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I don't think her undergarment choices would have been too limited though. Especially not for a woman with her means. The designer dress thing is still a power that the designer wields even for stars that have crazy dough. They decide whether they want to fit you or not and if you are promoting yourself on the red carpet you can't be consider all they way there unless you have are wearing a big name.
You'd be surprised. Christina Hendricks is wearing the wrong bra size, lol. Kim Kardashian as well. We've got pretty limited bra choices in the US and not much education around it. I remember Queen Latifah was promoting some bras a billion years ago! I was so excited (as I am in her bust size neighborhood). Well I found they didn't actually fit me. And then many moons later, I found out the reasons why and realized we are just all in the dark. No american lingerie brands make my size, and you wouldn't see me and think boy, she looks like she has totally "weird-sized" breasts. Money doesn't guarantee knowledge/education.
Lupita probably has a similar problem in the other direction.
Those women wear the wrong size bras so their boobs can spill out of their tops when they walk around for photo ops. It is part of their image. I have seen a couple of candid shots of CH walking around trying to stay low key and she doesn't appear to be so "VA VA voom" if you will.
The same tricks that can be used to make a small or flat chested woman appear to have a decent sized rack can be amplified exponentially when used on a woman who already has big boobs. The problem is when they do it so much and don't get the proper support from those too small bras, they get back and shoulder aches especially on a heavier woman. My wife has as big or a bigger chest then those three and has no problem finding properly sized bras.
Lupita gets to do the no bra completely exposed chest in a v neck style that Is OK Hollywood approved. If a large chested woman did that she'd be called a skank.
Huh. It's possible. But I thought Ellen came along later and that Queen hadn't come out yet when she landed that gig.
I think they were both two-fers. Ellen is "old"--and that was the point made at the time, although if all they wanted was "old," Lancome had already done that by reviving Isabella Rosselini as a cosmetics model. And there are plenty of other older models they could have used if "old" was really their point.
Latifa had already come out by then, and she's by no means the only plus-size model available.
However...there is also the growing trend now to use television and movie actors as cosmetics models rather than women off the catwalk. That would make Ellen and Queen "three-fers."
The world has been ready for a change and swing of conventional beauty for quite some time. However we have a handful of quacks with hefty pocke and flawed marketing - persuading many to believe otherwise.
I decided to revisit the original question which started this thread.
I love that Lupita (without intention, agenda or any effort on her part) has forced black Americans to have the conversation about the manner in which we deny a segment of our population (ie dark skinned women) the acknowledgment of their beauty. But it will take a thousand Lupitas to reverse the damage that has been done to the image of dark skinned women in this country. Sadly, far too many black people worship at the altar of the closer to white = the more value you have in the community.
What I find particularly strange is that certain people have the AUDACITY to be suspicious of the admiration that Lupita is receiving (specifically from non-blacks) yet these same individuals worship the ground that the likes of Kim Kardashian walk on and place someone like her on a pedestal as the epitome of womanhood to which black women should aspire. So I am hoping and praying that little black girls will turn off the misogynistic music of the vast majority of hip hop artists and stop watching their videos which are a race to the bottom of hell.
Lupita is more than just a breath of fresh air...she's is perhaps the beginning of a much needed a wake up call.
Good post. I find it odd that there was this entire Black is Beautiful and Black Pride movement in the 1960's and 1970's that has basically evaporated. I wasn't even alive then, but I have heard about this era my entire life. Dark skinned women were celebrated then. For those of you who were around then, what happened? Why did so many Black Americans go back to degrading dark skinned women?
Good post. I find it odd that there was this entire Black is Beautiful and Black Pride movement in the 1960's and 1970's that has basically evaporated. I wasn't even alive then, but I have heard about this era my entire life. Dark skinned women were celebrated then. For those of you who were around then, what happened? Why did so many Black Americans go back to degrading dark skinned women?
The "celebration" of dark skinned black women during that period was not fully authentic. The voices, the needs and the contributions of black women were marginalized during the CRM. I remember reading the account of some black women during that time which stated that the darker skinned women were used as mules on the front lines in protest rallies and lighter skinned women were discouraged from participating to protect them from harm.
The majority of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement had light skinned (or non-black) wives. Many of the Pan-African leaders who were the first to win independence for their respective countries had white wives/white First Ladies to lead their African nations.
The Black male leaders/intellectualists from Frederick Douglass to W.E.B Du Bois to Julian Bond to Cornel West to Dr. Henry Louis Gates.
I will leave a few bread crumbs if anyone truly wishes to follow the trail...
“Reflections Unheard: Black Women in Civil Rights”. The film highlights the marginalization of Black women between the “I’m Black and I’m Proud” Civil Rights movement of the early ‘60s and ‘70s and the predominantly White feminist movement.
The film was initially aimed to discuss racial misogyny through present day hip-hop culture and a journey through the past of the Civil Rights movement, where most of the marginalization towards Black women began. But Nanji said she soon decided to focus solely on the Civil Rights Movement because it captured the heart of the inequality towards Black women.
Eldridge Cleaver - Soul on Ice: Cleaver acknowledges committing acts of rape, stating that he initially raped black women in the ghetto "for practice" and then embarked on the serial rape of white women. He described these crimes as politically inspired, motivated by a genuine conviction that the rape of white women was "an insurrectionary act". When he began writing Soul on Ice, he unequivocally renounced rape and all his previous reasoning about it. However, he refused to show any remorse for his career as a rapist, or acknowledge any debt to society, claiming in Soul on Ice that "the blood of Vietnamese peasants has paid off all my debts".
The "celebration" of dark skinned black women during that period was not fully authentic. The voices, the needs and the contributions of black women were marginalized during the CRM. I remember reading the account of some black women during that time which stated that the darker skinned women were used as mules on the front lines in protest rallies and lighter skinned women were discouraged from participating to protect them from harm.
I was authentic. And it didn't seem to me at the time that Angela Davis got a lot of protection. Nikki Giovanni was out there, too.
I certainly can't speak for the leaders, especially those from northern urban areas (I was not an urban kid--my upbringing was in the small-town South), but a lot of us rank and file were all for the cause. IMO, what really sank us was that we got popular in the media and lost control of our own image.
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