More than a body positivity advocate, Ulrikke Skotte-Lund is simply sharing her love of photography and fashion, and the result is stunning
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Danish Ulrikke Skotte-Lund is not afraid to share her true self on Instagram. After avidly using the social media platform for about a year, she wanted people to get to know the real her. Using the #MyVogueScandinavia tag, she has shared multiple images with a common theme: that all women should love themselves enough to post whatever they’d like to their social media.
“You can’t go around praising body positivity when you’re not posting pictures of the real you”
Ulrikke Skotte-Lund
Photo: Dennis Stenild
She is currently working at the local museum in Ebeltoft, Denmark, but dreams about a day where she can focus on both her Instagram and a modeling career. Though she takes pleasure in tweaking and tinkering with her images on Instagram, Skotte-Lund felt certain pressure to retouch the way her body looked when she first started posting. “You know how some plus-sized people have a slimmer waist, their arms are slimmer and their boobs are bigger?” Skotte-Lund says over video chat, with an exasperated sigh. “I started editing my pictures and I became so good at it that you couldn’t even notice. It began to mess with my mind, and one day I just felt like that is enough — you can’t go around praising body positivity when you’re not posting pictures of the real you”.
Photo: Dennis Stenild
Being a plus-sized influencer, the 23-year-old argues, comes with certain expectations. “We need to normalize being fat without it being a statement, it’s just a body, like any other body,” she says. The first time she shared a picture of herself in a bikini, she was flooded with comments about how brave she was for sharing the picture, but she had a much different take. “I hadn't thought about ‘being brave’, I was just like ‘I look damn good in this picture, let me post it,” she says. We both laugh at this, but suddenly, Skotte-Lund’s smile fades. “I thought, ‘Why am I brave?’ And then it hit me, it’s because I’m fat. Sharing your body on Instagram is this incredible thing to do when you don’t look the way people think you should.”
“We need to normalize being fat without it being a statement, it’s just a body, like any other body.”
Ulrikke Skotte-Lund
Whatever her intention, Skotte-Lund represents a future in which all bodies are celebrated. When asked about what she thinks Vogue Scandinavia should do to further the discussion of body positivity, her response is simple: “You should do things like this, where you dive deep into what ‘normal people’ are doing,” she says. “Giving them a platform to let their opinions be known and for them to be like, hey, we exist too.”
*You don’t have to be a Vogue Editor to be featured in Vogue Scandinavia. We are always on the lookout for new talents in fashion, culture and photography. Use our hashtag, #MyVogueScandinavia, to show us what you’ve got.