Londoner Antonia Jade uses her online platforms to inspire body confidence and self-love. The 23-year-old vlogger speaks overtly and at once to her target audience, reinforcing one essential message; you are lovely no matter what. On her YouTube, she talks actually approximately her experiences developing up with low confidence, feeling like an outcast due to her size. As part of a yr-lengthy challenge with style logo COLLUSION, Antonia is documenting a wealth of frame-positivity, her passion for inclusive fashion, her revolutionary fashion, and her choice to make a trade. Here, she opens up solely to Glamour about her struggles and body shape and what brands want to do to reveal genuine inclusivity.
I have always struggled with my body photograph for as young as I can, don’t forget as I’ve constantly been bigger than my friends my whole complete life. I’ve usually felt inferior and much less appealing because of the size of my body. I would handiest ever wear black, unfastened-fitting garments because I believed it’d make me appear slimmer. I pretty lots simply desired to blend in with the historical past and now not be visible. I remember in school, it changed into my own garments day, and you needed to come wearing yellow, and I wore all black head to toe and yellow socks because the notion of sporting colorings could convey me near having a panic attack. My friends and my other classmates laughed at me the whole day for sporting all black, and I simply wanted to just curl up in a ball and disappear. I cried myself to sleep that night and simply, again and again, asking myself why I can’t just be every day and slender like all and sundry else.
I still get emotional while speaking approximately my weight and my journey because it is nonetheless very tons a massive part of my existence that I do battle with, granted now not as a lot as I used to. Still, the one’s self-hating thoughts and feelings do creep back in often. The desire to be narrow took over my life. Losing weight changed into the best issue on my mind 24/7; even if I had misplaced weight, which leads to disordered consumption and tension, I changed into still obsessed with being as slim as physically possible.
That all modified when I came across the frame positivity hashtag on Instagram three years in the past, I felt like I had finally become home. Seeing girls of all specific shapes, sizes and races put on bikinis (which I used to consider changed into socially unlawful for plus-sized ladies) and breaking ridiculous fashion stereotypes and regulations that society has imprisoned plus-length girls with was exhilarating and comforting. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s represented within the mainstream media and inside brands. A lot of people want to put on crop tops and bikinis too you recognize! I want brands and the mainstream media to honestly capture the authentic range of the body positivity movement and the real beauty, self-assurance, and range of fashion styles that plus-length ladies have, in place of branding us as insecure, self-loathing, and trying to hide our bodies beneath black floral smock dresses.,,
