fashion

Cotton On Body is quietly creating the best clothing Instagram account we've seen.

If you follow a lot of beauty and clothing brands on Instagram, you might have noticed a pattern as you mindlessly scroll through your feed.

There’s one face we keep seeing: she’s blonde, she’s thin, she’s beautiful and she’s everywhere. Of course, it’s not the one model that keeps popping up, but a type, a minor category of woman that is represented on social media accounts so well, you’d think she was the only type of woman.

Listen: Victoria Secret’s attempts at diversity weren’t quite so inspiring.

And then we noticed a company doing something different.

Here at Mamamia, we’ve been pleasantly surprised to see retailer Cotton On Body championing diversity on its Instagram account.

We’re even more surprised that we haven’t heard anything about it. No fuss has been made over the fact that the brand is using average-size models, women with disabilities and women of colour to showcase their activewear, sleepwear and underwear.

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Model Lauren Wasser, who has a prosthetic leg – something I didn’t notice at first glance – features in several of the brand’s recent posts.

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Wasser lost her leg as a result of Toxic Shock Syndrome and now campaigns for awareness of the potentially-fatal condition.

In a interview on Cotton On’s blog, she says that the people she most admires are those in wheelchairs.

“I was in a wheelchair for eight months and that takes such a strong human being to be able to get up every single day when doing the littlest things is such a task. I mean just taking a shower and getting yourself ready to face a world that doesn’t socially accept you, they do it and they own it. They inspire me because I know what it takes to even leave their house. They’re honestly superheroes.”

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Wasser and other models on the feed offer the kind of difference we need to see. As Mamamia co-founder Mia Freedman often says, Instagram has become the new women’s magazine – replacing the old medium as the new source of aspirational images that can often make girls and women feel bad about their own bodies.

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That’s why it’s fantastic to see a brand with such a high-profile promoting women who look more like the women we see in our everyday lives, more like ourselves.

And it would be nice if the rest of my Instagram feed was a lot more like it.

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What Instagram accounts have been making you feel especially good?