Addition Elle employee fired over ‘well-dressed fat lady’ comment
An Addition Elle employee has reportedly been fired for calling clients “fat.”
According to
CTV News, Connie Levitsky started working at the plus-size store’s West
Edmonton Mall location last week. She says she was fired within days
for a Facebook post she wrote about the store’s clients that
read “Conquering the world, one well-dressed fat lady at a time."
Levintsky
tells CTV that her boss said the language was “unacceptable,” claiming
the company prefers terms like “curvy” and “shapely.”
But
Levintsky says that those words promote a sexed-up image plus-size
women – one that doesn’t resonate with everyone who shops at Addition
Elle.
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| Model Ashley Graham poses in an Addition Elle ad. |
"If
you go into any Addition Elle or Penningtons or Reitmans, you know
that’s not how all fat women look,” she tells CTV. “So to use words like
‘curvy’ or 'shapely,’ where you’re essentially talking about a very
specific type of fat woman, I think that’s doing a disservice to the
clientele that you were afraid I’m going to drive away.”
Although
Roslyn Griner, vice-president of marketing for Addition Elle’s parent
company, Reitmans, says that using the word “fat” is a “slippery slope,”
she tells CTV that Levintsky should not have been fired.
“Taken
out of context, it could be offensive to use the word fat for some of
our customers and employees. And for others, they see it as empowering,“
she explains.
"We don’t have this filter to understand people’s
perception of the word.”
While Addition Elle has offered to re-hire Levintsky, she tells CTV she’s not sure she wants to work at the company anymore.
“I
think the real change I would like to see is a conversation being had
about how we see fat people and what we as a society can do to erase
that stigma,” she says.
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