An interesting new Guardian article discusses the plus sized pop culture phenomenon who’s the lead singer of rock band Gossip and her clothing line targeting “big” women:
Supposedly it was her friend Kate Moss who got Beth the Evans design gig, telling Philip Green, who owns the label, that he should get Beth to do a collection (he’d never heard of her). As Moss has a habit of picking up cool people like they’re this season’s handbag, one of the assumptions about Beth is that she’s just a bauble, a marvelous freak that will soon be cast aside by hoity-toity fashion. Again, she shrugs this off.
“This craziness, this attention, is not normal,” she says, “and I never expected it, so I don’t expect it to last…. Normal, of course, is subjective, and though 28-year-old Beth is clearly sane and well-adjusted, her normality is a million miles from suburban Croydon, or even Kensington. She grew up in Searcy, Arkansas, the middle child of seven, in a two-bedroom household headed up by her single-parent mother. “Our house was loud!” she laughs. “That’s why I am the way I am. I was always being told off at school. The teachers would say: ‘Everyone’s talking, but you’re the one I can hear.’”
Her religious background caused Beth trouble. She knew she was gay from the age of five, and “it created a lot of problems for me”. She became so stressed during her teens that her pubic hair turned white, though when she came out as a lesbian her mum took it well. “She’s very natural, my mum. She kicks around, hair down to here, not much make-up. I think she liked it that I was a bit alternative.”
“All this fashion stuff – who’s cool now – is just a bigger version of the cool kids versus the nerds,” she says. “At my high school I was really into nerds standing up for themselves, because we were the majority. The American high-school dynamic means that there are five popular kids in the whole school. But I grew up in a really small town, with a really small school, so the idea of popularity in that context was really weird, because we all knew each other. So who or what decided who was popular? And the answer was money. It always was money. And I was like: ‘We’re the ugly ones who get things done and yet we’re always shit on. Why do we accept that those people are cooler than we are?’”
