“I was getting down on myself, but seeing your post was a pleasant reminder to be kind to myself no matter my size.”
“Love the body positivity and you both are so gorgeous inside and out.”
“Just beautiful. Even more so for the message you’re sending out.”
Khloe Kardashian has called them “fire”, they have amassed nearly 180,000 followers in just two months, and Sports Illustrated has invited them to castings.
Kate Wasley, 22, and Georgia Gibbs, 21, are taking on the world and Instagram is documenting every step of it.
As two friends of two different sizes, with blonde hair and the faces of women who look more like sisters than friends, the Instagram feed of Wasley and Gibbs doesn’t look dissimilar to the all-Australian girls we tend to gravitate to on social media – at first glance, anyway.
But to consider their Instagram account Any BODY just like everyone else’s would be to miss the core purpose of what they are setting out to do.
You see, Wasley and Gibbs, in posing in bikinis and on beaches and on location and on shoots, are trying to do something simple. They’re trying to show the world how size and shape don’t matter.
Friends for years and models in their own right, it took an innocent image that became a viral sensation for Wasley and Gibbs to recognise social media needed to see women of all sizes.
“The Instagram account was created from years of sharing a mutual passion for self love and self acceptance. [The idea] was sparked from some negative feedback we received on an image we posted online – instead of people commenting on how happy we looked, people jumped to comparing our bodies instead and this really shocked us,” they tell Mamamia.
The image they posted was this one.
They were a couple of normal, everyday chicks going out on a Saturday night. And then, they say, the “controversy started”.
“‘You have photo-shopped yourself thinner or your friend bigger, what kind of friend are you?’ Was one of the comments, it broke my heart because Kate and I are best friends – why would I do that? The fact a simple picture of two people together went so viral purely because of their body types shocked me,” Georgia wrote on Instagram after the image attracted unwarranted attention, and later, commentary.
“All I see here is two women… not one ‘skinny’ woman and one ‘curvy’ woman, stop comparing everyone to each other and accept every person as beautiful in their own right.”
Born and bred in Perth, the duo “created a strong bond” when they both moved to Sydney to pursue their careers. They have been “inseparable” ever since.
Listen: The argument for being “body neutral”. (Post continues.)
When that one image went viral, the girls grabbed a photographer, took some photos together and put them on Instagram. By their own admission, the response they received was “absolutely insane”.
“It inspired us to create an account where both women and men can feed inspiration for learning to love the skin they are in. [We want them to] view our account and hopefully feel more content in themselves every day, accepting that no two bodies are the same and individuality is something to be celebrated,” they said.
Perhaps what’s most interesting about the exponential rise of their following and therefore their presence online is how their positive output has enveloped them in a positive community.
Rather than a barrage of trolls and abuse, the comment section of Any BODY’s Instagram page is littered with messages of thanks, support and encouragement. People have responded exactly how they had hoped.
“From the hundreds of direct messages from women (and the occasional man) sharing their story of personal struggles to celebrities shouting out Any BODY,” the girls say the highlights of their quick rise to prominence are everywhere.
The trolls are few and far between.
“There is always someone who has to try to pull you down but we just like to delete these comments! Or, alternately, we leave them and there is usually other people on the account who close the negativity down pretty quick too which is amazing.”
With castings for Sports Illustrated in their back pocket and more collaborations coming off the back of their newfound viral fame, it seems the girls won’t have a problem generating more support.
Their supporters are already out in droves.