when you don't see yourself on the inspiration board
a quick tip for curating a diversity of bodies on pinterest
On Tuesday, we talked about finding words or phrases to describe your style. Finding images of those styles than can help you envision it on your body is harder. As I’ve said before,
“We have to retrain our eye to see people of all shapes and sizes as able to express their personal style. The way we do this is by looking at images of bodies of various sizes over and over again. We have years of looking at thin bodies to counter. Normalize looking at a diversity of bodies.”
In March, Pinterest introduced a new feature so that when you search for women’s fashion, you can select the body type (really the body size) you’d like to see. Here’s how to use it via Pinterest:
Click the search icon at the top of your Pinterest home feed
For example, enter a search term like 'office outfit' or 'wedding dress'
Press Enter
Click Body types at the top of the screen
Select one of the body type ranges from the menu
Unfortunately, the feature is still pretty limited and doesn’t actually work for just any search. It seems to function best if you stick to very basic search terms and use the word “outfit” in your search.
I elaborate more here (originally recorded for my Making Space1 participants, please ignore the number of tabs open, this isn’t even actually that bad for me):
However, having a way to search is all fine and good, but the function doesn’t mean much if there aren’t images of bodies of all sizes to be found. In that regard, Pinterest is still lacking. Luckily, we can all contribute to the content on Pinterest, and so the more diverse bodies you pin, the more there will be for others to find. Here are a few creators whose work you might want to explore and pin (yes, you can pin from Instagram):
Jordan Underwood:
Marielle Elizabeth:
our own
:
and
:
Jacqueline Cieslak:
Kellie Brown:
and Sydney Scott:
And here are a few brands who photograph their clothes on models of all sizes (make sure you have the Pinterest extension on your browser so that you can pin images from outside of Pinterest):
Nooworks
Big Bud Press
Tamara Malas
Wray
Wildfang
Conscious Clothing
Universal Standard
Old Navy
Even if you have thin privilege or wear straight sizes, I encourage you to diversify your Pinterest (and other social media) feeds. The world will be a better place if we can normalize all kinds of humans in the images we see. And may I gently remind you, bodies are always changing.
Lastly, regardless of size or shape, regardless of whether you see bodies the same size as yours, you will never be able to know what something will look like on your body until you try it. Practice going into trying something with the expectation that it will look nothing like it does on the model, regardless of her size. It WILL look completely different, because all of our bodies are different, and you have to decide whether you like this relatively unrelated look on yourself.
Happy pinning!
What’s been your experience using Pinterest to develop your style?
Just an FYI, I tried to love on Wildfang. I love their inclusive sizing and gender fluidity. The problem is that there is no physical store near me to go into to try on the clothes so identifying how the sizing works and if the style suites me was a lot of trial and error via online ordering. I ended up having 3 orders that did not work so I decided to send all of the items back. They have a $10 restocking fee on returns. I am basically being charged $30 for zero product. I tried to figure out how to gift the items for Christmas presents (no one I could think of to gift them to). I even considered donating them but that was not cost effective either. I guess the moral of the story is read the return policy and commit to possibly losing money on the chance to try the product if you do not have a physical store near you.
I saw somewhere that uploading photos from your own camera can help skew the algorithm, so if that’s true, maybe take screenshots and then upload? Dacy, can you verify if this is a real thing?