There’s an image that, for me, encapsulates the 2010s. It’s a 2017 New York City billboard for the millennial-pink beauty brand Glossier, itself an offshoot of the 2010-founded, highly-addictive beauty blog Into The Gloss. The ad features the multiracial plus-size American model Paloma Elsesser, nude, but with the shot covering the relevant bits, such that it shows nothing more than your typical swimsuit ad.

The reason the image has stuck with me all this time is not that it was my one time seeing a scantily-clad woman on a billboard. (This is what is called, in the West, a billboard.) Nor was this the only 2010s instance of a woman in an ad whose body differs from the lithe blonde beauty standards from the eras before and after. Hardly! Those years were banner times for a pivot from the very publications that had been making women and girls feel bad about how they looked. Harper’s Bazaar of 2020 was introducing readers to “12 Stunning Black Plus-Size Models You Need to Know,” and I don’t need to Google it to remember that mainstream fashion magazines of 1995 or 2005 were doing nothing of the kind. If anything, the cool-girl brands, the if-you-know-you ones, identified themselves by hiring unconventional-looking models (older, fatter, hairier, androgynous, visibly disabled, and yes, racially diverse).

The fact of Elsesser being in a Glossier ad was itself emblematic of the moment, but not the whole of why I remember it so well. Rather, it’s the angle. It’s a front-and-side shot of Elsesser crouched, so as to showcase every skin fold. Every bit of midsection it is conventional for a woman to, if anything, suck in for a photograph.

Given that fashion photography (and just, photographs of women who are not models) traditionally eschews such angles, this was revolutionary. Or revolutionary-ish: the face of Glossier effectively remained that of founder and now-former CEO Emily Weiss, a slim, conventionally attractive young white woman.

Beauty standards never changed-changed, but they seemed as though maybe they might. The photo made the model look fat, and that was the point. My elder-millennial mind was blown. At last, the script was flipped.

But now, the script went and un-flipped itself. An embrace of conventional attractiveness—the thing ‘we’ as a society had supposedly transcended—is in full force.

Elsesser’s own career somewhat follows the contours of the long 2010s—the era leading up to Oct. 7 and Trump 2.0. In 2021, she broke the plus-size-cover-model barrier for American Vogue. In 2023, she did the same for........

© Canadian Jewish News