The fat-girl era is killing ‘Vogue’ The magazine should celebrate Bardot

Little is more frustrating than watching beloved cultural institutions, already struggling under economic stress, hasten their own demise by betraying their customers with woke decision-making. We might call this the “no-bag” effect, referring to the irritation suffered by a customer who has just overspent on a pile of items in order to support a small business, only to be told by the supercilious clerk that the store does not provide bags. Well, next time I’ll just use Amazon, the customer thinks, and who can blame her? 

Vogue’s online obituary for the late Brigitte Bardot is a case in point. The magazine long ago abandoned its mission of providing gorgeous inspirational eye-candy for young women who were never going to be able to afford the clothes, in favor of the dreariest woke-ism. So it’s no surprise that the Vogue cultural critic and body-positivity icon Emma Specter has written about Bardot’s politics instead of her style. 

Bardot was a French actress, singer, sexpot, and style icon, whom Vogue could have celebrated for many things — her smoky eye, her blond beehive, her embodiment of French-girl chic, which combined bombshell cleavage with boyish, gamine stripes. I’ve never particularly liked Bardot — she had the cruel face of a small animal, a sclerotic trout-pout, and looked spray-tanned long before it was a thing — but you could learn a lot about scarves from her. The orange skirt, metallic jacket, and black beret she wore in the video for the song “Bonnie and Clyde,” with Serge Gainsbourg, was both playful and timeless, and would look good on the streets of any city today. If you wanted to know what to pair with pumps, or how to rock an off-shoulder corset top, or the scornful angle at which to hold a cigarette, Bardot was your girl. 

Specter, a writer for a major fashion magazine, doesn’t mention any of this. “Mourning Brigitte Bardot Doesn’t Mean Absolving Her,” the headline on her obit piece reads. Instead, Specter preaches: “It’s our collective responsibility not to let [Bardot’s] legendary beauty and talent obscure the ugliness of her Islamophobia, sexism, and far-right apologia.”  She calls the actress the “embodiment of prototypically ‘perfect’ white womanhood,” and asks readers to consider that her fame “relied upon systemic marginalization and outright racism.” We expect such claptrap from Jezebel, but from Vogue? 

The magazine was ratioed online for the piece — meaning it garnered many more negative comments than likes or reposts — as well as for the identity of its author. Specter, who has been profiled on a Substack called “Big Undies,” is morbidly obese, and in 2024, she published a memoir about her eating disorder, titled More, Please: On Food, Fat, Binging, Longing and the Lust for Enough. She recommends dressing flamboyantly and unabashedly “for the body you have” and has a certain in-your-face approach to it: think sheer red-lace dress over giant red undies, or playful, color-block outfits that seem to emphasize what fashion magazines used to call “problem areas.” 

The urge to criticize her for tearing down Bardot is ignoble, but obvious. 

I worked for Vogue’s publisher, Condé Nast, decades ago, in the era when you had to be thin to even work at Vogue, let alone be photographed for its pages, and I found its militant policing of the beauty standard as noxious as everyone else did. Little did I know I’d want it back, but I do, though not because I agree with Specter’s online critics. What’s annoying about Specter on Bardot, is not the author’s weight, but her joylessness. She’s a humorless writer, offering only the most predictable of insights, such as that Bardot was a Right-winger and favored restricting immigration. 

In another controversy, in 2024, Specter wrote a piece criticizing the author Sally Rooney for not featuring enough (any) fat girls as romantic leads in her novels — a woeful misunderstanding, for a cultural critic, of Rooney’s brilliant mixture of idealized romance and the millennial hyperreal. Fat girls don’t star in Rooney’s novels — but judging by the books’ mega popularity, they read them, and love them, precisely for their preternaturally beautiful, carved-hollow lead characters, and the handsome men and kinky sex they enjoy. Shouldn’t this tell us something? 

Specter as a critic is a contrast to Specter the persona. In photographs, the writer has a sweet face, a winning smile, and a good sense of the color, cut, and flow of clothing — she’s stylish. When she’s putting her large body out there and looking happy, as she often does, she provides legitimate inspiration to any woman who struggles with her weight but still wants pretty clothing and to enjoy her day. Her choices, like a black dress with loopy boob-piping, or a frothy minidress over bike shorts are often whimsical and charming, and even the ones that seem aggressively-in-your-face offer a frisson of power. You don’t like it? Deal with it. The playful, punk-rock elements of her bodily nonconformity are good in themselves. They don’t rewrite the beauty standard, but they’re an escape valve from some of its more crushing demands. If she were my friend, I’d admire her. 

These elements of Specter’s personality are far more interesting, inspirational, and even subversive than her politics. A more honest body positivity might admit that beauty exists, and we all like to look at it, and that asking people to think otherwise is dumb. At the same time, to be beautiful is a chance of fate, and not a moral good. It’s completely possible for Brigitte Bardot to have been an icon of beauty and style, and also a sour little troll. And it’s enjoyable and appropriate for a fashion magazine to celebrate the one without reference to the other.

Vogue, even at its best, was cruel and status-conscious, but it was also once liberating, wildly creative, and a land of dreams, where death-by-perfume-card was a possibility, but at least you’d die in nice clothes. Its embrace of the woke orthodoxy has constrained the escapism without much diminishing the cruelty. And in some ways, the new demand — that we be fat and love ourselves for it — is crueler than the old. 

Emma Specter isn’t a Vogue writer because she’s beautiful; she’s there as a political token for the magazine to display its conformity to the current body-positivity status quo. And the rage against her online isn’t — or shouldn’t be — because she’s fat, but because she’s peddling a kind of untruth about the value of beauty. To stop pretending would be to free her to be appreciated for her good qualities, which are real, and it would allow us to appropriately censure her detractors, too. It would let Vogue return to fantasy-land, where it belongs. 

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