MAE WEST on body positivity

We’re all for good nutrition, but it can be exhausting keeping up with society’s (and our own) unrealistic expectations. If you’re ever feeling down with your dumpiness, remember the wise words attributed to Hollywood legend Mae West: ‘Curve: the loveliest distance between two points.’

Mae was just over five feet tall, a great wit and so famously well upholstered that Second World War sailors called their life jackets ‘Mae Wests’. She was proud of her body, even if it didn’t fit with the fashion of her time. In later life, she installed a mirror over her bed and adorned her piano with her own naked statue. For a Hollywood starlet, she was unusual. She was 38 years old when she was signed by Paramount Pictures in 1932 and was happy to be perceived as a risqué kind of dame, even though she endured dissing from the likes of author Graham Greene, who referred to her as ‘an overfed python’. But she ended up an icon: Salvador Dalí designed a sofa shaped like her lips and she appears in Frida Kahlo’s painting My Dress

Hangs There. And her nutritional advice? ‘I never worry about diets. The only carrots that interest me are the number you get in a diamond.’

“MAE LOVED HER BODY, EVEN IF IT DIDN’T FIT WITH THE FASHION OF HER TIME”