did it bother anyone else that most of the young women interviewed about being overweight were latinas?

Although the article may have been fairly sexist in its tone (are any fashion related articles ever not?)I would walk away from the reporting with a different message entirely.

Perhaps we should see the blossoming of muffin tops as a sign of people finally accepting women as they are, even enshrining the voluptuousness of women as sexy?

Sure there will always be someone who will say, this or that new trend is unseemly or unattractive, but numbers don't lie. If you see a large number of women sporting a look it means two things. 1) the women sporting that look like that look because they chose that look, and 2) men enjoy women sporting that look, as if they didn't sport that look, it is unlikely that large numbers of women would sport that look.

As to referencing women's bodies with food descriptions, I think that has to be taken with a grain of salt. People's bodies are often referenced in none human terms, when the emphasis is being put on appearance (as it would be in any fashion article), as an example, have you ever wondered exactly what Hunks were hunks of? Beef cakes, ox, and stud all refer to men who are judged by their bodies, and can be derogatory or complimentary.

I think describing something as a muffin top, is better than describing it as a love handle. A Muffin top implies something that bursts forth, free and alive (the top is the best part of the muffin isn't it?) where as a love handle is something desexualized people in their middle age get, something that those you love accept on your body, not something to be displayed. Even the term sausage girl, implies some one round and firm and fully packed, although the derivation of the term is from the derogatory statement "you look like a stuffed sausage," I think it's new incarnation implies someone unashamed of how she looks and willing to put their appearance out there to be appreciated.

These notions may not be particularly feminist of course, but again, what might a feminist article on fashion look like? I can't even imagine such a thing.

This seems like a very difficult article to research in a sensitive way, and I'm not sure the author succeeded. The most disturbing part for me was this:

[Blanca Perez] has a younger cousin who is chubby and insists on wearing clothes that are a few sizes too small. [...] When she called the cousin to see if she would consent to an interview, the girl burst into tears and hung up. Three days later, Perez reported, her cousin was still hurt and upset.

It's one thing to make somebody cry in pursuit of the big story -- like, say, NSA wiretapping. It's another to make her sob about her muffin tops for an article on "Sausage Casing Girls."

I don't think it's intentional - L.A. has a huge Latino population and a lot of integrated communities so no matter where you go, you're going to see a diverse mix of people. But the low-rise jeans topic has been discussed numerous times on this site - the LA Times is just now noticing the muffin tops?

It breaks my heart when I go to the mall and see teenage girls squeezing into clothes that don't flatter them just so they can try to fit in - you couldn't pay me to be a teenager again.

I live in LA proper, but work way out in the burbs. On my lunch break at the mall I see all these teenage girls who are anything but skinny nevertheless wearing the low-riding, butt-crack displaying jeans, with unfortunately exposed midrifs. It's quite alarming, really. There's nothing wrong with being fat, but it is unwise to think you can wear this style when you're carrying a few Michelin tires around underneath the tub top.

I'm calling bullshit on the concept that it's too hard to get clothes if you're not hour-glass shaped (wait a minute, last time I heard a crack about the fashion industry only building for one body-type, it was for stick-thin models. let's at least be consistent!). I watch What Not to Wear rather religiously, being something of a clothes horse, and I've been blown away by the shapes, sizes and sheer numbers of people who believe that the industry doesn't make any clothes for them, and then are astounded by what the hosts, Stacey and Clinton, find for them at actual stores.

Good article, but the "fashion industry only" argument is bullshit, and needs to be put to rest.

And at the water park this past weekend, where we took my boyfriend's two kids, I saw a lot of girls and women with quite large stomachs hanging those big stomachs out in teeny bikinis. While I hid my too-soft stomach in a two-piece with a top that covered my stomach--a retro-y, sort of tennis-dress-type bathing suit with a little skirt (primarily because I hate shaving my "bikini line"--it gives me a rash--and I thought I could get away with less shaving if I wore this).

Anyway, I assumed that the "muffin top" girls like the way they look, because how else to explain it? I wear low-cut jeans, I am most emphatically NOT an hourglass (I have very little differential between waist and hips, which is why I like the low-cut jeans in the first place--anything that fits my hips is much too tight in the waist, and anything that fits my waist is much too large in the hips) and I wear about a size 10 normally, so I am not a skinny thing either. And I can find jeans (cute ones) that don't give me "muffin top"--or at least not much of one. Cute shirts, ditto.

Right now I am confused by conflicting messages of another sort--no, not the "impossible body standard ones" but the ones that say 1) we're all too fat, but 2) we should love our bodies and not be influenced by what we see in magazines, but 3) we're STILL all too fat (especially teenagers), nonetheless 4) let's wear tight clothes and teeny bikinis and hang that fat out for all to see. I really don't get it. If we're all ashamed of our bodies and trying to fit in to an impossible standard, why ARE we running around showing off the fat rolls?

Whereas the way I try to work is 1) I'd like to lose a few pounds, or at least firm up but 2) there's not going to be much I can do about the stretch marks and the stomach jiggle, so 3) for my own self-respect and so others don't wonder what I'm thinking, I'll keep that more or less under wraps.