Finding a bathing suit, let alone a bikini, isn’t easy for any woman. No matter what shape or size you are, your body is different from the next woman’s. It can be frustrating to try on suit after suit, only to see weird pulling or bunching of your body with the elasticity of the fabric.
For plus-sized women, it’s even harder.
The options are incredibly limited and are usually pretty boring. Not too many designers are making suits specifically fabricated with a plus-sized body in mind. Even if there are some companies making suits in bigger sizes, they’re still not accommodating to a bigger woman’s body, leaving parts of her, well, spilling out of the suit if she bends over!
However, model and designer Elizabeth Taylor made it her mission to create comfortable, functional, and ultimately and most importantly stylish bikinis for women like her.
On a trip to Miami, she noticed all the smaller or average-sized women wearing simple but elegant and beautiful bikinis on the beach, and wondered why she didn’t have access to anything like that.
That’s when the idea for her company Curvy Beach was born.
She started designing her dream bikinis, researched how to make them ethically in Miami, and after a lot of hard work and passion, began manufacturing her wonderful product.
No woman should ever feel like she should hide her body, no matter her size or shape.
Every woman has cellulite, every woman has parts of her she’s less happy with, and every woman harbors her own insecurities. But the female body should be celebrated in all its different forms.
When you watch the video below, you can see the joy on the model’s face as she’s able to move freely and confidently in one of Taylor’s Curvy Beach bikinis. Her smile makes it impossible for you not to smile, too.
Taylor used her experience as a plus-sized model to engineer the designs of her swimsuits and used all of the emotional hurdles she had to overcome and love her body to fuel her forward.
When meeting with a New York agent early in her career, she was met with a heartbreaking ultimatum: either lose 50 pounds or gain 50 pounds, as her body was unacceptable as it was. She wasn’t big enough for plus-size, and she wasn’t small enough to be a “real” model.
She responded amazingly, rejecting the agency’s ridiculous standard and opting to forge her own personal path within the industry. She soon started working with a different agent and even modeled for Melissa McCarthy’s fashion line.
In regard to achieving a positive body image, Taylor says that:
“It really has to start as loving it as-is.”
You don’t have to change yourself in order to love yourself. Your life exists in this moment, not in some kind of idealized future version of yourself or your life. You’ve got to embrace yourself in the moment and do things that make you happy now. That can include embracing a healthy outlook on self-improvement, as long as you make sure your body and mind remain healthy in the process.
Hopefully, more designers will follow Taylor’s example in the summers to come. The more everyone sees all kinds of women enjoying their own bodies and dressing them with fun, playful, and beautiful garments like the Curvy Beach bikinis, the more society will begin to accept all sorts of body types.
We’ve come a long way already, thanks to folks like Taylor, but there is still a long way to go.
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