Gay fashion designers? Teenage boys? What on earth? Runway models are stick thin because the clothes hang on them like they would a hanger. You don’t want someone like Heidi Klum modeling haute couture, people would focus on her prettiness and kick-ass rack. You want plain faces and thin bodies, so the focus is the clothing. (Lingerie is different, of course)
So what ideal are we looking at? Actress ideal? I’ll still say that most women in lead roles on TV shows would probably wear a dress size of two, perhaps four. And I’ll stand by the guess that Hendricks is closer to a size ten.
Hendricks IS a sex symbol whether or not her hips are five inches smaller than a standard fashion model. What she is NOT is a standard fashion model.
She doesn’t look “good for her size” or whatever. She is smokin hot, big hips and all.
But it’s the TV/fashion ideal that Hendricks works in. She couldn’t find a designer to lend her a dress for the Emmy Awards because none of them wanted to create a “Fat” dress, meaning anything larger than a size 2. (Size 2 is very, very small) Hendricks’s dress size is reported as anywhere from 10 and 14, depending on the source; looking at her, to me she is pretty clearly a 10. Maybe a 12 - she’s not short, and dress size doesn’t account for measurement relative to height.
A recent tempest-in-a-teacup story was the photo shoot done by some of the cast members of Glee, which was very sexy and so was criticized by various busybodies as being “pedophilia” despite the fact that the actresses were in their 20s and being attracted to teenagers isn’t pedophilia anyway. In any case, the most remarkable thing about the actresses - Lea Michele and Dianna Agron - is that they have each obviously lost at least 15 pounds since the show began, and are now both really, REALLY skinny, as opposed to just being a bit skinny. Michele doesn’t even have a woman’s hips anymore, and this isn’t really a teenager, she’s a grown woman. I can think of a dozen of more examples of already-fit actress becoming almost emaciated over the course of their run on a show; the pressure to get down to a size 0 is tremendous.
Regardless of this, she still possesses a figure that would cause the vast majority of people who are attracted to women to overlook strabismus, crooked teeth, or a sincere belief in homeopathy, never mind that her features are pretty much platonically perfect. I can’t get my head around the idea that anyone might think she has any handicap to overcome in order to be perceived as hot sex on wheels.
I think the “victory”, if there is any, is adding another body type into the Hollywood mix, instead of just really thin or really thin with big boobs. Some girls are naturally really thin. Some are naturally on the slender without being skinny - the girls on Friends when it first started, or the girls on Glee that RickJay mentioned, that looked perfectly lovely as they were but dropped ten or fifteen pounds. And some, like Sara Ramirez, are larger all around. Now, all these women are making their careers in TV or movies and are very, very lovely facially and if you’re not born with that there’s no attaining it later, I agree with that. BUT, it is nice to see more than one or two body types on TV, that actresses might be able to stay at a healthy natural body weight without being relegated to a side character like “Friend of main character who can never get a date” or whatever.
Second, I like this outfit fine. Her body looks very different in regular clothes than on Mad Men and at awards shows because she’s not wearing the usual corset that makes her waist tiny and jams her boobs up to her chin. I think she’s more of a busty apple/rectangle shape than she is an ‘hourglass’. She’s not very narrow in the middle without Photoshop or shapewear, and she has a small bum and slim arms and legs compared to her torso.
I love curvy women with shapely thighs in skinny jeans. As long as you have the right size so you’re not overflowing. The idea that bigger women ‘shouldn’t’ wear clothes that show the actual shape of their body and that you need to be ‘balanced’ by your pant legs is just silly, to me. We’re human women, we’re pretty much all much broader and top and taper to small lower legs. Nothing ‘balances’ us when we’re naked and to many people, that’s when we look our best.
Those pants are not flattering in the least. Cut too short for an hourglass shaped woman and the pants should be bootcut, so they put her hips/boobs in proportion.
And the zip-up is obviously tragic. She’s gorgeous. She has an hourglass shape. I have an hourglass shape and it’s definitely hard to find clothing. If the boobs fit me the waist is gapingly huge. If the hips fit me, the waist is enormous. I have a good tailor who takes in my shirts and dresses in the middle, so that my hips and boobs fit. Most women are an unflattering pear-shape, and clothing is designed for them. Skinny jeans should not be seen on a curvy woman.
I know she could pull off a plain white men’s Tshirt and a pair of Jcrew curvy/hipslung jeans just fine. You have to be fit (she is) and have big boobs without being fat (she is) to pull off everyday items. She obviously also looks great in MadMen period dresses. The best retailer I’ve found for true hourglass-shaped women is Jcrew.
Her clothes aren’t too tight, they’re just the wrong ones.
I didn’t read the article, I’m just commenting on the main picture.
I’ve always found J Crew not curvy enough on bottom - Victoria’s Secret has a lot of slutwear, but I’ve been LOVING their pencil skirts for work this year. I look megafine in them - they fit my curves and aren’t too tight.
As a generality, men like curves and confidence. So put this woman in a room of 100 men and probably 85% would be drooling.
I think it is a crying shame that women (and especially young girls) feel such pressure to be stick thin. It really isn’t something you need to aspire to. Being happy with your body, is.
She is certainly a sexy woman and her clothes are incidental. If she carries herself with confidence an extra few pounds here or there are neither here nor there. (well, more specifically, they are there and though I am fully paid-up member or the 21st century, my primate instincts fully approve)
Disagree. “Huge boobs” doesn’t always equal “hourglass”. She’s definitely busty (and gorgeous), but her waist/hip difference isn’t all that much, as rhubarbarin said. She curves in a bit at her thighs, but everyone does. It’s the corsets, shapewear and photoshop that really whittle her waist down in pictures.
But she is quite chunky- if she had an average face and wasn’t wearing foundation garments, I don’t think you’d give her a second glance at the grocery store. Here is a dowdy photo of her in normal clothes.
I think the foundation garments are doing a LOT of pushing the boobs up, the waist in and the rolls smoothed over. Without them she has a pretty averagely chunky figure, the sort of thing you’d find on a dowdy teacher, a college student who hit the dining hall a bit too hard, or a mom who let things go a bit. So while she’s not enormously huge, she has to take a lot of care to look as good as she does. She can’t just throw on anything and look hot. The girdles and control hose is doing a lot of the work.
Anyway, naked she most likely has quite a big belly, and probably some rolls. Those boobs are not going to be quite the same without support. An hourglass figure (which I don’t think she really has, but she is squeezed into one) can absorb a lot of weight before it starts looking obviously obese.
My tastes must not align with the majority. I don’t find her figure very appealing at all; the proportions just seem all out of whack, to me. And I believe I’m comparing her with regular people, rather than the Hollywood ideal; if I saw her down my local street she wouldn’t catch my eye at all.
From Googling her I found out they sold a dress on ebay that she wore on Mad Men for charity, and it measured 39-30-39. Since she obviously wears a corset and shaping bra for the show, I assume that’s off from her normal measurements by a few inches. Not an ‘hourglass’ figure but a proportional and curvy one.
‘Bigger’ doesn’t mean ‘obese’ or physically unattractive. I think she’s beautiful and quite sexy.
By her measurements she wears a ‘Large’, size 12-14, that’s about the average clothing size for a woman in the USA but most who wear it are also a few pounds at least ‘overweight’ by BMI. So yeah, she’s bigger than a lot of women, especially famous women (not that too many of them aren’t unnecessarily and unflatteringly thin).
I don’t think she looks dowdy at all . . . her face is so stunningly beautiful that even dressed like that I think she’s very much a looker and would turn heads.
