So who is fashion for anyway?

Fashion has always told women who deserves to be seen. In this first episode of Not Your Size, Amy Abrahams, the woman behind Wear The Damn Dress and Founder and Director of size-inclusive runway event Revel the Runway, dives headfirst into the messy, emotional and honestly quite ridiculous relationship between women, fashion and visibility.

From fashion week statistics showing less than 1% of runway looks are shown on plus-size bodies, to the exhausting reality of trying to “earn” confidence through shrinking ourselves, Amy unpacks why fashion is never just fashion. It’s identity. It’s self-worth. It’s mental health. And sometimes it’s standing half naked in a fitting room wondering why a pair of jeans can ruin your entire afternoon.

This episode is part cultural commentary, part personal reflection and part loving rant about the industries still profiting from female insecurity while pretending inclusivity is revolutionary.

Because the average woman has changed.

Fashion just hasn’t.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Fashion has always told women who deserves to be seen. This podcast asks why. Welcome to Not Your Size. I'm Amy Abrahams, the woman behind the plus size fashion platform Wear the Damn Dress, and founder and director of size inclusive runway event Revel the Runway, based in Canberra. And after years of working in and around fashion spaces, building communities of women online and creating runways designed to represent bodies that the industry still routinely overlooks, I've realized something. Fashion is never just fashion. Because clothing sits so incredibly close to identity, to confidence, to belonging, to desirability, to self-worth. And whether we admit it or not, fashion has always played a role in deciding who gets visibility and who it is who gets told to shrink themselves. And the statistics around this are honestly staggering. The average woman in Australia wears around a size 16. In US, the average woman wears a size 16 to 18, which is about an Australian equivalent of an 18 to 20. Yet according to the Vogue Business 2025 size inclusivity report, less than 1% of runway looks at major fashion weeks were shown on plus size bodies. Just let that sink in. Less than 1%. The majority of women are effectively invisible in the industry's most influential spaces. And that's not just talking about plus size women either. This includes women of various abilities, it includes women of color, it includes women of age. There is a real lack of representation of what our society looks like when it comes to our most influential fashion spaces. And this matters far more than people like to admit. Because representation doesn't just shape trends, it shapes self-perception. It shapes confidence. It shapes mental health. And for many women, fashion has never simply been about getting dressed. It's been about negotiating our worth and trying to become acceptable in a world that tells us the best way to achieve that is through what our body looks like on the off outside. Often we're learning, and from a really young age, an increasingly young age, that visibility is something that we have to earn. And I think one of the most dangerous things the industry has ever sold women is the idea that confidence exists on the other side of shrinking ourselves. That life begins after the weight loss and after the transformation, and after we become more desirable, more polished, more palatable, more like what we're told to expect. But that's what happens when the majority of women never see themselves reflected back in the spaces that are defining style and beauty. And that includes things like fashion magazines, it includes the TV shows we watch, it includes the fashion spaces that we walk into, the stores that we go and visit. It's a really interesting thing to consider how long we spend trying to reshape and redefine our bodies. For me personally, that journey started from when I was about 11 or 12 years old. And I can remember distinctly feeling like I was getting bigger than my friends. I hit puberty a bit earlier, um, and the changes in my body became really noticeable to me, and I became more fuller-figured, while a lot of my friends were still quite slim. And the impact that had on me, I actually don't know how to how to quantify it or to eat to express it. But I can remember from about 11 or 12 really starting to be conscious about the food that I ate, about the looks that I was able to wear, about what I could shop for and the way that I could show up and the way that I would style myself in comparison to my much smaller friends, alongside the options that were available to me as an 11 or 12-year-old girl to try and to try and fit in in inverted commas. I can remember being on scales. I can remember looking up things around how much water I drank to try and lose weight, skipping meals. And the worst part is I can remember just how desperately, above anything else, I just wanted to be like the thin girls. And that's kind of what I want to talk about today. This is why it's so important. Because fashion is never just fashion. Clothing sits so close to our identity, to belonging, to status, to self-worth. And when the message being reinforced over and over again is that you are too big for this world or you should take up less space, we absorb that. Especially young people, and increasingly, especially young girls, children as young as the age of four, let that sink in, four have started expressing dissatisfaction with their bodies, and that is absolutely wild. I think sometimes people dismiss conversations about representation in fashion as superficial because they see fashion as frivolous. But what's actually frivolous is pretending imagery doesn't affect people psychologically. We actually know that it does. It's proven. There's decades of research around body image, media exposure, self-esteem, and eating disorders. Studies have consistently linked exposure to unrealistic beauty ideals with increased body dissatisfaction, restrictive eating behaviors, anxiety and depressive symptoms, particularly in women and adolescent girls. And honestly, many women don't even realize how much mental energy they are spending managing their bodies because it has become so normalized. Normalized to monitor, normalized to shrink, normally normalized to have conversations around the office about whatever the latest diet is that this person's trying. Normalized to start each conversation with you look great. Have you lost weight? Really normalized to describe yourself as good or bad based on your body and on your eating choices. So, you know, I'm being good today, I'm gonna order a salad for lunch. These little things that we have just ended up with ingrained in the way that we are, take up so much energy and so much time and so much real estate in our brains. We have turned this into a really normal and routine way of being, and that is not okay. For some for so many women, getting dressed is not a neutral experience. It's emotional, it's loaded, it's sometimes exhausting. Talk to a woman above a size 10 about going to try and buy a pair of jeans or a swimsuit. It can be debilitating. And I know of people who will go to great lengths to avoid having to do that because it is so stressful and it is so emotionally taxing trying to find something that makes you feel good and fits your body. And what fascinates me is that the industry still acts confused about why women feel alienated from fashion while at the same time continuing to exclude the majority of bodies from campaigns, runway shows, sample sizing, and retail experiences. You can't tell women they matter while refusing to design for them. The two things cannot coexist. When we think about conversations that happen around in the fashion industry about how tough retail can be at the moment, how tough the fashion market is, how hard it can be to try and compete in this increasingly crowded landscape of different brands and designers and options for people. There still feels like there's such a glaring gap of people who are not wanting to step in to thinking about, well, what if we actually showed something different? What if we showed clothes on a body so that people could see themselves reflected back and have a stronger possibility of purchasing a garment based on that? Because they can see it's for them. They can see themselves reflected back in what it is that they're looking at. If you look at any sort of online media marketing, open up your emails, for so many different types of brands, there's often one particular type of body shape or model who is shown in the clothing. And yes, I know that some brands are making an effort to show things differently. So with some, you might have an example of a size 8 model and you might have an example of a size 16 model. But your size 16 model is not your normal size 16 person. Um it's a great start, but I think there's still a lot of work to be done in that space. One of the most damaging things that fashion has ever sold women was the idea that our bodies are a temporary problem to solve. We're tired. We're deeply tired. We're tired of chasing smaller. We're tired of hiding. We're tired of entering stores already braced for humiliation. We're tired of being told that inclusivity exists because one model above a size 10 walked in a runway show. And I think that that exhaustion is part of why this conversation around visibility and representation, it's becoming louder now, even though weirdly, the industry itself is actually going backwards. Because I'm hoping that maybe we're starting to realize that the problem was never actually our bodies. Maybe the problem is that the entire industry, the fashion, the beauty industry, it's all built around insecurity. And look, this doesn't mean that different types of women, women under a size 16 are the enemy. Nothing like that. And it doesn't mean that wanting to feel attractive is shallow. None of those things are true. What it means is that there is a disproportionate representation of one body type when it comes to fashion and beauty. And the odd thing is that that representation actually doesn't represent the majority of people. It doesn't reflect or represent a cross-section of the society of people who you want to buy your clothes, people who you want to be investing in your product with their wallets. You don't show them. You don't show them in what it is that you're putting forward. And that just seems like such a no-brainer to me. I love fashion and I love beauty and I love style and I love self-expression. And that's exactly why this conversation is so important. Because fashion doesn't have to be miserable. Fashion can be joyful, it can be creative. For anybody who's been following the Australian Fashion Week posts from some of their favorite plus size content creators, there is some incredibly beautiful, expressive fashion in there. Women who are creating such spectacular outfits and showcasing their personalities in the most beautiful and joyful way. And it is liberating, but at the same time, it is devastating for me to sit and watch these and see them outside the buildings. Sitting at the runways, but not on them. Why don't we see that? Why is it that we're so excited to celebrate a token size 16 going down a runway? But we don't want to actually challenge and call out and say that there is a whole incredible industry and world of bodies out there who would look fantastic going down that catwalk. As the founder of Revel the Runway, it frustrates me so much to show that it can be done for the second year in a row. So Revel this year, 2026, we had models from size 12 to 24. We had ages mid-20s up to early 60s. We had different backgrounds. We had a model in a wheelchair. And each of those are conscious choices to look outside what's immediately in front of me and think broader about the casting and about what it is that I actually want to represent on a runway. Now, the tricky bit with that is because so many of the models are not used to being seen in these spaces, you have to be really deliberate in the way you call it out, in the way you seek people to come and walk in the show. I remember for the very first runway, for the very first revel, I went through Instagram and I scrolled and scrolled and I DM'd people saying, Hey, I don't know if you've ever thought about being a runway model, but I would love to have you if you would consider doing this. And so many people like, I just never thought that I that would be for me. Creating these spaces, making people feel welcome and building the confidence and showing that not only can it be done, but it can be done well and have such a huge impact. It baffles me that we can't see this more and more in mainstream industry. Clothing can be liberating, it can be transformative, it can completely shift how we feel about ourselves. There's actually a psychological concept called encloshed cognition, which explores how what we wear impacts our emotions, behavior, and confidence. And I think most of us, to be honest, intuitively know this already. We know the difference between walking into a room in something that makes you feel powerful and incredible versus something you're desperately tugging at all night or feels a bit small or feels a bit tight or feels a bit itchy. You know the emotional difference between wearing something because you genuinely love it versus wearing something purely because it hides you and because you are deliberately trying not to stand out. And honestly, I think we deserve more than camouflage. I think we deserve visibility now, not five kilos from now, not ten years younger than now, not after we become acceptable in inverted commas. Now, and part of why I want to create this podcast is because I think we desperately need more honest conversations around the intersection between fashion, identity, aging, confidence, media, and mental health. Not in a preachy way, not in a perfect way, I am very far from perfect, but in a truthful way, because I don't think we need more rules. I think we need more permission. I think we need permission to evolve, permission to be visible, and permission to take up space. Permission to stop treating ourselves like lifelong renovation projects. And honestly, I think the industry is eventually going to be forced to catch up because the average woman has already changed. But fashion just hasn't. And maybe that's where I'll leave today's episode. If this conversation resonated with you, I'd love for you to share the podcast and send it to someone who needs it, or leave a review because we're only just getting started. Next episode, I want to talk about the nature of plus size options and why we're becoming increasingly exhausted by bland repetitive fashion.