Jaime King has some things to say about body shaming, and it more or less started with Kim Kardashian and her memorable gown at the 2013 Met Costume Institute Gala, designed by Riccardo Tisci when she was pregnant with North West.
King told ELLE.com, her feelings about body shaming started “At the Met’s Costume Institute Gala with Kim Kardashian when she was pregnant [in 2013]. She was with Kanye, but she wasn’t fully accepted by the fashion industry. Riccardo Tisci was very brave in dressing her.”
She explained:
Anna Wintour had invited her to the Met ball, which is a big deal and a big step up for her. But when she was pregnant [there], I remember going back in my hotel room and crying for like five hours because I kept seeing all these things come up online, all of these horrible pictures and GIFs. I couldn’t stop crying because here was this beautiful glowing pregnant woman who is probably so excited to be attending the Met ball for the first time with the man that she loved, and she had this beautiful dress made for her that was very daring and very gorgeous, and she has a beautiful growing child inside of her, and yet everybody bashed her and called her a whale or said she looked like a couch or drapes.
She added her shock that people condoned this kind of online bullying:
It was so stunning to me that people thought that that was okay—not only okay but they condoned it. They would retweet it, they would talk about it, they would put it on the Internet, they would call her a whale on the cover of a magazine. They would not even think about the way it would affect her mental health and the child’s health. It emotionally tapped into a place for me because I was newly pregnant [with my first child]. What kind of world are we living in now where this is okay, where our bodies are being essentially sold to the highest bidder regarding their comments and that we are just put up on a cross to be persecuted?
Nobody’s standing up to say this is wrong. This isn’t right. [Pregnancy] is a very sacred and important moment in someone’s life. [But] the fact is that nobody should be body shamed. Nobody should be torn apart for being too thin or too fat or too this or too that. There are many people that are overweight that genetically have issues. We don’t know what conditions people grew up in.
It’s not fun posting a picture of yourself essentially nude because if you look at my Instagram, I don’t do that. I don’t post like sexy selfies, that’s not what I’m known for. To me, what is sexy is just being authentic…My whole life has been about presenting an image of perfection because that’s what sells in our industry. But as I become more and more of a woman and [think about] what I really put out there in the world, I don’t want to put out perfection anymore because that’s not attainable. That’s not the truth. I wanted to really empower other woman in knowing that hey, yeah, you know what? I am very thin but I’m pregnant and I feel beautiful and I feel grateful that I have a child growing inside of me and I love every little piece of me because if I don’t love myself, who’s going to love myself? And I also want other women to know that I don’t care what you look like. I love you too—the way that I felt about Kim, even though I don’t even know her.
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