Vogue criticizes due to a lack of plus size models in 'Hairspray'-inspired video with Gigi Hadid

Vogue's latest homage to “Hairspray” owes many license plates of the beloved musical: a catchy song, Big Hairdos and the 1960s.

But many spectators noticed a prominent part of the Broadway show and the film was left out: Plus-Size people.

The video that was published online on the Vogue Social Media and on Tuesday on its website is associated with its cover story in April about Gigi Hadid, which is known for the modeling of brands such as Victoria's Secret and Calvin Klein.

Equality and representation are two core topics of “Hairspray”, which follows Tracy Turnblad, a self-described “pleasantly plump” teenager in Baltimore in the 1960s, while she is pursuing her dream in a TV dance show and at the same time aimed to integrate it.

Vogue's feature is entitled “Gigi Hadid cannot stop the beat”, one piece on one of the popular numbers of “Hairspray” entitled “You Can't Stop the Beat”. In the video, Hadid Lip-Syncs to the song before accompanied by actor Laverne Cox, Comedian Cole Escola, designer Marc Jacobs and model actor dancer Alton Mason. The video, a fully 3-minute, 17-second version, which is published on YouTube, reflects the 60-aesthetic aesthetic from the film and the Broadway show.

Some people online pressed frustrated that most people in the video are thin, which they said to defeat the entire acceptance message of the musical. Others shared concerns that the cover shooting of Vogue is the latest indicator that society is removing body positivity, a movement that focuses on self-acceptance regardless of the body type.

“Sorry, but everyone who knows hairspray knows that this is a crazy campaign so that it is not even [have] A plus size person in this? What's going on … ”, wrote Remi Bader, an influencer that is known for the promotion of body positivity for your millions of social media followers, on Thursday in her Instagram history.

“It is wild because I am literally a plus -Size model that Tracy gymnasium has played three times and somehow no plus size. Bailey Scaman, a model, wrote in a comment on Vogue's Instagram Post.

Representatives of Vogue, Hadid, Cox, Escola, Jacobs and Mason did not immediately answer inquiries about comments.

The April shoot takes place only a few months after the Vogue Business published its report on the inclination of spring/summer size of 2025. It wrote that “progress has stalled and that we have a worrying return to the use of extremely thin models in the middle of the Ozempische Boom”, whereby we relate the popular drug emigration to weight reduction.

It said it was analyzed: “Every runway show and presentation on Vogue Runway from the official schedule in New York, London, Milan and Paris, to calculate the proportion of overall looks that are currently in the middle of size”, and found that less than 1% of the more than 8,700 runway models plus size were.

Last year, many influencers who are known to promote body positiveity have been a return to the “thinness” as a norm about what they say.

Some people who reacted to the Vogue video repeated similar concerns.

“If I have learned something from Vogue's Hairspray cover, it is the case that thinness is nearby again and we have decreased so much that even the tokenistic body diversity has disappeared,” wrote a Tikok user in the text of a video that was viewed over 1.5 million times from Thursday. “How does an entire crew of people okay?”