Posted By Stuart on July 31, 2009
Is there now something terribly vulgar about being too thin? Let’s meet Kristi, the face, and bum, of the new reality, where we no longer worship, or weigh ourselves against, the super-skinny false idols of the boom years. When Kristi Kuudisiim pats her bottom and explains her plans to improve upon it, you realize how unusual it is for a woman to draw attention to that part of her body. If one draws attention to her derriere, it is generally with a view to bemoaning its size or shape, not to showing it off. “Mine hasn’t dropped or anything,” Kristi assures, as if that wasn’t entirely obvious, “but I want to make it round and full and smooth.” Which is to say that the 25-year-old Estonian, Ireland’s only plus-size model, has plans to make her bottom bigger. Personally, she wants it, and professionally, she believes it will do her no harm. Skinny, Kristi feels certain, has had its day. And she’s not the only one.
Suddenly, there’s something terribly vulgar about being too thin. It’s a combination of things: a heightened awareness that there are bigger things to worry about than your thighs, or Angelina Jolie’s thighs; a growing resentment of celebrities and their sense of entitlement in a world that is patently unfair; a grasp of the fact that life is fundamentally about survival and that to thwart the body’s natural need of food as fuel is somehow unnatural and in need of correction. It’s about addressing our attitude to consumption, perhaps.
Gone are the days of thoughtless material over consumption which, conversely and bizarrely, bred an under consumption of food. Which is to say that as designer handbags got bigger, the shoulders forced to carry them got scrawnier, a fact that seems oddly disgusting now. In this time of new uncertainty, the last thing we need is our bodies to let us down along with everything else. Further, we now need new heroes and, chances are, they are not going to be weedy ones.
Nude Kristi Kuudisiim
Kristi Kuudisiim is a size 14 who admits that, in the past, she slimmed to a size 12 in order to get work. “In Estonia, I did some work as a model,” she says today, seven years after her move to Ireland. “People in Estonia are taller than in Ireland, but not bigger, and the models were all much smaller than me. Here, at first, I tried to be a smaller model, but I was fighting my true size and it wasn’t good and it didn’t work for me. Now, I have made peace with my true size, I think. I can see that I can still wear all the nice clothes and do the nice jobs and I don’t have to be that thin.”
I like the idea of slim and I can admire people who are slim,” she adds, “but if they are healthy, too. But I think all people are getting over the idea that the only way to look good is to be skinny. And all those skinny stars, they can’t be eating, they just can’t.” That last pronouncement, made with some passion, is a conclusion at which many people are finally arriving. Once, we were prepared to suspend disbelief at claims of fast metabolisms and enjoyment of cream cakes from size-zero celebs, but we don’t have the time or patience for that any more.
Kristi Kuudisiim in a corset
After a year in which all bets are off with banks, with property, with job security and pensions, we aren’t buying what is patently untrue. In 2006, when Angelina had her first baby, Shiloh, we might have accepted that it was the superhuman in her that meant not an ounce of weight deposited itself on her in pregnancy and hung around for months after, but by the time she had twins Knox and Vivienne last summer, we were over that illusion.
However let’s be clear on one thing, Kristi Kuudisiim is not fat. At 5ft 11in, she’s tall and she’s slim. When she moved to Ireland at the age of 19, she settled first in Ennis, Co Clare, where she was spotted by the mid-west’s premiere manager of models, Celia Holman-Lee. Celia recognized Kristi’s beauty, but also the need for runway models to whom women could actually relate. Most of us don’t have Kristi’s looks, height or perfect proportions, but her presence in a fashion show assures us the clothes come in normal sizes and that we could wear them, too. After several years in Ennis, Kristi moved to Dublin, where she is on the books of Assets, getting catwalk and photo work, and working one night a week as hostess in the VIP suite of Krystle.
“I do all the fashion shows, all the jobs the other models do,” Kristi says, “and just as much as them, I must look after myself. My skin must be good, my health must be good, I must eat well and be healthy. I can’t be fat; I’m a model. And the reaction I get from women is very positive,” she continues. “They give me very positive comment. Women can relate to me more, I think.”
Kristi Kuudisiim reckons her bum lift —the first stage of which she underwent late last month — might give her a head start, so to speak, in the shift in mood away from skinny. Ribbons of thread, she explains, will be inserted into her bottom — “four of them, two on each side,” she says, gesturing at her bum — and then after a month of allowing the flesh attach to the ribbons, they will be pulled upwards, bringing the flesh with them. “Woop!” Kristi exclaims, acting out the upward movement of her bottom. It will be a more pert bottom, she says — bigger, some might say, and they’d possibly be right. But it says a lot for the success this woman enjoys as a plus-size model that she has no fear of filling out a little further.
Category: Plus Size Models |
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Tags: model, News, People, plus size
