Curvy or normal?

On the Street....Angelika, Milan

I saw this young lady in Milan several times this past season. She is one of the crop of new bloggers. (Read her blog here.) I loved that she's a bigger, curvier girl than most of the other bloggers who you see in the press and tend to represent the genre.

The subtle thing she achieves so successfully in these two looks is to complement the sturdy but beautiful shape of her legs with an equally strong shoe. A daintier shoe would be overpowered but these shoes create a beautiful harmony for the lower half of her body.

Tomorrow I'll post an image of a different young lady I met in Paris with a similarly curvy body type but a different method of creating body harmony.

UPDATE

I love a post like this. It creates a real and important conversation.

A number of the commenters are upset by the word "curvy." They feel I should have used the word "normal." However, normal is relative. There is a young lady on my team who is 5'0", and another who is 5'9". Which would be "normal"?

Look at the man walking across the street in the first image, and the height of the umbrella in the second - and Angelika relative to each. This girl is taller than most, and has the bearing to match. Regarding the curves...just because you don't see them does not mean they are not there. Is there a minimum degree of curviness to be considered "curvy"?

Remember, curvy is a body shape, not a weight. To be honest, you can't really see in these photographs most of the curves - chest, stomach, hip - this woman has.

I get emails all the time from self-professed curvy girls who want to see representations of their size on the site. What sucks is that when I try to put a photograph up to talk about these issues, the post is hijacked over the political correctness of the words.

So help me understand; what is the modern way to speak about size? I'm not married to the word curvy. I'm just trying to describe her in the best way I know how. Let's not hide from this issue; I don't want to be afraid to talk about it on my blog. Help me describe this young lady without using the word "normal," but in a way that addresses her body size and still references my point about the size of her legs relative to her shoes.

Last week I did a post of older women every day, and I was proud of that. I am proud to be a blog that is showing women of different sizes. I don't want to lose the potential power of the post by being caught up in wordplay.