Yes, I know it’s been a little while since I posted, but HERE I AM!

BACK IN THE GAME!

I KNOW YOU MISSED ME!

This won’t be a super-long post, but I definitely want to celebrate and talk about small victories. 

I want to talk about Miami Swim Week. 

It made me emotional as I clicked through a bunch of swim week photos yesterday.

I saw plus sized women. Mid-size women. Mature women. Short women. Disabled women. Trans women.

I saw women, and I saw representation. 

One of the shows that I came across in my snooping was, of course, the Sports Illustrated Swim show, and if I was emotional before seeing it, I was openly teary afterward. 

Because I have a little history with Sports Illustrated Swim. 

Growing up, I used to look forward to getting the swimsuit issue every year, though let’s be honest, most times it was more about the models than it was the swimwear.

And my GOD, were the models beautiful. I grew up coveting Cintia Dicker’s lean figure, freckles, and red hair. I loved Bar Refaeli’s blonde, girl-next-door look. They have the body paint shoot every issue, I think, and I remember seeing those photos of the models and just being in awe. 

And I didn’t think too much about the implications of that until I got a little older and they started tossing in a token plus-sized model here and there. She probably only showed up in one photo from each shoot, MAYBE, and she always wore more than the skinny girls who were there, laying on a beach with just sand covering their lady bits. 

The implication there? Bigger bodies need to be covered. We can include them, sure, but not too much. Wouldn’t want to change the look of Sports Illustrated Swim. 

For a few years, it seemed like there was a little bit more tokenism. A model embracing her natural hair. Another plus sized model. A more diverse athlete spread. 

But lately, they’ve been stepping their game up in their representation of all women, and it’s not going unnoticed by me. 

I saw their runway show from Miami Swim Week 2021. 

I saw the diversity in body type, more than I think I’ve ever seen from them. 

These women, they didn’t seem like models to me. They were more than that. They were women wearing swimsuits. Swim is such a vulnerable thing. We feel vulnerable shopping for it, and we feel vulnerable wearing it. 

But these women, these models, making their way down the runway and seeing their bodies MOVE, it made me feel seen ad excited and confident in myself. 

Any time I watch a runway show, I’m reminded of my freshman year of college. A bunch of us gathered one day in the common area of a dorm to watch the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. 

(Now, freshman year was a brutal year for my body image. I was gaining weight at school and I was frustrated with myself and angry with my body, constantly.)

When we watched the show, we oohed and ahhhed over the costumes and the lingerie. We loved listening to the performers. 

What was more, we put ourselves down in comparison to the models. Our constant commentary about how good they looked and how horrible our own bodies were in comparison, THAT was runway to me. 

And it didn’t make me want any part of what Victoria’s Secret was selling. It made me want to skip dinner. 

But the ladies at Swim Week? Their confident smiles and struts and the camaraderie and the self love that poured from their faces and seemed to emanate from their bodies, that’s the kind of thing that will encourage me to support a brand. 

Trust me, I know that we as a society and the fashion industry as a whole aren’t where we should be yet with representation, but I truly believe we are getting there. 

And it makes me emotional, thinking about what a 5th or 6th grade Emma might have thought had she seen these women, beautiful women flaunting their cellulite, jiggly bellies and hip dips, rocking their swimsuits and loving every second of it.

Maybe I would have grown up loving myself in a swimsuit, too. I wouldn’t have felt like I “shouldn’t” wear a bikini because my belly isn’t flat, or because “they aren’t made for me.”

Maybe I wouldn’t have felt like I had to wear shorts instead of bikini bottoms because my butt and thighs have cellulite and jiggle.

Maybe I wouldn’t have felt so insecure about taking my t-shirt or cover-up off at the beach because I’m built thicker on the bottom than I am on the top. 

I’m here to tell you: seeing that representation matters. It does. And while some people may not GET it, take it from the girl who pored over those magazines in her younger years. 

It takes a lot to unlearn that kind of thing, what the fashion industry has been telling women for decades: your body has to look a certain way to wear clothes and look beautiful. 

But from where I’m standing?

Maybe models of the past were meant to be people women could look at and say, “wow, I wish I looked like that.”

But now, in the age of representation and constant expansion of that representation, women like me are looking at these runway shows and these magazines and saying, “wow, she looks like me. And she is absolutely beautiful.”