Do You Love Yourself Yet?

Checking in on how the body-positivity movement is impacting women.

- Suzannah Weiss

When body-positivity influencers like Tess Holliday and Jessamyn Stanley took to Instagram in the early 2010s, they cultivated a space where unaltered images of women’s bodies challenged beauty norms and where you didn’t need a flat belly or cellulite free thighs to attract thousands of supportive comments. On a perfection-obsessed platform, their accounts gained millions of followers.

Their message has finally gone mainstream, with major fashion brands expanding their sizing options and featuring women with diverse and often unretouched bodies in ad campaigns.

The number of modelling agencies catering to a more representative group of girls has also increased in the past few years, says Zuzanna Campbell, an agent at APM Models New York (whose own clients used to be mostly size zero, but now represent a broader range of sizes). ‘We’re definitely seeing a lot more inclusive images of bodies in commercial fashion,’ she adds. (FWIW, COSMO is also committed to showing more gorgeous diverse images in its pages.)

Getting Good Vibes

But is BoPo’s new ubiquity making an actual difference in how women view their bodies? Maybe. A 2018 study published in