In 2014, Denise Bidot became the primary plus-size model to run 2 runway shows at NYFW. The 32-year-old launched a life-style movement referred to as 'There’s no wrong thanks to being a woman' in 2016 and has modeled for Chromat, Nordstrom and Lane Bryant.
Denise Bidot On Being A Walking Role Model For Her Daughter Joselyn
Before modeling was even on her mind, Denise Bidot was all about breaking boundaries. As a child, she recalls having a rebellious spirit, not allowing anyone to stand in her way or tell her no. As a teenager, she refused to succumb to pressures to lose weight, influenced by both industry professionals and some within her family. When she rose to the top of the plus-size modeling market, she adhered closely to her body-positive mentality to create a pathway for further models to come. And now, as a mother, Denise Bidot is raising her 11-year-old daughter Joselyn to do the same. The two walked the runway together for New York Fashion Week.
“I never really thought the diet culture was one for me. [I knew that this] self-loathing or inability to see yourself and love yourself stops with me.”
Bidot was raised by a Puerto Rican single mother who constantly struggled with her weight and body image. Watching her mother’s yo-yo dieting battle and how it was only making her increasingly unhappy and unsettled, Bidot realized early on that weight loss was not the key to happiness, nor was attempting to fit societal norms of beauty. But in that day and age, body positivity was never discussed, and so Bidot found it difficult to broach the topic with her mother.
“Body positivity was something that was never really spoken of. Not only just within my household but I think in a lot of households of people of my generation and older," she says. "Back then, it was unfortunately a time when everyone believed and was sold this notion that being skinny was the goal: it was when you became happy, it was when you found your man, it was when you got your promotion—so many things in your life revolved around you being thin and beautiful.”
She always tried to tell her mother that “she's absolutely gorgeous, and her body is beautiful. And it was beautiful at a [size] 2, it was beautiful at a 22, it is beautiful everywhere in between, and I just wanted her to see that.”
Whether or not her mother saw how beautiful she was, Bidot did, and that experience was formative when she turned 15 and traveled out to Los Angeles to begin auditioning as an actor. She was told, however, that her curves, boobs, and butt made her only castable as a more mature woman — a common over-sexualized judgment made towards women with curves — and since she was still underage, they told her to come back to L.A. after she turned 18.
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