Katherine Lipovsky had only gone to pick up a Sephora order.
She walked past an American Eagle store, saw some shorts on sale and decided to try them on. She was 41, lived in Reston, Virginia, and hadn’t worn shorts since she was a little girl. The last time, a classmate had pointed to the backs of her legs and asked what those marks were. They were stretch marks. She wasn’t even overweight then, but from that day on, she never wore a dress without tights again.
She spent decades shopping in plus-size sections, without thinking about colors or cuts, only whether something fit. Everything changed in March 2022, when her test results came back abnormal and a doctor told her that her liver disease could be fatal if she didn’t do something. She came to weigh more than 193 kilos and has since lost 136. In the American Eagle fitting room, with a size 6 in her hands, she burst into tears. The video, just seven seconds long, got more than 120.000 likes, and thousands of women wrote to tell her that, at last, they would wear shorts with her.