Isabella Moore: the fashion for skinny bodies teaches kids they'll never be good enough

Growing up in the '90s when "heroin chic" was the beauty ideal, Isabella Moore never imagined someone of her size could be a model, but in the "body positive" early 2010s, her career as a curve model took off.

These days, the fashion industry has again turned its back on diversity and inclusivity, Moore says. In the RNZ docuseries Cutting The Curve, she examines her relationship with her own body to help others with bigger-than-standard bodies feel seen.

"I want [women] to feel empowered and to show up and walk a bit taller and with a bit more confidence and take up the space that they deserve and they're worthy of taking."

Before becoming a full-time model, Moore was an acclaimed opera singer, trained as a professional soprano in Wales and the US and won the 2014 Lexus Song Quest.

Last year, she had the "huge huge honour" of singing the Sāmoan folk song 'Tofa My Feleni' with her husband, fellow opera singer Benson Wilson, at the Royal Family's Commonwealth Day service at Westminster Abbey.

"I was singing, and I was making eye contact with the Prince of Wales, and I was just like, how many people get this opportunity to sing a Sāmoan song? It felt extra special."

Opera singing first came about after Moore got kicked out of the St Mary's College school band for not going to tenor saxophone lessons.

Required to pick up another instrument for NCEA music performance, she chose singing and became the leader of the school choir.

After training as a soprano overseas, Moore wasn't successful in scoring a young artist's opera residency in Europe, and in 2019 came home, feeling defeated.

Back in Auckland, though, she fell into the "open and welcoming arms" of Unique Model Management. In the early 2000s, as the body positivity movement boomed, the work rolled in for Moore as a plus-size model.

In recent years, though, Moore has seen the fashion industry make a disturbing shift back to the idea that there is only one "acceptable" size for a female body - thin.

As a curve model, she has learned to be "resilient" in the fashion world, but when Cutting the Curvewas shot in 2023, Moore's body was "bigger", and the jobs were drying up.

Although the most desirable size of a curve model in London has now dropped to UK 14 (NZ 12), Moore refuses to take Ozempic or any other weight loss drug to try and shrink her UK 18 to 20 (NZ 16-to-18) body to fit this standard.

"My health's more important".

The celebrities risking their health by taking drugs to be skinny help perpetuate "unattainable" beauty standards that the body positive movement attempted to smash over 10 years ago, Moore says.

"People still believe that thinness equals worth, and are using the drug to try and fit the narrow beauty standards set by others, rather than questioning and working through their own internalised fat phobia or challenging their own ideas or what they've been told is beautiful."

Moore knows how damaging a lack of inclusion and diversity in media is for the many people who don't see themselves represented.

The promotion of skinny as the only way to be beautiful is giving young people a "warped sense of reality", she says.

"We're teaching our kids that they'll never be good enough as they are. We've basically received an inauthentic reflection of the world that we live in."

Moore's advice to young people low on body confidence is to be kind to themselves and give themselves grace.

"Don't blindly follow others. Listen to your gut, and if your gut is saying 'no', then really listen to that. Question everything, especially question yourself and the rules you live by. Let go of the ideas that don't serve you. Reflect, and when you learn about yourself and discover more, just remember to give yourself grace.

"Don't always believe what you see in the media, because with AI and heavy editing, you don't know what's real and being real is so important and so empowering for yourself."

Cutting The Curve premieres at 12pm on Monday 25 August.