New York Created A "Fat Beach Day" To Celebrate Obesity

"Fat Beach Days" in New York feature food, drinks, and free sunscreen to encourage acceptance and celebration of fat bodies, no matter their size. Similarly, a "Fat Friends Pool Party" is taking place in Chicago in July, and a "Bellies Out Beach Day " is scheduled in Los Angeles.

"I’m so self-conscious at the beach, and I’m never around people that look like me,” stated one of the co-creators of the New York Fat Beach Day, Emma Zack, who owns a vintage clothing store "curated for curves."

“I’m so excited we’ve created this space for other folks with bigger bodies to have a good time,” she added.

“In the 2000s, there was this anti-fat, intense cultural swing that really parallels what we’re going through right now,” fellow event coordinator Jordan Underwood explained."

These activists believe that Fat Beach Day helps people fight against "diet culture, and thinness as the ideal beauty standard."

Interestingly, the "fat acceptance movement" continues to be heavily pushed in New York despite the presence of the fashion industry which has largely rejected the demands of "fat activists" (what many "body-positive" activists now call themselves) for decades for practical and aesthetic purposes. The main reason for their resistance is that most consumers don't actually aspire to be fat, but it's also because creating large garments isn't cost-effective or sustainable.

Interestingly, Vogue Business reported that only 0.8% of models at New York Fashion Week were plus-size in 2023, while 3.7% were mid-size, which represents a notable decline from previous years.

Nonetheless, the creators of Fat Beach Day were inspired by an alleged “fat-in” held in Central Park in the 1960s where 500 protestors supposedly burned diet books and photographs of the supermodels to publicly encourage "liberation."

More recently, New York’s mayor, Eric Adams, signed a bill in 2023 to ban "weight discrimination" in hiring and housing meaning that even those who can't perform certain requirements due to their health cannot fired or passed over by a potential employer.

“It’s a really shitty time, not just on the internet but in society, to be fat, and it feels really violent in a lot of ways,” said one Fat Beach Day attendee. “You’d think it wouldn’t be such a thing because New York is so open, and you dress however you want. I always say I never realized how much people hate fat people until I got TikTok.”

As "body positive" rhetoric has given way to full-fledged "fat activism, more people are pushing back against the glamorization of poor health. Some are also calling out the flagrant double standard applied to those with thin or fit bodies and leaving the body positive movement altogether in search of something healthy and aspirational at the same time.

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