Curves or No Curves, Just Wear the Bandage Dress

Earlier this summer, Patrick Couderc, former Hervé Léger exec, outlined who should not wear the company’s eponymous bandage dress. His restrictions boiled down to “voluptuous” women (and lesbians, randomly). 

All the various celebrities who attended the Hervé Léger show today must have missed that memo. The Léger-clad front row was a glorious celebration of the boobs, butts, and curves, all bestowed by God and toned by Barry’s Bootcamp.

None looked more fantastic than former model and writer Beverly Johnson, who was spotted in the front row, chatting about Paris and jet lag, with the most glamorous sort of casualness. “I’m a curvy woman, so I embrace it. I think that they make dresses for curvy women,” she told the Cut when asked about the anti-voluptuous sentiment. “Their fashions don’t look great on stick-thin girls. You need the shape.”

“I mean, look,” she said, standing up and showing off her own curves in a classic black bandage dress. “If I were 103 pounds like when I was modeling, this dress wouldn’t look the same.”

When asked about body-positive campaigns on social media and movements to redefine “curvy” and “plus-size,” Johnson shared her full-scale support: “I think it’s wonderful. We have to celebrate who we are. And the whole image of models has changed. When I was a model nobody wanted to look like me, they didn’t want curves. My daughter was a plus-size model. She started off as a straight model — meaning a size zero — and she hated it. Then she went to school and got her MBA and came back and was one of the top-ten plus-size models in the world and was much much happier.

“We have a responsibility now to represent the woman, the real woman, we’re trying to do that. I have so much respect for women who stand up and appreciate and love themselves.”