Thoughts on Fat and Fashion

Just now I was reading the article 'Fat is a humanist issue' by Marianne Kirby over at Comment is Free in the Guardian (don't read the comments). It made me think about the role of fashion for fat women, and yes here I'm referring to what Kirby describes as the 'marginally fat' (I imagine this means those that struggle to fit into mainstream shopping sizes - even a size 14 can be plagued by this phenomenon). This led me to ponder whether fashion blogs such as What Katie Wore, where a photo is taken of a slender woman (probably size 8) in a different outfit everyday, would a similar blog be as popular if it was someone that was a size 16? size 20? size 24? size 28? Or is it that she has such a slender figure that makes us so excited by the blog? Would such a blog be possible if it were by the fatter woman? You know what, I'd like to see a fat woman try a similar project - wear a different outfit everyday for a year. I mean it'd be amazing if they could catch the interest of designers etc.

A girl can dream... I don't think I'd be brave enough to tackle such a project or willing to spend that much on clothes but I'd love to see it exist somewhere. Perhaps in time...

I'm joining InAdWriMo 2009!!

Ok thanks to Alice Academic's post that I read this morning, I've decided to join in the challenge of InAdWriMo. It is the academic alternative to NaNoWriMo (Aim: write a 50,000 word novel in a month), which was started by Fumbling Towards Geekdom in 2006.

The aims are as follows:

• Write as much as you can and get those niggling projects finished at least in the rough draft version.
• Post a word count progress bar on your blog
• Write about your progress on your blog
• Register at this post so you can receive moral support from your fellow academic writers.

I'm going to use this as inspiration to help me complete the following tasks:

• write more on my dissertation (7,000)
• write progress review documents (2,000)
• write my conference paper to present end of next week (3,000)
• write a shitty first draft of my book chapter (8,000)

Well I'm going in to start some of this writing and hoping that I can think through my fingers! Best of luck to any of the rest of you who are participating in InAdWriMo 2009 (and to those other academic dissertation writers)!!