Plus-size model Barbara Bang makes some noise

MANILA, Philippines - If we’re being completely honest, the concept of body diversity hardly exists in local media, if at all. (No, Sharon Cuneta does not count because she is an exception, not the rule.) And if you look closely, you’ll notice that the starlets churned out by the reality TV machine have been groomed to the point where they’re all starting to resemble each other: Victoria’s Secret Angel hair, tiny, sylph-like faces, arms and waists like a prepubescent boy’s, fake boobs, fake noses, glutathione-white skin, bleached star-white teeth. The standard is pretty much set in stone.

“I think it’s really hard to change it,” 24-year-old Barbara Bang tells me from her makeup chair. “It’s already imprinted on society, how you should look like or what’s glamorous and what’s not.” The half-Norwegian Bang tells it like it is, perhaps coming off a tad cynical, especially when you consider that she’s the current face of SM Ladies’ Plus Size Fashion in the competition’s second year. And if you think about it, apart from Jenna Pertgen, the first winner of the nationwide plus-size model search in 2011, she’s probably the only face of plus-size modeling here in the Philippines.

Having “always, always” wanted to model since high school, though, Bang knows how rigid the industry can be when it comes to standards.“Women should be able to relate to their type of size, so nobody will be insecure if they’re not ‘perfect’ as portrayed in the media,” she says. “But it’s really hard to change it, to make someone think the way you do. To make everybody open-minded is quite hard, so I think you just do your own thing and it will spread to other people.”

Like most would-be models, she tried going through the conventional route: “I had to avoid eating — not totally — but I had to drink a lot of water, starve a little bit,” she tells me. For a girl whose normal dress size is in the higher double-digits, she whittled her waist down to 29, which is half her current dress size. “I had to work 10 times harder than other naturally fit models. I’ve always been a big-structured woman.” She reached a point where she realized that she could take the whole modeling career and lose the weight, or leave it. So she left it before reaching her 18th birthday.

She’s never regretted her decision since. Though she continued to keep an eye out for gigs that might need a plus-size model, she soon realized “plus-size” in the Filipino modeling industry meant average-sized women who wore sizes eight to 10. Now, she gets to truly represent what a plus-size model should look like. “People always advise, ‘If you want to look slim, you should wear black,’ and I say, ‘I don’t want to look slim! I want to look the way I look.’ There’s no point in hiding something that’s pretty obvious, so I’d rather show it,” she says.

When asked about what got her through her difficult phase of being a young, struggling model, she says nonchalantly, “I think you kind of get over it. Like, if you don’t fit in a certain category and you look at somebody in the magazines or on television you think, ‘Oh, I wish I was her.’ I think you have to be secure with yourself or else you could end up becoming pretty down on yourself. Have security because there will be a lot of negative comments, whether you’re thin or big. There will always be something, but as long as you’re sure and happy with yourself, they can’t really affect you.”

Photos by RXANDY CAPINPIN

Styling by RYUJI SHIOMITSU

Assisted by KEITH ANGELO

Makeup by DON DE JESUS for MAC Cosmetics

Hair by ALEE BENSON

Special thanks to Vanilla Cupcake Bakery