PLUS SIZE FASHION....THE BIG ISSUE

When top model Crystal Renn was anorexic, her career thrived. She had protruding collar and hip bones and worryingly thin arms, but the sicker she became, the more her career seemed to flourish. Crystal was featured in Vogue; she was in catwalk shows and ad campaigns; she was shot by leading photographers Steven Meisel, Craig McDean and Patrick Demarchelier.

Crystal Renn

Fast forward a year or two and Crystal weighs 12st and is a UK size 16. She says she has never been happier. Today Renn, who is the face of Evans' latest campaign, is the highest-paid plus-size model in America and she has become a role model for young girls and women worldwide. Plus size or not, she's drop dead gorgeous.


But she's not alone - when 20-year-old model Lizzie Miller appeared on the pages of a US fashion magazine in 2010, un-airbrushed to show a small roll of fat around her stomach, it caused a media storm. That one simple picture was seemed to signal a shift against the super-slim aesthetic that has gripped the fashion world for so long.

Lizzie Miller

The March edition of French Elle also picked up on the debate by featuring Tara Lynn wearing a white jumpsuit on the cover. Lynn is a plus-size model who sports, it said, "adorable belly fat" and inside appeared with three other larger models for 32 pages of a "special edition" dedicated to plus-size fashion. It came a month after Italian Vogue launched an online section called "Vogue Curvy" dedicated to fashion and beauty for larger women.

Tara Lynn

Many championed it, others hated it - but no-one can deny it bought the plus-size issue to the fore. The controversy over super-skinny models has been growing in recent years. In 2006, model Luisel Ramos died during Uruguayan Fashion Week, having fasted for several days. Later the same year, Ana Carolina Reston, a Brazilian model, was killed by an infection resulting from anorexia nervosa.

 Ana Carolina Reston

 In 2009, British Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman wrote to all the big fashion designers voicing her concerns that models have "jutting bones and no breasts or hips", they have to wear "minuscule" garments and that Vogue frequently has to airbrush fashion photographs to make the models look bigger.

Catwalk model

For as long as anyone can remember, thin has been the aspirational body type - the one that went hand in hand with success and glamour and money and, above all, fashion. But now the rail thin look is beginning to look out of step with the times and after years of size 0 - skinny has lost its ability to shock. The new crop of plus size models, which include Crystal Renn, Kate Dillon, Tara Lynn and Hayley Morley represent the diversity of women's bodies and I, for one, am delighted to see more realistic shapes being shown on the catwalk.



Top Irish model - Louise O Reilly



Where once lanky, size-zero sticks stalked the catwalk; a plus size revolution is quietly taking place, and designers such as Antonio Berardi, Michael Kors and Mark Fast are regularly using curvaceous models in their  runways.

The likes of Kelly Brooke, Beyonce, Holly Willoughby, Alesha Dixon, Nigella Lawson and Scarlett Johansson are also making us realize that there are many ways to be beautiful.

Actress, Kate Winslet, has been quoted as saying: "I like the way I look. Why is it women think that in order to be adored they have to be thin? I don't understand. "All I know from the men I've ever spoken to is that they like their girls to have an a**e on them."

The proof is in the pudding. Karl Lagerfeld was recently quoted after sending girls away from a casting because, "They looked as if they had grown up in a Third World country with no food to eat."

At last, slowly and from within, it seems fashion is falling back in love with the things that make women truly stunning: confidence, sex appeal, health. Big, little, pint-size, plus-size - every body is beautiful.

"Accentuate your best features and disguise what you are not so happy with. Choose outfits that fit and make you look comfortable rather than those that are up-to-the-minute." - Giorgio Armani

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