Curves Are the Culture.Join the newsletter →

Culture

History

The case that fullness was the standard, not the exception — restored from the historical record.

A three-quarter view of the full-length granite statue 'Confident' on its pedestal in Stryi Park, Lviv: a nude, full-figured woman standing with one hand on her hip, her carved hair falling past her shoulders and dusted with snow, bare winter trees and a curved row of snow-covered park benches behind her.

Photo by Ірина Бучнєва, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Granite Woman Lviv Tried to Burn

Vasyl Korchovy carved her 3 meters tall in 2021 and called her Confident. Two years later, in Lviv, someone tried to set her on fire.

The Culture Desk · 4 min read

A black-and-white 1973 photograph of the Johnson Publishing Company headquarters, a modern multi-story office building with company signage, on Michigan Avenue in Chicago.

Jet's Beauty of the Week: Naming an Ordinary Black Woman Beautiful for 60 Years

The Culture Desk · 4 min read

Titian's Venus and the Lute Player: a full-figured Venus reclines nude on a draped bed with a small winged cupid at her shoulder, while a lute player seated at the left turns to look back at her, an open landscape behind them.

Why "Body Positivity" Was Always the Wrong Word

The Culture Desk · 4 min read

A circa 1630-1635 oil painting by Peter Paul Rubens showing three nude women with soft, rounded stomachs, hips, and thighs standing in a circle with their arms around each other's shoulders in a sunlit wooded landscape, feet caught mid-step as if dancing. Now in Madrid's Museo del Prado.

Peter Paul Rubens Made Fullness the Beauty Standard of Baroque Europe

The Culture Desk · 4 min read

Kenny Guiy of Nissan of Boerne in front of a Nissan Rogue with an explosion behind him. 322 Nissans in Boerne, Texas. 2026 Rogue SV from $361 a month. Text Kenny at 832-524-7770. Offers end September 30.

An anime-style illustration of a full-figured young Efik woman seated on a low carved bed in a lamp-lit room of her family compound during the nkuho seclusion. Her hair is dressed in the tall, sculptural Etenge style pinned with brass combs, and she wears strands of coral-red beads at her throat, stacked brass bangles and anklets, and a patterned indigo-and-ochre wrapper, with fine dark patterning painted along her arms and legs. An older woman in a bright headwrap kneels beside her offering a covered bowl, against woven raffia wall panels and a carved shutter.

The West African Kingdom Where Brides Were Fed Like Royalty

The Culture Desk · 8 min read

Ancient Egypt's Beauty Standard Looked Like Us

The Culture Desk · 3 min read

Keep Reading

More From History

A Tang dynasty handscroll on silk showing five full-figured court ladies in sheer, trailing red and cream silk robes, each wearing an elaborate flowered headdress over a high black chignon. They stand widely spaced against a plain ground with a crane, a small dog and butterflies among them.

Historical image — Photo by Zhou Fang, Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Most Beautiful Woman in Chinese History Was Plus Size

Yang Guifei's fullness wasn't in spite of the Tang dynasty standard — it was the standard. One of history's great love stories, reconsidered.

The Culture Desk · 4 min read

The Venus of Willendorf photographed in its museum case on a mirrored plinth: a small limestone figure roughly 11 centimetres tall, with heavy breasts, a rounded belly and broad hips, her head covered in carved concentric rings and no face carved at all.

Historical image — Photo by MatthiasKabel, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons

The First Woman Ever Carved Wasn't Thin

Forty thousand years before "body positivity," Ice Age carvers rendered the female body full and soft. Nobody agrees why — but nobody flattened her.

The Culture Desk · 4 min read

The colossal limestone statue of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye seated side by side in a museum hall, photographed from below. Both sit upright with hands on their knees, the king in a striped nemes headdress and the queen in a heavy tripartite wig, carved at the same monumental scale.

Historical image — Photo by Prof. Mortel, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Courts That Crowned Her

From the Nile to the Yangtze to the courts of West Africa, six empires didn't just accept a fuller figure — they built their idea of royalty around it. We restore the original narrative.

The Culture Desk · 2 min read

Kenny Guiy of Nissan of Boerne in front of a Nissan Rogue with an explosion behind him. 322 Nissans in Boerne, Texas. 2026 Rogue SV from $361 a month. Text Kenny at 832-524-7770. Offers end September 30.