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#ThisIsPlus campaign inspires diversity in plus-size movement

"#THISISPLUS is a tag for everyone but specifically anyone who feels that the high street plus-size campaigns do not represent them."
/ Source: TODAY

Plus-sized women are woefully underrepresented in the fashion world. And it seems that whenever a fashion brand tries to address the issue with a line of clothing designed especially for them, it only exacerbates the matter by showing “plus-size” models who look scarcely bigger than a size 8.

Surely, plus-sized women come in more shapes and sizes than that! That’s why the hashtag #ThisIsPlus is currently exploding on Instagram, with users all over the world embracing it.

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Mostly plus-sized women, but some plus-sized men, too, are sharing pictures of themselves on the social media platform alongside the hashtag.

Some are taking this campaign as an opportunity to get a bit revealing and strip down to their underwear.

It’s something we see often enough in the media, but usually that imagery focuses on remarkably thin people. It's just not realistic — and what's more realistic than real people who don't model for a living?

A woman who goes by the name of Kat and publishes the blog “A Curvy Cupcake: Fat Fashion & Feeling Fabulous” launched the hashtag campaign.

“#THISISPLUS is a tag for everyone but specifically anyone who feels that the high street plus-size campaigns do not represent them,” wrote Kat, who was not immediately available for comment.

“In the same way that we can't get style inspiration from a size 6 mannequin, we can't be inspired by barely-plus models posing for photoshoots in shop windows," she wrote. "Plus bodies are so, so varied and we need the clothing industry to realize that.”

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Kat published her blog post explaining #THISISPLUS on Sept. 22. The hashtag presently has more than 840 posts.

The majority of those posts have been created in the last couple of weeks, but the hashtag appears to have been first used on Instagram by a user called kckleymann, who used it over three years ago.