Wendy Fitzwilliam On Defining Beauty

She burst onto the scene in 1998 after capturing the Ms. Universe crown. However, on that night she captured not just a title but she stole the hearts of Trinidadians and viewers around the world with her effortless grace, infectious smile and effervescent personality. 12 years and counting Wendy Fitzwilliam is still a staple in local culture for not just her renowned poise but her national contributions which helped place Trinidad and Tobago on the world map.

After running into Ms. Fitzwilliam in the produce aisle of my favourite grocery, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the beauty queen turned corporate mogul at her offices at eTeck, where she is Vice President of Investment Promotions, to discuss beauty standards in age where airbrushed media portrayals often depict that thin is in and also to reflect on her experience as Ms. Universe.

CH: It is such an immense pleasure to meet you. You burst out onto the scene in 1998 when you captured the Ms. Universe title. How would you describe that experience and looking back on it in retrospect how did it change you?

WF: Ms. Universe was definitely a surreal, life altering experience. You dont attain celebrity as Ms. Universe for anything, its because of you and who you are. You dont have to have a talent per se, its just about a girl who has the it factor which really is a certain level of confidence in who you are and being pleasant; those are the two main things.

Yes you do have to look a certain way; its a beauty pageant and an American owned beauty pageant and they have clearly defined ideals but it was really a great opportunity. I always say Ms. Universe was a super te! mporary job and for a temp job you cant get better than that. You know its one year and because youre not Ms. Universe to sing or to act. I really had the opportunity to interact with persons from around this planet and I have maintained many of those relationships at all social levels, which has and continues to serve me in good stead.

CH: Pageants normally seek to set the parameters on beauty in terms of size, shape and deportment. Having gone through that experience do you think you judge appearance differently and how would you define beauty?

WF: You know I dont define beauty by the pageant standard, particularly the Ms. Universe standard. As I said Ms. Universe is an American owned pageant. The companies that truly define beauty I think are the Madison Avenue Advertising Agencies in New York City. So sometimes like when I was a child very skinny blonde girls were popular like Christy Brinkley and others. Even the black women who burst onto the scene, beautiful like Iman and Beverly Johnson but you know they fit that model, very long and lean, very narrow noses and not those full thick African lips as we know them and Iman would beat me up for this because shes very African.

Then personalities like Serena Williams and Jennifer Lopez flipped the script with their big fabulous backsides and bodacious va va voom bodies. So, beauty is no longer as narrowly defined as it was say 20 years ago. In the same way that you can get any flavour of chocolate to suit your taste now, beauty has also evolved like that, there is no one true standard of beauty anymore; we in the Caribbean love our slim thick.

I would never be the ideal here; Ive won Ms. Universe and our nationals and people of the Caribbean generally love me very much but I am still not the sole ideal. Destra is revered in Jamaica, and Allison Hinds, God bless her will bring the most feeble of West Indian males out of his home to see one of her performan! ces and shes a beautiful woman. She has a very attractive face, beautiful curvaceous body, by no means the Madison Avenues tall skinny, long neck version of beauty; not that thats not beautiful too, it has sold many many products all over the planet, but I think beauty has evolved.

So thus I judge beauty according to the environment in which I am generally. If I am judging a pageant anywhere in the world for Ms. Universe, I know what Ms. Universe is looking for. You judge according to the situation but there is emphatically no one beauty standard in todays world thank God. Could you imagine all of us trying to be 6 foot tall and a size 2!

CH: The media such as television and magazines often sell an airbrushed version of what beauty should look like that leaves many women feeling mediocre. What advice would you give to young women who feel insecure about their appearance due to misrepresentative media portrayals?

WF: Thats a very tough one and the advice is always to look at you and be the best you that you can be. If you are built like Katherine Zeta Jones then it is useless trying to be Angelina Jolie or Naomi Campbell. If you are built like Serena Williams then you will never be Calista Flockhart.

So, as I said, yes the media has done a number on us in terms of aging as if aging is a bad thing. You know we airbrush everything. I wish I got up looking as I am portrayed sometimes in magazines. Thats a ridiculous ideal and once we get over Photoshop I think we will return, as the media is to some extent returning, to a more natural version of beauty as opposed to a very cartoonish Jessica Rabbit version of what a woman should be.

There are well known women and men of all shapes and sizes who have done phenomenally well that you can emulate and admire. Focus on developing yourself, focus on what works well for you and that comes with! guidanc e, I didnt arrive here by myself. I am very lucky in that I have two amazing parents who worship my sister and me in equal measure. We are built very very differently and one was not more attractive than the other ever and still is not and as a result we are very comfortable in our own skin.

But if you dont have a terribly supportive environment at home, find the image of the personalities out there that look like you and that you can emulate. When my parents in my late teens were going through their marital difficulties and it was much more difficult to speak to them at that time because they were caught up in their own little world, I latched on to Sharon Imbert here. When I started modelling around the age of 15 with Mei Ling I met Sharon Imbert who is a professional; a trained certified accountant and a just recently retired Permanent Secretary in the Prime Ministers office. Phenomenal woman, beautiful, like Trinidad and Tobagos gold standard of beauty in my opinion. Now everyone called me her little sister, she looked like me, she was sweet, very genteel lady from Sangre Grande, stunningly gorgeous and I thought to myself Well hey I could be her!

So Sharon without knowing it helped me through some of the most difficult times in my life and I just keep that kind of thing always in my life and at every stage I find someone that I can admire and aspire to emulate. You can admire those photographs but focus on the shoes or the belt because that perfect skin does not exist. We all have veins and pores! Admire the photographs but know that they are meant to be ethereal versions or humanity, not the real deal.

CH: Speaking of media, after your announcement that you were pregnant in 2006 there was media frenzy. Did it feel like the general public unnecessarily made a spectacle out of your personal life? What was some of the negative backlash and how were you able to deal with that?

WF: I dont think the media made ! so much of a spectacle out of my personal life here. The only thing that was reported about my personal life at that time was really one, that I was pregnant out of wedlock and two, the father of my son. Otherwise there was no real bru ha in terms of delving into Wendys personal life. I expected the backlash, so I think I was well prepared for it. I wrote Letters to Ailan, even though I was going to write it anyway, because a lot was written about me during my pregnancy and my son is very smart and very inquisitive. I am after all and he is my child. Thus I wanted him to have his story at that time in his own words.

But in writing his story I realized that there were several life lessons in there for me. If you read Letters to Ailan it is not about the media frenzy, its about my relationship with him, nurturing him and the challenges that I faced at that time in my relationship with his father and how I overcame those and how I am still working on those. That is important because I am raising a young West Indian male and I must have a healthy image of young West Indian males to be able to raise a healthy West Indian man and thats my guiding principle and why I published that book. Seventy per cent of West Indian households are single mother households whether it is women like me who made the decision to have a child out of wedlock or women who are divorced or separated, and our men are falling by the wayside.

That is evident in their performance at school and it is evident in the fact that so many young women, like me, are single because we are well educated, and we have decent professions and we want companionship and our men for some odd reason are not able to cope generally. You listen to young women now, you know we gripe about our young men and I think thats because we are doing our men an injustice. If were raising them and theyre not meeting the standard that we set for ourselves and the standards that we are setting for our daughters then we are doing our sons an inj! ustice.< /span>

So Letters to Ailan is the start of, I hope, how we can fix that. I had an amazing pregnancy and I am very good at, in good and bad times, not paying too much attention to my own media. That keeps me very grounded and focused because I was very ready to be a mom, very ready. So from the womb Ailan and I had a killer time. I thoroughly enjoyed my pregnancy and I think not paying attention to my own press helps me get through life generally and stay focused. I once read an amazing quotation, What other people say about you is none of your business So my acid test of what Trinidadians think about me is how they interact with me, not what I read about myself.

CH: So, as Vice President of Investment Promotions at eTeck, mother to Ailan, author of the recently published Letters to Ailan and host of the Wendy Fitzwilliam Show on Heartbeat 103.5fm how you are able to balance all of these roles?

One, I dont do everything at the same time; I dont think Im great at multitasking so I focus and do things sequentially generally. So I work at eTeck, Im the Vice President of Investment and Promotions which is my full time job, my radio program is primarily weekends and evenings I record interviews and thats a once a week Sunday show so its not terribly onerous and I do have help. I have an amazing mother who is exceptionally supportive, I have a phenomenal housekeeper-nanny who works with to take care of Ailan so I dont have to get up at 5 in the morning to cook meals, I get up at 5 in the morning to read reports and answer emails!

I also have my management out of New York and Miami, Barrington Management who have been my managers for 11 years now. Tyrone Barrington has been managing me for years and does an amazing job, so he manages my appearances and schedules everything and negotiates the deals. Dont be fooled this is not a one woman operati! on; it n ever is. Oprah has Gayle and a battery of amazing staff that take good care of her. When you have such an amazing position you need a sounding board, you need someone who will take care of the little details, who will tell you when you are doing rubbish and I have a few people like that in my life.

CH: So, whats next for Wendy Fitzwilliams? Any current or upcoming projects?

WF: I am working now on the international launch of Letters to Ailan which has taken a little longer than I had hoped. It is available online at Amazon.com for my kindle iPad toting nationals as well and I am working with my publisher outside now to finalize the release of the book in the UK, US, Canada, etc. Im a little behind but it will be out definitely before Mothers Day next year. We are finally where we want to be with that project.

Of course my radio program continues. We are at season two and I am going to interview some of the men that grate on our nerves as women but we love anyway. My focus of course is Ailan, the demands of raising a toddler into a young boy only increase; they dont need you any less as you get older. So Iam a very hands on mom, making sure that he is well rounded and a good West Indian male, and to do that I have to be there setting the example ensuring that he has good strong positive male role models in his life.

CH: You have accomplished so many admirable things in your life. If you could leave one morsel of advice with our readers what would it be?

WF: You always hear follow your dreams and that clich is so! true. I have discovered that once you believe in something you will succeed and its not because its any easier, its because you believe in it and will stop at nothing to get it done. The things you really enjoy doing you excel in because you work harder at and the rejections come as opportunities to learn. There is a quotation from Ted Turner, When I suffer a setback I dont think of myself as losing, I am simply learning how to win and that I love and take with me everywhere.

CH: Closing comments? Acknowledgements?

WF: I just want to thank you for giving me an opportunity to chat with you. I think what you are doing is very very admirable, your own magazine, a magazine that is very positive, focused on our youth and we need more of that.

CH: Well, thank you for taking time out to do this interview and for your candid responses! We at CH are certainly looking forward to seeing more of you and I do wish you all the best in your future endeavours.

By Claudia Liburd,
CH Editor-in-Chief.

Photos courtesy Calvin French.