Hubert de Givenchy, the French designer who dressed Grace Kelly and Jackie O, once said: “The dress must follow the body of a woman, not the body following the shape of the dress.”

Last week, a 24-year-old woman named Nancy Upton entered American Apparel’s contest to be the face of its new plus-size line. Outraged by the clothing company’s attempt to “use one fat girl as a symbol of apology and acceptance to a demographic it had long insisted on ignoring,” Upton said, she submitted two satirical photos of herself. In one, she ate a rotisserie chicken in a swimming pool; in the other, she smeared the sauce of an individual pizza on her face.

The crazy part: She won.

That is, however, until American Apparel retracted the title, bestowed on Upton by online voters, for mocking “the positive intentions of the campaign.”

Upton has received mass praise from men and women across the country for her humor and courage in representing those who are not a size two.

But I have a huge issue with the way she’s chosen to represent them.

At a glance, Upton’s sabotage of the competition is not upsetting. We all knew, long before her statement, that a major demographic was missing from American Apparel’s representation. We also knew that the company itself was not of the highest virtue; its CEO was accused just last year of holding a model hostage — as a sex slave.

So Upton’s message is less about the company and more about plus-size women. But her photos reinforced an unflattering and obviously unsound stereotype that plus-size women are slovenly and gluttonous.

Furthermore, her winning submissions made an absolute joke of a contest that thousands of plus-size models actually valued as progress — both for themselves and for clothing companies that have long ignored them.

That said, I understand what drove her to do it.

Upton’s situation is just one new example of old issues within the fashion industry, which are often brought to light at this particular time of year: New York Fashion Week.

Since the spectacle kicked into full gear last week, talk of models and clothing lines has been rampant. Popular newspapers created special sections for photos from the fashion shows and interviews with designers. Twitter was drenched in fashion news.

Unfortunately, not all of it is just about the outfits.

I’ve seen articles detailing the exploitation of young models; very few are paid and most are out of work after they celebrate their twentieth birthdays. And Kanye West, whose recent “Monster” video featured scores of young female models hanging from ropes, just launched a women’s clothing line in Paris last week.

Sorry if I’m mistaken, but isn’t the fashion industry supposed to be for women?

Aren’t clothes meant to fit all of us? Shouldn’t models represent us? Shouldn’t they be compensated? And why is a man whose art has consistently involved the defamation of women designing clothes for us?

I’m not a plus-size woman, but I’m also not 5 foot 10 inches and 100 lb. Look around Milwaukee or any other city in America — how many women do you see with model proportions? The only women we see on runways and in our magazines have knees we could break in two and clavicles more prominent than their noses; they look nothing like us and they mean nothing to us.

So although I don’t stand behind Upton’s decisions, I do understand the frustration that drove her to them. Fashion, like de Givenchy said, is meant to follow us — not the other way around. And until we see models of all heights and widths, receiving the pay they deserve from clothing companies and designers who respect them, that conviction will remain lost on us.