Fat Bubble: Vanessa X Camille

Hey friends! Welcome to the Fat Bubble, where each week I gratefully land in your inbox and offer up some fat joyful resources, to celebrate and affirm ourselves in fat culture. 

It’s summer season here in the UK, and my newsfeed is full of weddings. Of course, because my lens is fat 😉, my mind immediately goes to how weddings translate into a fat experience. 

The anti fat hate built into weddings is so established, it can be hard to ignore it. Culturally, it’s a wildly acceptable practice to diet and restrict in preparation for the wedding. The knowledge that you will be the centre of attention can feel distressingly vulnerable and visible, and it can feel rare to opt out of those practices,

Really, all major milestones under diet culture are caveated: that we should only reach for them, or expect them, when we have passed through the door of ‘intentional weight loss’. Weight loss is the magic key that will satisfy us and make us worthy of the experience. So many job promotions, wonderful holidays, new hobbies, relationships generally, weddings and celebrations exist suspended in time, waiting for weight loss to grant us permission. 

As with so much body liberation, the idea of acceptance rather than modification is so very radical. It can feel like there’s no one out there in the world just getting married as they are. We have very few blueprints for body acceptance, that when we hit certain milestones, we look around and we don’t see anyone doing it in the way we want to do it. There are a couple... I can’t forget Bethany Rutter’s gorgeous wedding- she writes about her experience in this great article here. I am so so grateful that Alysia Cole exists in this world, doing the work she’s doing! And I always love to see the delicious confections that Nerecina Couture creates. 

But we deserve these things just as we are, if we want them. We deserve all our hopes and dreams in the body we have right now. A powerful quote from Virgie Tovar is:

‘In the dreams I have of my future, I am fat’.

What a permission. All things are possible, in the body I have right now. All things are possible, in the body you have right now. And if that future were to include a wedding, you can do it fat. 

The wedding that has made me smile the most this season has been the stunning, stunning wedding of Vanessa X Camille. If you want to immerse yourself in wedding joy, do check out her IG and Tiktok – she has a saved story highlight, and lots of gorgeous videos and photos to soak up!

Vanessa got married in Hawai’i and this is a good opportunity to share mutual aid resources in support and solidarity with the people of Hawai’i. Click on the images below to find out more.