“I love creating something from nothing,” says Wilson, dressed in a pink satin bomber from the new line over black jeans and a V-neck. We are meeting in her office, which is actually a house in a newly hip strip of West Hollywood. A design obsessive who remodels homes on the side, Wilson recently renovated the space, building an airy kitchen and a grey and white living room with showroom seating.
From here she manages multiple projects as well as her new role as a movie producer with two studio films in the works. She stars in both: Isn’t It Romantic? and a Dirty Rotten Scoundrels remake titled Nasty Women. And she fields other offers as well as she begins to expand Rebel Wilson into a lifestyle brand, potentially adding shoes, bags, and activewear.
“I’ve had to create my own plays, television roles, and movie projects in order to play the parts I’ve wanted,” she says. “It’s what I’ve always done as an actress, but I never thought as a teenager that I’d someday have a fashion line.”
Wilson often develops characters based on an irreverent embrace of her size. As a comedian, her weight and physicality are her punch lines. She once described her natural state as “elastic waistbands,” and at the 2015 MTV Movie Awards she spoofed Victoria’s Secret fashion shows by strutting onstage in enormous wings with a bare midriff.
In real life Wilson is personally sensitive to the societal pressures of beauty standards and the weightist paradox of a fashion industry that uses the term “plus size” to describe clothes that are in fact more representative of the norm. The average size of the American woman is 16 to 18, according to a study last year in the International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education. Like so many women, even as she became more successful, Wilson hated shopping.
“I was a young woman making money, and there were no clothes to buy,” she says. “It felt like if you were over a certain size, designers didn’t care about you.”
Working with stylist Elizabeth Stewart, whose clients include Cate Blanchett, Viola Davis, and Julia Roberts, has helped Wilson find her look. She says she picked up tips for how to present herself at photo shoots by watching America’s Next Top Model. “Whenever they had the plus-size girls, I was always like, ‘Yeah!’ ” she says, “even though they would only have one or two a season.”
Despite the daring nature of her characters and her name, Wilson dresses quite conservatively, which is reflected in her new collection. The first designs include trend-driven jackets like a suede motorcycle style in sophisticated colours, rather polished-looking dresses, and only a few touches of her signature provocative wit. There’s a denim jacket, for example, embroidered with a message on the back: “Just fan me & feed me grapes.”