand for justice takes place at the swearing-in of a new mayor in the city that is America’s heart. The city that has been sanitized and stratified by 12 years of Bloomberg’s neoliberal policies. The city that has become an extreme–and extremely visible–symbol of an economic system that crushes lives and spirits.

The city that refuses to give up fighting.

In that fight, I see a world of new beginnings.

2.) Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “The arc of justice and the long run: hope, history, and unpredictability.”

Solnit argues that “[s]ometimes cause and effect are centuries apart; sometimes Martin Luther King’s arc of the moral universe that bends toward justice is so long few see its curve; sometimes hope lies not in looking forward but backward to study the line of that arc.” She gives examples of social and political seeds that germinated for years, decades, even centuries before bearing fruit: the role of hip-hop in the Arab Spring uprisings; the influence of Thoreau’s writing, which sold few books when he was alive, on both Gandhi and King; the effect that a seeing a talented black trumpet player had on a young man who grew up to help end segregation by aiding the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education.