(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

By Heidi Moore

Oprah Winfrey is a successful billionaire with an empire worth $3bn, a woman whose public reputation has been built on self-empowerment. She has been frank about the stresses in her life – racism and sexism figure often – and about her struggles with her weight.

It is this last aspect that may be the hardest to deal with. Oprah’s thyroid condition makes her weight problems unavoidable. She has to deal with the rebellion of her body. She may find sympathetic tailors and fabulous shoes, and accessorize brilliantly, but she likely knows what all women know: shop assistants won’t be kind to women over a size 10, and that is especially true of woman of color.

To find something nice for Tina Turner’s wedding, Oprah walked alone into Trois Pommes in Zurich last month, an upscale shop that carries clothes from the usual runway names – Celine, Jil Sander, Lanvin – and has locations in wealthy ski towns that attract billionaires: St Moritz, Gstaad, Basel.

A shop assistant refused to show Oprah a $42,000 crocodile handbag. Here is the incident in Oprah’s words, via the International Business Times:

I was in Zurich the other day, in a store whose name I will not mention. I didn’t have my eyelashes on, but I was in full Oprah Winfrey gear. I had my little Donna Karan skirt and my little sandals. But obviously, the Oprah Winfrey Show is not shown in Zurich. I go into a store and I say to the woman, ‘Excuse me, may I see the bag right above your head?’ and she says to me, ‘No. It’s too expensive.’

Oprah later mused to Larry King that she considered following the script of Pretty Woman and deploying her fortune by buying everything in the store, but decided not to give the saleswoman the satisfaction of a larger commission. The head of the luxury chain, Trudie Goetz, later said that the saleswoman didn’t recognize Winfrey and that by rejecting Oprah’s request she tried to be “too kind”.

No doubt, the details of the incident will be pored over. It has already been attributed to racism, and rightfully so: Oprah’s incident tripped a wire that worries many women of color: to be judged negatively and immediately by their race, to be treated as second-class citizens, to be pointed to the things that are not the best, but considered merely “good enough” for you. The best and most expensive, the implication goes, is saved for those with the obvious status markers: well-groomed, accompanied by a wealthy-looking man, and usually, not coincidentally, very thin.

This is what Oprah, and most other women, rarely talk about: the struggle for respect faced by women of color is shared, at times, with another group: women of size, another category to which Oprah belongs. The scale is not the same – racism can be as ugly as anything humans are capable of – yet, on a day-to-day basis, they have parallels. There is the same sense of diminishment, the same high-handed assumption by others, the same struggle for control of your own image.

Read More Oprah faced not just fashion retail racism, but size bias too | Heidi Moore | Comment is free | theguardian.com.