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**Trigger Warning - This story discusses disordered eating and fatphobia.**
The 2023 Met Gala is already getting headlines - but not for the right reasons.
It was recently revealed the prestigious fashion event will be dedicated to the late fashion mogul Karl Lagerfeld.
While this isn't the first time a designer has been chosen as the Met Gala theme, choosing Lagerfeld has led to a great deal of online backlash.
To some he was known as the creative genius behind Chanel; but for many others he's known as the man that hates women - particularly FAT women.
For the many decades Karl Lagerfeld worked in the fashion industry, he never tried to hide his feelings towards fat people.
He even wrote a diet book to encourage fat people to lose weight and "discover or define their real personalities."
'The Karl Lagerfeld Diet book' oozed weight bias and fatphobia right from the beginning.
"Weight-loss guru" Dr. Jean-Claude Houdret manufactured the strict diet and in the book's forward wrote, "overweight people who are more and more numerous are paradoxically the unloved of our time."
Lagerfeld continued this fatphobic sentiment by adding, "it is a lie to think that appearance does not matter in this day, it allows you to live in harmony with yourself."
It seemed every time Karl Lagerfeld opened his mouth he shamed women's bodies.
He didn't like Pippa Middleton's face and said she "should only show her back."
He called Heidi Klum "too heavy" to be a runway model.
He described Adele as a "little roundish" and "a little too fat," yet later said his comments probably "helped her" lose weight.
He actively defended the industry's unspoken practice of hiring exclusively rail-thin models to walk in fashion shows on the grounds that "no one wants to see curvy women."
He protested against Brigitte magazine's decision to only publish photographs of 'real women' and blamed the decision on "fat mothers with their bags of chips sitting in front of the television and saying that thin models are ugly."
And in 2013 he even blamed France's social security issues on "people who are too fat" as they catch "all the diseases."
With all that said, Anna Wintour and the team behind the Met Gala still want to honour this man.
Somehow a man that's openly fatphobic, misogynistic, anti-migrant and anti-Russian-men (that's a whole other story) is deemed worthy enough to celebrate at the world's most prestigious fashion event.
Our fave podcaster/actress/mental health advocate/body positivity activist, Jameela Jamil, called out the Met Gala for celebrating a man who repeatedly "hurt and belittled people."
She wrote on social media that it's "deeply problematic and offensive" to choose a "ruthless, fatphobic misogynist" as the Met Gala theme for 2023.
"This man... was indeed, supremely talented, but used his platform is such a distinctly hateful way, mostly towards women, so repeatedly and up until the last years of his life, showing no remorse, offering no atonement, no apology, no help to groups he attacked... there was no explanation for his cruel outbursts," says Jameela Jamil, "why is THIS who we celebrate when there are so many AMAZING designers out there who aren't bigoted white men?"
Yes, this man contributed to the fashion industry IMMENSELY, but why can't the Met Gala celebrate a different designer?
Why not someone that hasn't mocked fat women for simply existing?
Why not someone that hasn't ridiculed women in the public eye?
Why not someone that didn't spend decades of their career encouraging toxic diet culture?
This man wasn't just 'outspoken,' he was a fatphobic misogynist.
And by celebrating that legacy, Anna Wintour and the Met Gala team only confirm that fat women are still not worthy in the fashion world, or even in today's society.
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