On Friday a new dress collection by blogger Nicolette Mason hits the market, via leading plus-size brand Addition Elle. Consumers may be familiar with Addition Elle’s “I Am Size Sexy” campaign, which helped rocket supermodel Ashley Graham (of the historic Sports Illustrated cover) to stardom. As one of the largest and oldest plus-size fashion brands in North America, Addition Elle is riding the sea change of fashion’s increasing inclusion of diverse body types—and many of its models are slowly gaining entrance into a larger beauty industry that previously slammed its doors in the face of the body positivity movement.
But even in this corner of the fashion world carved out by otherness, Nicolette Mason stands out. The 29-year-old’s tattoos, often changing hair (sometimes two-tone, sometimes pink), and girly-yet-punk style have helped her gather hundreds of thousands of fans online. With 109,000 followers on Instagram, more than 39,000 Likes on Facebook, and 24,000 Twitter followers in addition to her popular blog and a four-year-old column at Marie Claire (where she is a contributing editor), Mason is queen of her style empire.
Courtesy of Addition Elle
What makes Mason’s success all the more exciting is the fact that she’s been out about her sexuality from the very start. Mason, who married her wife Ali Talan in a much-blogged-about Brooklyn ceremony last year, imbues a proudly queer femme sensibility into all of her work. It’s a certain edge to her style—a cute toughness embedded in the fabric of her retro-influenced Addition Elle dress collection, a distinctly femme line where each piece is named for one of Mason’s friends. The Jesse dress is named for Jesse Lackowitz Crozier, a stylish queer from the menswear label Outlier; the Janet dress is, of course, named for Mason’s famous fellow Marie Claire editor (and transgender icon) Janet Mock.
Courtesy of Addition Elle
Mason’s style supremacy is inextricably linked to her gayness, size, culture, and relationships. Hers is a career realm that only seems possible in 2016, when social media has driven demand from the bottom up by consumers who not only want to see themselves represented, but also crave someone real to walk virtually alongside them on their lifestyle paths.
The Daily Dot went to see Mason’s new dress collection in person this month at the Row NYC hotel. Immediately upon entering the room, her attention to detail popped: Mason’s heels matched the Champagne, which in turn matched the flowers, which matched her acrylic nails, which matched the macarons. Everything in a shade of lavender-tinged pink, delicately femme.
Heading straight to the rack of dresses, Mason was all business. As she caressed the fabric of her creations, she talked about the collaborative design process that built the collection over an endless series of emails and images: “There were points when I think the designers wanted to strangle me a little because I was being so specific about my design needs, but it was a lot of fun,” she said.
Each of the seven occasion dresses (sizes 14-24) are high femme, with lace elements and pink and retro 1950s-inspired cuts. The bigger purpose is simply to look cute, but Mason also took care to fill in some gaps that plus-size women often encounter with certain dress styles—literally. The shirt dress has a flat-laid button strip down the center that’s designed never to pull apart in that annoying “shirt gap” way—one that so often frustrates busty fashionistas. The dresses are designed to be easy; specifically, to fit into a multi-hyphenated, busy lifestyle like Mason’s own.
Courtesy of Addition Elle
“Women have a lot to do. In our generation, we have to wear so many hats in order to make our careers work,” Mason said, explaining that each piece was designed to be travel-friendly and flattering without a bunch of special undergarments. “All of the dresses I wanted to be wearable with just a bra. You don’t need a slip or shapewear, the body con dress does it for you because this fabric is nice and heavy. The dress should just enter your life and be easy.”
The ethos behind this particular collection is work-to-weekend; the wearer should be able to work any of the pieces at a client meeting, then take it straight to happy hour and out on the dance floor. It makes sense that this would be Mason’s approach to clothing, given her own career as blogger-editor-model-designer-influencer.
Sitting in the luxurious hotel suite, Mason described her self-made career.
“I started blogging before that was a thing,” she said.
A graduate of the Parsons School of Design, Mason initially went to work for a brand strategy firm. When she started her blog in about 2008, it was similar to “a really primitive Pinterest” and mostly served as a place for her to assemble her own style inspirations. But the timing couldn’t have been more perfect: With the people issuing a growing clamor for plus-size representation, Mason’s blog quickly entered the emerging canon—and stayed there.
“Social media has given women a platform,” said Mason, “To say that they matter, to tell brands that they want to shop! Being a blogger and an influencer has fed into that—it helps give a platform to very frustrated consumers who, for years, have been feeling left out of the conversation.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/-cpYrVG0mk/
“The bottom line was people saying ‘you should go away and hide yourself,’” Mason said. “There were other comments that were even more aggressive and kind of scary, but the one that stuck with me the most was the person who wrote that they hated ‘having to lie to my nine-year-old about what you people are.’ What if that child is gay? What if that child is transgender? What message are you sending them?”
When the harsh ray of homophobia is aimed at Mason’s wife online, she feels especially outraged.
“The comments that people direct specifically towards my partner are devastating. She’s not choosing to put herself out there,” said Mason. “I feel very protective of her.”
But for all the hatred, there’s an enormous outpouring of love in the plus-size online community. In fact, love is what sparked the design partnership with Addition Elle. Mason was first approached by the brand to shoot scenes with Talan for the #MeetMyLove campaign, which showed plus-size models and influencers with their partners.
“There’s so little positive visibility of women who are outside normal beauty standards in their relationships,” Mason said about the project’s appeal.
“So many times I’ve worked with brands who were like, ‘can you tone that [gay] side down a little?’ And there was absolutely none of that when I started working with Addition Elle,” Mason said. “It was really celebrated… And it didn’t feel tokenizing, which was really affirming and empowering.”
And Mason knows as well as anyone else that her presence—out, proud, and stylishly attired—could make all the difference for a young, isolated person desperate for a mirror image.
“That’s not something that I had growing up,” Mason said. “I was very depressed as a teenager, which could be for a multitude of reasons, but it all comes down to feeling like the person you are is not OK. Being told actually that the person you are needs to change in order to be acceptable.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/BAzoARHm0qf/
For every depressed and isolated LGBT teen now, there’s a Brendan Jordan and a Jazz Jennings and a Rowan Blanchard. For every queer, plus-size femme kid who dreams of growing up to be a design superstar that goes to fancy lunches at Chateau Marmont, flies off to Hawaii for a weekend, hangs out with celebs like Beth Ditto and Aidy Bryant, goes to Barbie parties in Los Angeles, and has their wedding dress specially tailored by Christian Siriano—well, there’s Nicolette Mason.
Correction 10:50am CT: An early version of this piece misattributed a quote by Addition Elle’s Jen Patterson to Nicolette Mason.
Photo via Addition Elle