RAHUL SHARMA DEBT CONNECT IN MANCHESTER, UK,
Adele is currently the number one trend in the UK on
Twitter. What had she done to warrant this attention amid a pandemic? A new
single, perhaps, or a livestream performance? No, she had posted a photo of
herself on Instagram, wearing a black dress and heels outside a house
(presumably hers), in front of a wooden circle decorated with garlands of
roses. She looks happy.
In the caption, there’s a small note thanking fans and
friends for sending best wishes on her birthday, and also a message to key
workers amid the coronavirus pandemic. Yet it’s the way Adele looks that has
caused such an almighty kerfuffle. It’s also what’s caused me to confront a
long-running struggle with the way I think about other women’s bodies, and my
own.
Adele didn’t always look like this. When she first emerged
in the mid-Noughties, she was one of a number of “gobby” singers, alongside
Lily Allen and Kate Nash, to scandalise the tabloids with her “laddish”
behaviour. She swore, she drank, she didn’t give a f***, basically. She looked
different, too – put bluntly, she was fat. The media tiptoed around this by
calling her “voluptuous”, “full-figured”, “curvy”. She didn’t seem to care – a
2009 interview in Vogue had her joking about having “three bums”, and
commenting: “Fans are encouraged that I’m not a size 0 – that you don’t have to
look a certain way to do well.”
She proved that and then some. Her three albums have sold a
combined 60 million copies worldwide, and she is of the most successful artists
of her generation, with a cluster of Grammys and an Oscar to her name. She
broke the record for the fastest-selling album in the US before she turned 30.
In interviews, she was confident and clear in what she had to say. “I would
only lose weight if it affected my health or sex life, which it doesn’t,” she
said in 2011’s Adele: The Biography. She was warm-hearted and generous with her
fellow artists – think back to the Grammys in 2017, when she insisted it was
Beyonce who deserved the Album of the Year award. Yet somehow all of this has
been forgotten by the media, because over the past year, her body has changed.
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