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Fat Shaming: Lilly Pulitzer Under Fire As Controversial Cartoons Are Photographed At Company Headquarters

By Joanna Jaguar
Published on: 06:42 PST, May 27, 2015

Popular clothing company Lilly Pulitzer has once again come under fire across the internet, but this time it’s not because of droves of people rushing to buy out a collection from Target in a chaotic Black Friday-esque shopping spree. On Tuesday, New York Magazine’s The Cut Blog ran a feature showcasing a behind-the-scenes photoshoot of Lilly Pulitzer headquarters, and in one of the photos, two drawings that legions of Twitter users are calling an instance of fat shaming can be seen.

The first hand-drawn illustration, which was decorating an employee’s personal workspace, depicts an overweight woman with the caption, “Just another day of fat, white and hideous. You should probably just kill yourself.” A second drawing below the first shows another overweight woman in a bikini with the words “Put it down, carb face” written beside her.

As can be expected, when the photoshoot went live on The Cut Blog, the Twitter-sphere exploded with people berating Lilly Pulitzer for allowing such blatant fat shaming to occur, especially considering an employee in the same photoshoot described Lilly herself as being “ultrainclusive.”

Jane Schoenborn, vice president of creative communications at Lilly Pulitzer, apologized for the incident in a statement.

“These illustrations were the work of one individual and were posted in her personal work area. While we are an employer that does encourage people to decorate their own space, we are a female-dominated company and these images do not reflect our values. We apologize for any harm this may have caused.”

But is it possible that there’s an even darker, scarier reason behind these pictures than simply fat shaming? Some Twitter users think so and believe the employee behind them is in need of help.

These pictures, while definitely fat shaming, could belong to the sometimes scary culture of “thinspo” or “thinspiration” which is full of girls and young women — oftentimes in the throes of battling an eating disorder — who use pictures of sickly thin or morbidly obese women to inspire themselves to keep on dieting. These kinds of pictures can be found throughout “pro-ana” (anorexia) and “pro-mia” (bulimia) websites all over the internet.

So while yes, the fat shaming cartoons at Lilly Pulitzer headquarters are deplorable and need to be dealt with, perhaps before condemning the company, society and the powers that be at Lilly Pulitzer should reach out to the employee in question to ensure that these cartoons don’t reflect an even more sinister and dangerous, self-hating mindset.

[Image Credit: Twitter]

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