Our latest campaign Bring Your Own Body just dropped. A campaign that embraces all that is YOU and being your best self, we’re celebrating all babes and riding on those good vibes of all things love, acceptance and body confidence.
We caught up with model, activist and one of the babes featured in the campaign Mahalia Handley to talk body positivity, happiness and self-love.
At what age did you feel most at peace with your body image?
I feel like I’ve always understood my body as I was a trained dancer before I was a model, and dancing creates a special bond with your body that’s hard to explain. I do, however, feel that when I was about 23 was when I felt settled with who I was and what I looked like, and from 25 to 27 it’s just been leaps and bounds into how much my appreciation for my body has grown.
What is true happiness to you?
Those 5 minutes when I wake up and you’re in fresh beautiful bed sheets, snug as a bug, contemplating how lucky I am to be where I am, who I am and whom I have in this life with me.
How do you practice self-love?
Self-love is a marathon not a race. I also don’t think it’s about routine every week (although I do love a home spa day and food indulgence) but I think self-love is about taking a moment for yourself to find accountability in your actions, understanding that we as humans have emotions and it’s okay to feel them and it’s okay to decide how we want to process the emotions we are having and how we want to move forward. Being accountable to myself is my self-love.
If you could tell your younger self anything, what would it be?
Take more time to study more and invest in the other things you like to do other than modelling and fashion and make those hobbies priorities.
How do you use your social media platform for good?
I like to post outfits that showcase that curvy bodies don’t have to be covered or put in an older aesthetic. I also speak out and create activist campaigns that are out there to make a change. I speak truthfully about what it is that I feel or think, and I have sass, I was always so worried to come across as too sassy or too intelligent and now that I’m older I don’t care anymore about impressing people, I hope that by being myself it encourages other women to be themselves too.
I also have no tolerance for bad behaviour on my platforms, one slip up that’s racist, sexist or of a bullying nature and you’re blocked.
What would you like to see happen in the modelling/fashion industry?
More plus size models of different backgrounds and countries (a wider variety of plus size models not just one or two) on the covers of big magazines and front and centre of campaigns!
As well as an equal ratio and fairer advertising of people of colour especially in Australia!
Also can we just eliminate fur from the industry already!
Finish this sentence; “All women…”
Deserve more! More equality, more reproductive rights and more justice! All women deserve safety and freedom.
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