Tara Quinteros is flipping through a rack of vintage clothes when she spots it: the perfect linen summer dress.
“I love the slip moment,” she explains. “But also I carry a lot of weight in my tummy, so being able to open up the side and wear shorts underneath is really cool.”
As she peruses the wares of 20 vendors popped up in a North Hollywood alley, Quinteros says this is one of the first times a flea market has made her feel included. That’s because it was curated exclusively for plus-size folks.
“In Los Angeles there's so many of these markets … focused around clothing and they're never meant for people like me,” says Quinteros. “Being able to walk in here and know I could shop at any of these tents is absolutely incredible.”
The flea market is called Thick Thrift, and it’s the brainchild of part-time stylist Rachael Frank. As a plus-size shopper, Frank knows what it’s like to spend hours thrifting only to come home empty-handed.
“I think expressing yourself through clothing is part of being human,” explains Frank. “The fact that we're denied the basic humanity of self-expression … that’s a really big deal. And that makes us feel like ‘others’ in society. So it's ‘just clothes,’ but it's actually a way for us to feel seen and heard as people.”
Frank and two friends put their first Thick Thrift event together this year.
Aya Kajikawa, Rachael Frank and Mia Fernandez (left to right) teamed up to create LA’s first plus-size flea market. Photo by Kyle Boland.
Co-founder Aya Kajikawa, a plus-size fit model for a local fashion brand, says when she teased the event on TikTok, she got a huge response. “Zero comments have been negative,” she says. “Everyone's like, ‘Wow, I'm so excited,’ ‘This is so needed.’ It’s been great.”
Co-founder Mia Fernandez, a clothing reseller, adds that the vendors got excited too. “We’ve had vendors from Canada and Texas that were like, ‘Let us know if we can vend and I'll book a ticket.’ It's very overwhelming. It doesn't feel real.”
Frank says part of the point of creating Thick Thrift is to push back against fatphobia.
“We're here, we're plus-size, we're not going away, and we deserve space, just like anyone else does,” she says.
Why is “fat” such a dirty word anyway?
UC Irvine Sociology Professor Sabrina Strings points out that there have been many times in history when curves were celebrated. “We have so many paintings, and there are even books that were written during the Renaissance, that make it very clear fatness is beautiful,” she says.
But Strings, who wrote a book on the topic called “Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fatphobia,” says it all changed toward the end of the 18th century when the slave trade was booming in America.
She explains when “fat” became a dirty word: “It wasn't until people tried to make a connection between Blackness, and especially Black femininity, and fatness as proof of lack of self-control during the Enlightenment. [It was] an era in which everyone was trying to claim that they were rational and disciplined and self-controlled. So it wasn't until these connections were being made that people thought, ‘Well, fatness is a problem.’”
Fatphobia really took off in America in the 19th century partially due to fashion, Strings says.
“It was women's magazines … who were producing what were called these lithographs of elite white women,” explains Strings. The message? “This is the way that you should look. You should eat with temperance for God because you're a good Protestant. And your figure, as an ideal American figure, is expected to be slender.”
Today, of course, that’s still the ideal. But since 1999, the percentage of American adults the CDC considers “obese” has increased from 31% to 42% (“obese” is a term activists see as derogatory because it labels fatness as a disease). The average woman’s waist size was almost 39 inches as of 2018, according to the CDC.
That means most Americans are considered plus-size – but you’d never know it from browsing store windows when you walk through a mall.
Jessica Hinkle (left) runs Proud Mary Fashion, a plus-size fashion brand. Tara Quinteros (right) visited her booth at Thick Thrift. Photo by Andrea Bautista/KCRW.
At Thick Thrift, vendor Jessica Hinkle says the fat community deserves more spaces to shop and feel safe. As she helps people check out, she says she’s worked in plus-size fashion for 12 years and owns Proud Mary Fashion in Highland Park. The existence of brands like hers might give you the impression there’s no problem, but she says, “No, there's still so much we're lacking. We're not serving the plus-size consumer. ... There’s just room for so much more.”
Thick Thrift’s co-founders couldn’t agree more. After a successful first event, they’re working on finding a new location for their next pop-up in July.