THE SHAME GAME
Side- eye, whispers, snarky comments: Why women are getting judged at work . . . for what they eat
DARCY Barber loves her work as a fashion designer— but after 10 years in the biz, there’s still one thing the trendsetter hates about her industry: the widespread fat shaming and judgmentalism about food and eating.
“The fashion industry is the worst,” she says. “Nobody ever really blatantly comes out with any verbiage, shame wise, but you feel it. There’s whispering and disapproving looks . . . everybody knows what diet everybody’s on.”
So she created a playful line, BARBER, which is known for clothing boasting such cheeky phrases as “Fries Before Guys.” The brand, favored by the likes of “Girls” star Lena Dunham, is a saucy nod to industrywide pressures of having to be a sample size or less.
Barber says that, in a past job, she and her coworkers talked about their bodies all the time. “At one teambuilding thing, this one girl ate a cheeseburger,” she says. “It’s totally what I wanted . . . but I ordered a salad like everybody else— and I hate salads.”
Barber’s former company isn’t alone when it comes to food shaming. A few weeks ago, the colorful clothing line Lilly Pulitzer was profiled in New York Magazine, and the company was promptly put on blast for two drawings at their headquarters that ridiculed overweight people. A wall was adorned with “thinspiration” sketches, including one that read, “Just another day of fat, white and hideous. You should probably just kill yourself.”
The brand apologized, but women were still outraged— and rightfully so: Experts say it’s not uncommon for women to judge each other— often ruthlessly— based on what they do or don’t eat.
“Fat shaming is very real,” says Katherine Crowley, coauthor of “Mean Girls at Work.” “This is an area of competition, like, ‘ I’m not gonna show you that I would eat greasy french fries, because then you get to judge me.’ It occurs more often in fashion and beauty industries than it does in, say, a Walmart.”
The irony, of course, is that treats are prevalent in many offices. “When I worked for a fashion company, all anyone ever thought or talked about was what they were going to eat and when,” says a Brooklynbased marketing exec who asked not to be named, citing career repercussions. “Everyone seemed to torture themselves by restricting their calories to a crazy level, yet they had candy and cupcakes around all the time. You’d see girls have, like, two steamed pieces of broccoli and a bunch of candy for lunch.”
In addition, in her workplace, as in others, if you are overweight, everything you eat is considered gross.
“I’ve felt judged for both my weight and dietary habits— mainly that I’ve chosen to eat food at all— by friends who work in fashion, either at wellknown magazines or as stylists/ models/ publicists/ hairstylists,” says a 30something creative director who asked not to be named. She feels the glare of judgmental fashionistas even at children’s birthday parties and school events: “I’ve starved through enough events to avoid being the one woman who dares take a passed hors d’oeuvre.”
Another woman, a former receptionist at a women’s designer ready to wear company, quickly learned her office’s unspoken rules about food.
“No one actually took a lunch break. They would order the same steamed vegetables and salmon every day and discard most of it,” she says. “If I brought in anything considered remotely unhealthy, like a bacon, egg and cheese after a long night out, I got major sideeye and sometimes even comments, like ‘ Ewww, how can you eat that?’ or ‘ Aren’t you worried about gaining weight?’ ”
Meredith Fuller, a psychologist and author of “Working With Bitches,” says many women find pride in being able to deprive themselves— and even believe self-deprivation and selfcontrol is the way to get to the top. “Some women equate the ‘ eat for pleasure’ women as slothful or not as driven and hardworking as [ they are],” she says.
Barber, for her part, is trying to combat these issues with her clothing line.
“To be clear, my line is a‘ fk you’ to my industry,” she says. “We kill our own kind. We know what those girls in the glossies actually look like before all the ‘ photo fairies’ swoop in and smooth it all over— and we still make each other feel subpar for what we look like.”