I am in love with Lady Gaga 2.0.  It took me a while. She’s living, breathing performance art/art installation, and in her latest version (2.0) she’s hooked up with ardent producers, more designers, more exploration. Triple-M!

I wish she sang about butterflies, flowers, and caterpillars though. I aim to watch her videos with the sound off and loop the parts of her song that make me smile. Then? Ultra-yum.

Courage is *always* outrageous. Always lovable. Never goes out of style, is ever-fashionable. Ever-endearing, and ever enduring. Dress it up however you want.

“Any time there is a fat person onstage as anything besides the butt of a joke, it’s political. Add physical movement, then dance, then sexuality and you have a revolutionary act.” —Heather MacAllister

E-thumbing through a portfolio of Erin Zerbe’s body of work, it soon becomes evident that her body is her work, and there’s a soulful body of thoughts supporting it. There’s an active mind at work, a life behind her expression. Plus Size Clothing Magazine is always looking for size-positive folks who inspire others as much as they find themselves inspired, and we’re honored to connect with Full Figured Model and Artist, Erin Zerbe in this interview.

First of all, thanks for taking the time to chat. So, Erin–are you a superhero, or what?

Superhero? No, not I! But I am SUPER dedicated to my positive message, and empowering women of ALL sizes to love their bodies and themselves. I’m honored to have an opportunity to share a positive message about being plus size with other ladies who struggle with…

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Plus Size Clothing Magazine

The Affirm-Who Project?

A lot of folks aren’t familiar with what affirmations are, and yet we make them everyday. Many authors, pundits, personalities, workshop leaders, many you’s, many me’s, we all definite it differently.

in my mind, an affirmation is a statement of any sort that is made manifest in our world, reflecting our strong desires and intentions. If you’re New Agey, you may have heard it in “The Secret,” punk rockers blurt it out and change the shape of the world with their not so silent screams…and there’s a reason why they call Soul songs “baby makin’ music.”

I’d been wondering what would be most fitting for my “someday album,” it was always going to be recorded “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” and I have finally come to realize that, too, is an affirmation. Always keeping the birth of it outside myself.

So the affirmation project, too, is an experiment. It’s an experiment in Staying in Love, standing strong in my pure intention, cultivating my desire to see the project born, stoking the fire, and watching the great results unfold.

Folks have told me so often that they enjoy my artistic body of work, and I realize I’ve recorded projects and singles mostly and mainly in collaboration.

The Affirmation Project is a baby with a 90 day gestation period. I’m raising her on a steady diet of affirmative thoughts.

I Affirm that The Affirmation Project, this healthy baby, is now being born, and I envision that it is successfully funded and sees the light of day, indelibly inspiring others to find their own healing, growth, and affirmation. And so it is!

Be Well,

Jianda

Crystal Renn’s Alternate Book Cover for “Hungry”

Plus Size Visibility Continues In All Shapes and Sizes.

“Whether or not you have a weight problem, during Fashion Week it’s a mental game that is imposed on these girls, and so people in Fashion Week eat less and they believe they’re natural. However I don’t have to do such things.”
- Crystal Renn, to GlamChic

Way to go, Glamour! The wave of enthusiasm, support, and excitement in light of their Lizzie Miller feature inspired Glamour to continue to honor their promise: “We’ll make prominent more full figured models in our editorial content.”

According to New York Magazine, Plus Sized model Crystal Renn will be prominently featured on the cover of Glamour magazine. Per Women’s Wear Daily, the theme of the shoot is “fun in the sun.” Apparently Glamour has been enthusiastically supporting Renn ever since she was featured in a swimsuit article in a previous spread from May.

Renn just finished the cover shoot for Glamour in the luxurious island of Saint Barts, alongside two non plus size models, Alessandra Ambrosio (Victoria’s Secret muse) and Brooklyn Decker (well-known for her Sports Illustrated pictorials).

New York Magazine goes on to say that Glamour has not featured an actual model on its cover for four years–since their May 2006 issue, when Alessandra Ambrosio was the cover girl.

With the cover shoot’s size diversity and…

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Plus Size Clothing Magazine

He emphasized that such ephemera like “career” and “success” were mostly beside the point. “Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It’s the only thing you can control.”
-Deadspin’s Will Leitch, on the words of dearest Roger Ebert

Integrity must be learned.  We’re all only born with so much. Integrity, integration, integral, meaning whole. Integrative healing. Wholeheartedness.

Oftentimes, people of color, at least in the States I can say from direct experience, don’t have the most ideal role modeling, simply because we don’t always have the traditions set in place.

I once had someone say to me, because I didn’t sound like the people of color that she knew from her home state that I wasn’t “following my tradition.” But my folks are from Oklahoma. And that’s just the 2 generations that I know of that are on the books.

You see the conundrum…much of this tradition depends on family heritage, and where, indeed, we arrived from–and when.

It’s Obama time, ideas are being recycled, new rituals are taking place. We are becoming a nation of one, worldwide. You can, for the time being, type “how to” in any major search engine and get a ballpark idea of what and how to create things, from the ground up. Rites of passage in the form of bits and bytes.

Still, there is the idea of tribe. Real-time warmth. Family. Oftentimes our matriarchs and patriarchs, if indeed they figure into our lives at all, either  accept or reject their babies into the fold. This, too, has a lot to do with upbringing, tradition, even habit.

If we’re not initiated into our tribes and we’re cast away, stolen, spurned, neglected, or even accepted into a fold that doesn’t have the right ideas in mind for caring ritual, doesn’t have the models, then what?

Personally I find solace in the idea of family of choice. The LGBT community has taken the idea and run with it, but you find it in various cultures over time. The Harlem Renaissance, even the expats in it. Pre-Civil Rights era and of course in the thick of it, when the idea was new. Feminist circles.

White, too, is a color. Statistically, a lot of folks on welfare are white. We don’t address this idea often enough. Lots of crack addicts are white. Substance abuse busts up tribes too, regardless of color, and with or without the role modeling.

Incest survivors, survivors of abuse, so many scattered tribes. A disapora of motherless and fatherless children who all the while have birth mothers and fathers.

The mama bird kicks the seedling out of the nest. The recreational drug abuser parties with her little ones in the clan in the interest of thinking she’s doing what’s good and best for them. The lioness chases her cub away and bans it to the other side of the plain. We all have to fend for ourselves eventually. A blessing of sorts awaits, in the banishment.

Solutions in mind? The first, of course, is to survive.

Taking oneself from surviving to thriving is an elegant and stately idea. An idea that can be stitched up, patched, band-aided, and healed, one day at a time.

This is truly integrative healing.

My symbols in mind, of this integrative healing, at this time have to do with self-expression. This is the best idea I know up to now. Truth heals. Love with good intentions heals, the best of all possible solutions is a restoration to wholeness. Finding your right tribe can heal. This can take a lifetime. You could also spend your whole life as a tribe of one.

Holistic Healing Practices also come to mind, a part of but not the whole of the integrative healing process.

Thoughts wash up, and heal, survivors all, we are. Everyone on this plane of consciousness is a survivor. We made it out of the warm womb into the brisk cool air of life, today, and made it, yes, another day above ground. Just because we can.

Hand-fashioning, stitching, embroidering the fine and intricate patterns and designs of a life beyond livelihood, a fine work of art that is called quality of life, what a brilliant and blessed journey. I am grateful for it–bruises and bleeding and all.

And healing. I find the process of healing to be a beautiful one. Our bodies do it naturally, a million forces inside us run to rescue when there’s a ding, a scrape, an “anti-antibody” invader. The process of healing, and of support, is an innate one, from the inside on out.

How we make it look is a lifelong lesson. What doesn’t manifest naturally takes time to make itself known, and takes some learning. That is why mistakes, too, are gorgeous and delicious.

Revel in your mistakes, and integrate them. Relishing in that is a joyful and ever-new ritual.

What a beautifully-designed sight you, and your process, and I, and my process are, and will become.