The rise and rise and Ashley Graham
She’s one of the world’s top 10 highest paid models, but the only size 18. Emily Cronin talks Barbies, bikinis and body activism with the Nebraskan beauty.
Ashley Graham is trying to convince me that
I’m wrong about bikinis. I say, short of a burkini, the more material, the better. She has other ideas.
“OK, for me – and everyone’s different – I feel like if I’m showing more of my body, and the bathing suit is less constricting, it’s just more flattering.
“That’s why I love a string bikini,” she says. “But I’m a special case, in that I’d walk around butt-naked all the time if I could – it’s just more comfortable.”
It’s far from bikini weather in London’s Mayfair when we meet and Ashley, 30, is dressed for winter in a fluid Tome jumpsuit, navy-blue Marina Rinaldi coat, Aldo heels and fullspectrum Spanx. (“Have you seen these suckers? They go all the way down and all the way up.”)
Ashley is in the top 10 of the world’s highest-paid fashion models, the only curvy model (she wears a size 16 to 18 but hates the term “plus-size”) to rank alongside the likes of Kendall Jenner, assorted Hadids and Gisele Bündchen.
She’s also a body activist, TED Talk giver (her Plus-Size? More Like My Size talk from 2015 has been viewed more than two million times), lingerie and swimwear designer, author, television presenter and – well, she’s quite the pin-up.
In 2016, in a turn of events that now seems preordained but which must have called upon Ashley’s reserves of sheer moxie, she became the first model above a sample size ever to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit edition, in all her booty-popped glory. Covers with American and British Vogue followed.
But what really makes Ashley feel she’s made it is the Barbie that Mattel produced in her image.
“She’s got thighs that touch and lower-belly fat and round arms,” she says with satisfaction. The Vogues reside in a storage box; Barbie lives on a shelf in Ashley’s kitchen.
Ashley says she’s “always been an old soul”. She grew up mostly in the midwestern US state of Nebraska, where she was scouted in a shopping mall, aged 12. The first job she booked was a lingerie shoot. There was a contract saying “that they would airbrush my nipples out of the see-through bra because I was under the age of 18,” she recalls.
She already looked more mature than most of her peers, and Ashley’s figure meant that a lot of her work seemed provocative from a relatively young age: “Everything has always been sexy.”
Rarely was her status as a minor reflected in the work or the on-set treatment. During a recent appearance on a US chat show, Ashley described being cornered by a photographer’s assistant on a shoot when she was 17.
“He lured me into this hallway, pushed me into a closet. He exposed himself and he said, ‘Look what you did to me all day long. Now touch it.’” The encounter left her “freaked out” and worried that nobody would want to hire her if she spoke up.
She knew she had to say something, though, when two American TV networks rejected a 2010 ad from US plus-size women’s retailer Lane Bryant on the basis that it was “too sexy”.
In it, Ashley flits around the house in a bra-and-knicker set until she gets a diary alert to “Meet Dan for lunch”. She slings on a trench coat and walks out the door – not exactly postwatershed material.
Ashley considered the ban discriminatory: she assumed it never would have been imposed had the ad featured a less voluptuous model. Her agent told her, “This is either going to be your moment to shine, or just a moment. You choose.” “Until then, I was just taking pictures in some hideous clothes, and all people expected from me was to be fat and happy. That’s what my career was. I always wanted more and that opened a new door for me, to know that I actually had a voice.” The publicity led Lane Bryant to book Ashley for her first contract, and to Ashley securing her own lingerie line. Then Sports Illustrated came calling. “That was a game-changer. It made women feel better about being in a swimsuit.” Ashley says she regularly hears from women thanking her for empowering them to go to the beach in a swimsuit. She says she’s always thought of herself as a role model, thanks to her two younger sisters. “My mom always said, ‘They look up to you. Anything you say or do, they’re gonna do, but you’re never gonna know that because they’re gonna act like they don’t like you.’ Now I look at my fans and I’m like, ‘You are all like my baby sisters. We’re all in this sisterhood together.’” She takes the sisterhood seriously, replying to as many emails and Instagram direct messages as she can.
For every appraising “Damn, girl!” in the comments stream, there’s abuse.
“I get told stuff like, ‘Stop making fat look cool – you’re gonna kill somebody,.” she says. “Those people are part of the problem and that’s why I post things like this. I’m not standing up for myself – I’m standing up for all the girls who have been told they’re ugly, who’ve been told they’re fat, who’ve been told they’re unhealthy.”
She continues, “My favourite part about modelling is talking to women whose lives change because I’ve told my story, or because they’ve seen an image of someone who looks like them in a magazine and they say, ‘Finally, I’m represented.’ That brings me joy.”
As she’s become Brand Ashley, she has also made strides into the luxury fashion world. At New York Fashion Week last September, she walked in shows for Prabal Gurung and Michael Kors. She’d like to do more runways and editorial shoots, if only designers could sort out their schedules. “Designers want to design for me, but it’s a timing issue. With a sample size, you can lend out the same dress to a couple of people. For me, you have to create a whole new dress.”
Given that designers usually produce samples in tiny sizes, curvy models often end up styled in a mix of lingerie and jewellery.
“If more of us started saying, ‘I want to have a cool editorial where it’s actually about the fashion and not just my body,’ that’s what’s going to make our bodies more normal in mainstream fashion. Put clothes on us!”