Katie Sturino is not a black swimsuit type of gal.
As she wandered the racks at Bergdorf Goodman on a Thursday afternoon in late May, she wore a floral silk muumuu and a striped sweater, a bright green Hermès bag with candy-colored purse charms slung across her arm. She grabbed a stack of bathing suits — patterns, colors, a baby blue tweed bikini with buttons at the waist — and asked a sales associate hovering nearby if she could please grab them in the largest size the store has.
The associate eventually returned without the requested models, instead proffering up a scant handful of shirred, red one-piece options, adding, unasked, that they came in navy and black, too. They were too small, but Ms. Sturino politely tried one on anyway. It fit, if fitting means technically being able to pull a garment over one’s body.
Ms. Sturino was unfazed, taking out her phone to snap a mirror selfie of the pair of us in matching vermilion Lycra.
It’s a scene that’s played out dozens of times — both in her private life and in the videos she regularly broadcasts to more than 800,000 followers on Instagram: Ms. Sturino searching for clothes that fit her in major retailers, trying on a too-small option, and documenting the result.
It’s also a scene that unfolds in the opening pages of her first novel, “Sunny Side Up,” out on Tuesday. The book tells the story of a dog-obsessed public relations pro turned body-positivity influencer slash entrepreneur who built a social media audience by posting candidly about her life.
The protagonist’s biography bears a close resemblance to that of Ms. Sturino — a dog-obsessed public relations pro turned body-positivity influencer slash entrepreneur who built a social media audience by posting candidly about her life.
But even in this autofiction-friendly moment, Ms. Sturino has repeatedly insisted that the frothy novel isn’t really about her. Instead, she said, it’s the story she was looking for but couldn’t find after her first marriage ended, in 2016.
“I went back to old favorites like Bridget Jones or ‘Sex and the City,’ which, like, those characters are messy and I like that they’re messy, but they’re also not necessarily bringing in that body messaging that I’m looking for,” Ms. Sturino, 44, said earlier that afternoon, over a shrimp salad at an upscale restaurant near her apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan (which also happens to be where her protagonist lives).
For more than a decade, Ms. Sturino has made a career out of “body messaging.”
In 2015, when she started her blog The 12ish Style, which offered advice and shopping recommendations for women somewhere between straight-size and plus-size clothing, the body-positivity movement seemed ascendant, led by a mix of women’s media, corporate brands and outspoken female celebrities. The movement notched some wins: Ashley Graham landed a Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover. American Eagle rolled out its Aerie Real campaign, which showed unretouched models of various sizes joyously strutting around in their undies. Instagram was awash in hashtags like #EveryBodyIsBeautiful.
“We had such a great 10 years of growth,” Ms. Sturino said.
Now, though, her novel is arriving at a “weird” cultural moment.
Body-positive influencers have started not-so-mysteriously shrinking, sometimes — but not always — talking openly about the way Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs have helped them lose weight. Those drugs “gave permission to people who didn’t believe in that movement” to abandon inclusivity efforts, as Ms. Sturino sees it.
Ms. Sturino said she was currently taking a GLP-1 medication, though she was hesitant to discuss it.
“The thing that I fear is by talking about it that I will make people feel as though they need to do this drug also, and that is just something I never want to do,” Ms. Sturino said, adding that some test results had improved since taking the medication.
“I tried to change my own bloodwork using exercise and lifestyle changes for a couple years and that did not work,” she said.
She worried her followers might feel abandoned.
Elsewhere online, communities glamorizing eating disorders, including #SkinnyTok, have proliferated in a way that feels almost retro, reminiscent of the “thinspo” days on earlier platforms like Tumblr. On fashion runways, larger models are disappearing.
“It’s hard when you put your whole heart and life and work and put yourself out there only for all of it, in a matter of — let’s be honest — months to be completely ripped away,” said Hunter McGrady, a plus-size model and friend of Ms. Sturino’s. “It just goes to show we live in a society where bodies are trends.”
Getting Into the Body Business
On Instagram, Ms. Sturino has the tone of a favorite camp counselor, a summer job she cherished as a teen. She is friendly in a no-nonsense kind of way. Women regularly DM her to share their personal stories, Ms. Sturino said. She exudes confidence, often posting videos in her underwear, performing what she calls a roll test by squatting in front of the camera and seeing if the waistband stays up.
She calls out brands who do not carry bigger sizes via a hashtag campaign she started called #MakeMySize where she posts content modeling ill-fitting clothing, like an Aritzia skirt, in the largest size the store carried in 2018, that wouldn’t go past her thighs. It’s a form of gentle public shaming that relies on Ms. Sturino’s willingness to expose those sweaty, stressful fitting-room moments most would never choose to relive — let alone broadcast. (Aritzia has since expanded its size offerings.)
She is adept in the patter of a millennial woman who came of age online and would probably be skewered by Gen Z for her defense of skinny jeans and occasional side part.
Her rise to mega-viral “body acceptance advocate,” as her Instagram bio reads, is also a millennial story.
After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison — she was born and raised in the state — with a degree in communications, Ms. Sturino moved to New York, where she got her start working an entry-level P.R. gig at Dolce & Gabbana.
Her boss took her aside one day at the office and informed Ms. Sturino that her preferred uniform of Uggs boots and a terry cloth Juicy Couture sweatshirt was not appropriate office attire.
“I was extremely on-trend, just in the wrong space,” Ms. Sturino said, adding she started wearing black to blend in better. She was eventually let go. After a few more jobs, she decided to open her own business.
“I didn’t want to be yelled at and I didn’t want to be made to feel like an idiot for something that was not life or death,” she said of the decision to strike out on her own.
She started her firm, Tinder PR (no relation to the dating app, though she said she eventually sold them her website domain for $50,000) and found internet fame as a dogager (that’s dog-manager) running an Instagram account for her since departed Cavalier King Charles spaniel, Toast.
She got the idea to start her blog, The 12ish Style, after she was featured on the fashion site Man Repeller. The 12ish got its first big break not long after, when Glamour called to do a feature on Ms. Sturino.
All of this was parlayed into her brand, Megababe, a line of personal care products best known for its anti-chafing thigh stick and a powder for under-boob sweat that Ms. Sturino founded in 2017. The brand, which sells in chain stores like Target, Walmart and Ulta, remains self-funded and is “profitable,” Ms. Sturino said.
An animated ad for Megababe, showing a product meant to reduce ingrown hairs, played in the cab on our way to Bergdorf.
There is another spot in which Ms. Sturino is shouting at the camera, she said, adding in a whisper that she sometimes wonders if a cabdriver will recognize her voice when she gets in the car.
A multihyphenate who also had a podcast (“Boob Sweat”), nonfiction book (“Body Talk,” an illustrated workbook about self-love) and Substack newsletter, Ms. Sturino’ said she was influenced by billionaire businesswomen like Sara Blakely, the founder of Spanx, and Jen Atkin, the celebrity hairstylist turned entrepreneur.
These days, a novel can be just another thing to add to an influencer’s business portfolio, more a mark of prestige than a significant source of income for an internet star. For publishers, which have an increasingly symbiotic relationship with #BookTok, a book by an influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers has started to seem like a no-brainer.
Reading Ms. Sturino’s novel is not dissimilar to scrolling her Instagram feed. Along with the obvious parallels to her life, the book is peppered with recognizable New York City locations and specific brand names. At one point, the fictional Sunny spells out a shopping discount code for readers in a familiar influencer style.
“I think pushing into a novel, but having that novel also sort of pushing back into a brand — it feels very holistic,” said Jennifer Weiner, the author of “Good in Bed,” who also wrote a blurb for Ms. Sturino’s book. (She calls Sunny, the main character, a “modern-day Bridget Jones without the toxic self-loathing.”)
Ms. Sturino said she worked with a ghostwriter. “I don’t have the traditional path that a lot of people who write books have had and I needed help,” she said, adding she felt “no shame or embarrassment about having a collaborator.”
“I think that there’s a big wall around literature and who can be a writer,” Ms. Sturino said, adding, “There’s just a lot of pretension.”
‘Free of Diet Culture’
For two years, Ms. Sturino was married to the influencer Josh Ostrovsky, better known online as the Fat Jewish.
“I wanted somebody who wanted to be with me and who, like, loved me,” Ms. Sturino said of dating again after her 2016 divorce. “I mean, really low bar.”
After the divorce, Ms. Sturino said she gained weight and discovered that if shopping for size 12s and 14s had been a challenge, shopping for larger sizes was all but impossible. But just a few years after she had started The 12ish Style, she found more brands had become size inclusive — to an extent.
“When I needed a size 16, there were no size 16s. Since then you can find a size extra, extra large, or a 16 in a lot of collections that were not available back then,” Ms. Sturino said. “That I take as a win, it’s a small win.”
“There are still like a lot of places to get good plus-size clothes, but some of the novelty places that you were like, ‘Wow, they’re extending their sizes, that’s so exciting!,’ those places are gone,” she said.
She met her current husband, John, on Bumble in 2017. He showed up to their first date in jeggings.
He took her last name. Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City and a friend of Ms. Sturino’s family, officiated their wedding two years later.
In addition to an apartment in Chelsea, the couple splits their time between homes in Palm Beach, Fla., and Wiscasset, Maine.
Ms. Sturino described her relationship and home life warmly, but in her work, she navigates the world with a “thick skin.” It’s a defense against those who see her body as unruly and offensive, as well as people who have cynically watched her for any sign that she is trying to shed pounds.
Now that she is speaking openly about using medication, Ms. Sturino said she isn’t looking back negatively on her larger body.
“I have learned to address my new, old sizes with fresh eyes and a mind free of diet culture,” Ms. Sturino wrote in a text message. “This took work. I don’t celebrate the number going down on the scale, I don’t rejoice in changing sizes and I do not look at my heavier body with disdain.”
“We’re not here to monitor the bodies of others,” she said, at one point, of her work in general. “That’s my whole point.”
Still, there’s a bit of cognitive dissonance between Ms. Sturino’s ethos — “weight is not news,” she regularly reminds her followers — and a personal brand that uses your body as the marketing material, whether for a thigh-chafe product or a novel.
In March 2024, Ms. Sturino criticized an ABC special hosted by Oprah Winfrey titled “Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution” in which Ms. Winfrey spoke with Sima Sistani, then the chief executive of Weight Watchers. Online, Ms. Sturino said she wished Ms. Sistani had apologized for the company’s contributions to diet culture.
Ms. Sistani did eventually apologize, thanking Ms. Sturino for the push.
Later that year, Ms. Sturino sat down for her own interview with Ms. Winfrey in a different special, this one sponsored by Weight Watchers. Ms. Winfrey asked why Ms. Sturino, whose fandom was somewhat critical of her decision to participate, agreed to the interview.
“If we don’t have this conversation, if we don’t insert our voice into this conversation, someone else will: Someone else will make those decisions for us again,” Ms. Sturino said. Ms. Sturino would also go on to host a podcast for the weight-loss brand.
And this summer, she is inserting her voice into the conversation in fictional form, too.
The book itself is lighter on the complexity of body neutrality — Ms. Sturino’s preferred term — in 2025, and more focused on love. And beach wear.
Spoiler alert: The titular Sunny finds love in the end, both romantic and of the self-directed variety. She also creates a line of size-inclusive swimwear.
Maybe you can already see where this is going.
A few weeks before the release of “Sunny Side Up,” Ms. Sturino announced that she, too, was creating a line of size-inclusive swimwear, a collection that eschews staid pieces and instead offers bikinis in bright stripes and patterns like hearts and tomatoes.
For those interested in a one-piece, Ms. Sturino designed one in a lime green Lurex.
Madison Malone Kircher is a Times reporter covering internet culture.
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