Anna Scholz Blog

Looking for fun and enlightenment this bank holiday weekend? Then head over to London’s Saatchi Gallery and witness the magic of Hermès artisans at their crafts.

From May 21-27, the Festival de Métiers exhibition at the gallery will feature a selection of Hermès artisans demonstrating how they make luxury products in their workshops in France. Visitors will see the famous Hermès silk scarves printed right before their eyes. Demonstrations of the creation of the much-coveted Kelly bag will also take place. Visitors will be able to interact with the craftspeople as they bring to life watches, jewellery, handbags, scarves and other iconic Hermès objects.

Admission is free, which helps towards the cost of a Kelly bag, right? (A girl can but dream.) Maybe we’ll just try chatting up an artisan…

We’ve already raved about Anna’s sexy photo shoot for online magazine, Volup2. But we’re also loving the way Amy Lamé has been styled in Anna’s Spring-Summer 2013 collection for this latest issue. The photographs were taken by Velvet D’Amour, the magazine’s Editor, Creator, Art Director and Photographer.

Transplanted to London from New Jersey, USA, Amy Lamé has built a career in radio, TV, journalism and performance. She’s also has a regular hostess gig at the nightclub Duckie. One of her many notable achievements includes holding the first Lesbian Beauty Pageant in 1997 (documented as the first of its kind in The Guinness Book of World Records). She also turned a stint on “Celebrity Fit Club” a few years ago into a platform for demonstrating how a curvy woman could be genuinely happy with herself but aim to improve her health on her own terms.  She currently can be seen onstage as the star of  Unhappy Birthday, which she wrote, produced and performs (see below for details).

In addition to getting all dolled up in Anna’s styles for the pages of Volup2, Amy gives a frank interview to Melissa Jo Smith, in which she discusses her work, her politics and her love of diamante everything.

Amy delights Melissa by using the F Word. “Rule number one of feminism– the personal is political,” says Amy. “All I have to do is walk down the street and people are affronted and make their disgust known. That makes it political. Because I’m not a shy, retiring wallflower, I’m not going to sit at home repenting for my sins like they’d like me to, drinking a diet shake, like they’d like me to.”

Amy speaks openly about how her work for the Burger Queen pageant also has increased her interest in exploring the psychology behind body issues and in pursuing self-honesty through her work. “I’m fat and I’m fabulous. I won’t entertain any other idea;” she elaborates, “it’s really not very productive. I’m interested in constantly pushing my own boundaries and trying to understand who I am and why I am who I am. We all want to know ourselves a little bit more deeply, to try to live in a better way. That’s one of the goals in life, isn’t it? I think trying to understand that can be scary.”

Amy’s courage to face fears and to confront deeper meanings through creativity, humor and compassion gives others the inspiration to do so as well.

Read the full interview here.

Unhappy Birthday is at Camden People’s Theatre, London from May14 – June 1, 2013, www.unhappybirthday.net

Anna strikes a number of seductive poses the latest issue of the online magazine Volup2. Velvet D’Amour, the magazine’s Editor, Creator, Art Director and Photographer, has bestowed the theme of “Grace” upon this latest issue.

Herself a former plus-size model, Anna shows that she still has that chameleon-like ability to work any number of different looks!

See the full issue of the latest Volup2 magazine here!

Anna recently had a nice chat with blogger Miss Kathryn of MissKathryn’s MissTakes.

Here are a few choice OutTakes!

K: These are exciting times in the plus size industry: what is exciting you / inspiring you at the moment?
A: I am happy to see the voice of the plus size community getting louder and stronger, there is much more involvement from bloggers and ‘real’ women within the industry. Collaborations between bloggers and designers with companies like Simply Be, Evans and Swimsuits for All are making sure that (plus size) women get products they actually want.

Kathryn, Liz and Anna at the Plus London Two blogger event last year

K: Are you likely to go down the route of some designers / brands and utilise bloggers / your fan base more?
A: I loved having the blogger event in our studio as part of Plus London Two and am hoping to be involved in Plus London Three as well. I am always inspired by listening to people who look at our brand from a different perspective.
Social media offers us a great exchange with our fan base.

K: What do you prefer to design – clothes that flatter, or clothes that flaunt, or do you think clothes can do both?
A: Oh I think clothes can do both, as you want to flaunt your own best assets and flatter at the same time. I am all about curve enhancing and showing you off to your best potential.
I also keep in mind problem areas and add a little pleat / ruching detail here or there to help out with lumps and bumps. Curvy women come in so many different shapes and sizes and what suits one woman doesn’t necessarily suit the next, so when I design a range, I try and keep different body shapes in mind so we have something for everyone.

Read the full interview here!

How many of us have a friend who (as much as we love her) kind of brings us down and makes us feel uncomfortable because she’s constantly saying negative things about her body and appearance? Or maybe we ourselves have gotten into a bad habit of voicing that negative inner voice (we all have one—that’s another thing to work on correcting). What does this negative body talk really achieve? Well—according to a recent study—it ultimately serves to alienate you from people and to make you less “likeable.”

As reported by Huffington Post, psychology professor Alexandra Corning and her research team at Notre Dame’s Body Image and Eating Disorder Lab asked 139 undergraduates with average BMIs to look at photos of women of various weights captioned with both negative and positive statements from the women themselves about their bodies. The participants viewed eight photos each, including every possible combination of body size and positive or negative statement.

The findings indicated that participants “liked” the women who said positive things about their own bodies more than those who engaged in “fat talk,” and positive overweight women were liked most of all.

The researchers concluded that the undergrads preferred the overweight women who made positive statements because a larger woman expressing satisfaction with her appearance may be less threatening than a thin woman expressing confidence. They also decided that seeing larger women being positive about their bodies “may encourage others to accept their own bodies as well.”

The HuffPost article also cited a 2011 study led by Rachel Salk involving a similar number of students, which demonstrated that women also engage in fat talk in order to be reassured of the opposite by friends, but are not usually comforted by friends’ responses. “In Western cultures,” the study reads, “women’s dissatisfaction with the size and shape of their bodies is so common that it has been termed ‘normative discontent.’”  This study also concluded that women may express body dissatisfaction not only because that is how they feel, but because they think it is how they should feel about themselves. In other words, society expects women to feel bad about their bodies. (Interestingly, though Salk feels that fat talk diminishes with age, a 2013 study found that women replace fat talk with old talk, or negative comments about their increasing age.)

Ultimately, Corning’s study refutes Salk’s study’s conclusion that fat talk bonds women together, and feels that her findings are important “because they raise awareness about how women actually are being perceived when they engage in this self-abasing kind of talk.”

So there’s now scientific research to support the downside of voicing negativity about ourselves aloud. Now we all need to work on silencing that negative inner voice—easier said than done– that whispers only to us…

What do you think about these studies?

Check out Anna’s recent interview on Female First.

Among other things, Anna discussed getting ready for summer (if only summer would come to the UK!):

What are your fashion tips for dressing for summer?

ANNA: Be daring, be bold. Experiment with colour and print. Summer should make you want to have fun with clothes. Wear ‘comfort’ shorts under dresses and skirts to avoid uncomfortable rubbing, enjoy maxis with flat shoes.

And wear pretty underwear so you don’t mind showing off a colourful bra strap under a strappy dress. If you don’t want to show your arms , add a shrug, but really if it is hot, just go with it.

How about swimwear – which is the most flattering pieces for plus size?

ANNA: I personally love Tankinis the most. As I am very tall most swimsuits are too short for me and I always feel tankinis give you a much better breast uplift.

So get something supportive, and buy the bottoms one size smaller to hold you in and give you more support.

I also love halter necks for great cleavage, just not that great for tanning.

Read the entire interview here!

The studio photo shoot for the campaign imagery for Anna’s Autumn-Winter 2013 White Label collection was a big success earlier this week.

We don’t want to reveal too much, but here are just a few tantalising photos [courtesy of our intern, Anne] with more to come…(can’t promise too many more of Frida though– she’s expensive and very choosy about how her image is used!).

Plus size American model Jennie Runk says she was completely surprised that her H&M beachwear campaign would cause such a stir. Since she had never really considered how she looks in a bikini, she was surprised that so many people were pleased to see her curvy figure in the campaign photos.

In fact, says Runk, some women have confessed that her photos have “inspired them to try on a bikini for the first time in years. This is exactly the kind of thing I’ve always wanted to accomplish, showing women that it’s OK to be confident even if you’re not the popular notion of ‘perfect’.”

Runk has decided to use the attention she has received “as an opportunity to make the world a little nicer by promoting confidence.” She especially hopes to reach out to teenage girls as she had an awkward adolescence and feels it is a difficult period to navigate. “When our bodies change and we all start to look totally different, we simultaneously begin feeling pressured to look exactly the same,” says Runk. “This is an impossible goal to achieve and I wish I had known that when I was 13.”

Having finally survived her teenage years, “I feel compelled to show girls who are going through the same thing that it’s acceptable to be different,” Runk explains. “You will grow out of this awkwardness fabulously. Just focus on being the best possible version of yourself and quit worrying about your thighs, there’s nothing wrong with them. … After all, I never thought of myself as model material but then I was discovered at a Petsmart, while volunteering in my too-short sweat pants no less.”

Runk acknowledges that “there are also negative connotations associated with thinness. Just as bigger women get called fat or chunky, thin women get called gangly or bony. …There’s no need to glamorise one body type and slam another,” she says. “We need to stop this absurd hatred towards bodies for being different sizes. It doesn’t help anyone.”

When she was first discovered, Runk was given the option to lose weight and try to maintain a US size four (a UK six or eight), or to gain a little to be a US size 10 (a UK 12 or 14) – and start a career as a plus-size model. Since she knew her body was never meant to be a size four, she decided to go with plus modelling.

The self-professed “quiet type who reads books, plays video games, and might be a little too obsessed with her cat” seems to be doing pretty well so far!

Read Runk’s full self-penned article from BBC New Magazine.

“This was at an art auction for my husband’s charity,” Kirsten wrote us.  “I loved wearing the kimono contrast dress and got lots of compliments!”

We would like to encourage anyone who loves the Anna Scholz brand to nominate it for a chance to win in the British Plus Size Awards 2013.

“[W]e feel the time has come to reward outstanding service and inspirational people,” says the event’s website. “We want to recognise those who have broken barriers in the plus size industry, an industry that is being utilised by more and more people.”

HURRY: Click here to enter your nominations — the poll closes at midday on May 31st, 2013.

The awards ceremony will take place on 23rd November 2013 at the Grand Connaught Rooms in Central London and will be in conjunction with the Miss Plus Size International 2013 beauty pageant.