I am currently the founder and CEO of Henning, which makes ethical luxury womenswear in sizes 12 to 26 here in New York City. I had a past life where I was a fashion editor; a few years ago, I was the fashion news editor atso I was overseeing the fashion front-of-book section, the fashion writing team and helped the marketing team as well. Before that, I was a plus-sized model.
17: How did you go from having the idea and inspiration for starting a company to actually making it happen?That process is so scary. People who have done it before would joke and tell me that it's almost a good thing if you don't know what you're in for and you don't know how scared you should be because that naivety kind of protects you from not taking the leap and not actually going out and doing it.The best way to start is to just start.
I think that the reason that we were all such a great team in achieving all those things was that I was the plus-sized person in the room. By no fault of any singular person there, the magazine and the company didn't really have a lot of fat people. Without that particular"secret sauce" of having that experience, you can't fake it. The clothes in our collaboration wouldn't have been as great unless they had someone like me designing them.
Systemically and as an institution, body positivity was started in the 60s by fat women of color, black women. It was meant to demarginalize people who were completely othered because their bodies were so far out of the beauty ideal which also has racist implications and socioeconomic implications. I hope that with body positivity as a system, we actually trace back toward those roots and find more value in education and conversation in that idea.