style story: virgie tovar
I was trying to remember when I first became aware of and I really can't. She was definitely one of the first people I came across when I was discovering the worlds of body acceptance and fat positivity. Her writing is brilliant, but I also remember being charmed by her personal style. I was so excited and grateful when she agreed to do a style story. When I read her email with her responses, I actually exclaimed (some sort of joyful noise, not a word or anything) because it was one of the most positive and affirming and delightful things I've ever read. I know you’re going to love it.
Q: Introduce yourself, your work, and how you spend your time.
My name is Virgie Tovar. I call myself a body image futurist. I’m plus-size, and do a lot of work to end weight-based discrimination. I’ve written several books on the topic, including You Have the Right to Remain Fat and The Body Positive Journal, and I lecture all over the place and am a contributor for Forbes.com.
Q: What was your style like when you were a child?
Well, my mom used to dress me when I was really little, and she has this amazing, eccentric style. There’s a photo of me as a baby dressed like miniature melanated Jane Fonda: with a bright sweatband and shiny leotard on my chubby baby body. My mom and grandma were gifted seamstresses, and we were all bigger than the average clothing run. So they’d make cute clothes, sometimes identical looks for me, my mom and my grandma. I’m thinking of one year they got a hold of a bunch of cheetah print denim and they made all three of us jumpers with ruffles. I was horrified at the time, but now I can appreciate this moment. As I got a little bit older, I learned fatphobia and developed a lot of shame, and clothing became a thing I used to cover up my fat body. So my wardrobe pretty rapidly became dark colors, conservative cuts and oversized so no one could see my belly or my thighs.
Q: Growing up, what messages were you given about what you should or shouldn’t wear (and from whom or where do you think those messages came)?
The biggest messages were coming from my peers, primarily the boys in my class from elementary through high school. I got the very clear message that dressing feminine was “gross” because I was “too big” to be girly, according to them. I learned from them early on that my body was shameful and disgusting to other people, and that I should do everything in my power to hide it. So, clothing became a way that I could try to protect myself, but it didn’t really work because no matter how dark or oversized my clothing was, it never seemed to be enough to stop them from abusing me.
Q: How has your style evolved since you were younger and what phases have you gone through with your style (i.e. high school grunge phase, early working days business casual phase, etc)?
I guess I would call this era of trying to use clothes to hide as my “fat compliance phase.”
I really started to rebel through clothing when I was introduced to feminism at UC Berkeley when I was about 20 years old. I started wearing the absolute tightest, tiniest clothes I could possibly find. I felt like my sexuality and my gender expression had been totally censored for so long, and I dealt with the anger I was feeling through clothing and a lot - and I mean a lot - of cleavage. I was in the cleavage era for a really, really long time. I wore really short things, too. This era was about aggressively expressing my sexuality, but it was also about provocation and using fashion and my body to push back on the social norms that are used to repress fat people. When I was introduced to the world of fat activism when I was 29-ish, it was a world that was run by queer high femmes. So I quickly adopted their style of 50s high glam - or at least I tried to: a lot of cat eye sunglasses, red lipstick, vintage clothing, vintage fur, and manicures and pedicures. Oh, and crop tops, which I still love. Glam has fascinated me for a long time, and this was the height of it. This definitely got me a lot of attention, which I enjoyed.
Then I started dating an IP attorney, and this marked the beginning of kind of another compliance phase: like trying to communicate that I deserved to be in this world of respectability and money and suits and six figures, which involved wearing a lot of black and putting my cleavage away. I found that this fashion performance, while kinda boring, was also thrilling in its own way because it was about mimicry and codes and rules, and that stuff fascinates me, and the food and wine were so good at those holiday parties. Now I’m in my “San Francisco Lady Creative” phase: we all literally wear the same thing because we all buy things that one could find in Joshua Tree: high-waisted jeans with a cropped sweater and/or high-quality linen set and/or Nooworks with a top knot and those wedge shoes in an earth tone. I think my next phase will be “Art Therapist Who Wears Museum Jewelry” phase. I can’t wait!
Q: Have external pressures to conform to the ideal standard of beauty and the thought of how others view you affected your style?
Yes. Cultural attitudes about what fat women are “supposed” to wear has had the biggest influence on my style. I feel like I’ve always either conformed to it or resisted it. There doesn’t seem to be an in-between. Like, even when I’m just wearing what I want, it’s still “a statement” because - as a fat woman - I’m not “supposed” to have style or want to stand out. Once one of my exes told me that I shouldn’t show too much cleavage because then I’d look like “one of those fat women who is trying too hard.” Ugh, that one hit me in the gut. He was a jerk for saying that, and he was also a fat person whose mother sent him an email everyday about how to lose weight. He was just voicing something he’d internalized from his peers and from the culture. So, yeah, he confirmed that what a fat woman does with her breasts is already always subject to interpretation viz-a-viz fatphobia, which is so demoralizing and dehumanizing and sexist. I think even when you’re fat-positive - which I am - there’s still a lot of pressure from even within plus-size fashion to smooth, flatten, and accentuate acceptable fat bits from less-acceptable fat bits.
Q: How have your sense of style and shopping habits shifted along with changes in your body?
I think changes in my sense of style and shopping habits have shifted the most with changes in my politics, not my body. So, today, I wear things that 20-year-old me would have only imagined she could wear if she lost a lot of weight.
Q: What barriers do you encounter in trying to express your style? Are there any situations or spaces you feel your style prohibits you from accessing or gives you better access to?
I encounter race, gender and size-based barriers. I find that fashion is about fun and play self-expression when I’m in the 4 walls of my own home and when I’m in safe places with friends, but it’s rendered differently outside of those spaces. Like, I remember a few summers again when kaftans were really trending, and I knew implicitly in every cell of my body that this was a trend for thin people, and probably white thin women in particular, because fat woman have been negatively associated with kaftans for, like, EVER. A friend had gifted me a gorgeous, hand-dyed cotton kaftan, and I really wanted to wear it. So, I fought the little voice in my head that said, “You’re asking for trouble if you wear that in public.” That day I was in LA, riding public transportation somewhere. I’ve been fat-shamed on public transportation dozens and dozens of times, but that day - for the first time ever - I was called “a sloppy fat bitch.” And I knew… I knew… that the word sloppy was there because of the kaftan, ya know?
Fat women of color’s bodies are sexualized a lot more quickly, too, when we’re wearing shorts or a crop top or a tank top or a skirt. The dehumanization of fat women and women of color already always makes us even more subject to sexual degradation, and because of that my clothing choices are more quickly rendered as “signaling” sexual availability.
I often say, in my dream world, I would just wear bikini tops and cut-off denim shorts with some kind of jelly clop-clop heel and hoop earrings. But the reality of doing that would be so emotionally draining because of the ways that all women of color are devalued and because of the unique ways that we’re devalued if we’re fat.
Q: Do you have any style icons? Who are they?
Miss Piggy is my #1 style icon.
Q: How would you define your current relationship to clothes and style?
Overall, I’d define it as really positive, joyful and playful. I am really lucky as a plus-size woman at this moment in fashion history to have unprecedented access to so many incredible, well-made and cute things that I cherish. I do feel like my wardrobe allows me to express myself, and that feels amazing.
Q: What makes your style authentic to who you are today?
I’m at the core a person who loves to experience and spread joy. Just the other day, I was at the grocery store and one of the people who works there said that my pink wayfarer frames make people smile. I loved hearing that! I love the idea that what I like can just effortlessly make someone’s day a little better. Like, as humans, that’s what we’re designed to do, I think: lift each other up by being ourselves. I’m drawn to color, big and bold prints, and I have a special relationship to the color pink - because it’s such a “girly” color and because I didn’t feel like as a fat girl or woman that I was “really” a girl because we’ve been taught that “girly” or “feminine” means dainty. I love reclaiming pink for the fatties.
Q: Do you wear anything that’s conventionally considered unflattering?
All. The. Time. As a fat woman I’m not supposed to wear anything colorful that draws attention, anything that shows my rolls, anything body con. And I wear all those things.
Thank you so much, Virgie! Having Miss Piggy as your style inspiration is ICONIC. Paid subscribers, continue on for Virgie’s wardrobe recommendations!
Virgie Tovar holds a Master's degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. She is a contributor for Forbes where she covers the plus-size market and how to end weight discrimination at work. She started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight in 2013. She's the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat, which was placed on the American Library Association's Amelia Bloomer List, The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color and her new interactive book, The Body Positive Journal. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, MTV, Al Jazeera, NPR, and Yahoo Health. She lives in San Francisco.
(some of the links included in this article are affiliate links which means I get a small commission if you purchase through them, at no cost to you.)
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