Cover girl who was snubbed for being curvy
MOST models survive on a diet of water and champagne during fashion shoots and obsess over every ounce of weight gain but Ashley Graham is different. The plus-size model is happy to snack during breaks and once claimed not to own a set of scales.
“I felt free once I realised I was never going to fit the narrow mould that society wanted me to fit in,” she said during a talk last year. “I was never going to be perfect enough for an industry that defines perfection from the outside in and that’s OK. Rolls, curves, cellulite, all of it – I love every part of me. This is the generation of body diversity. The current is changing.”
She may be right but not everyone has got the memo. This week it emerged that a number of fashion brands refused to provide clothes big enough to fit the size-16 model when British Vogue requested them for a cover shoot.
While the clothing company Coach was happy to dress a 28-year-old woman whose vital statistics are 38-30-45 not everyone had such an inclusive approach.
“They were enthusiastic about dressing a woman who is not a standard model but sadly there were other houses that flatly refused to lend us their clothes,” says the magazine’s editor Alexandra Shulman.
“It seems strange to me that while the rest of the world is desperate for fashion to embrace broader definitions of physical beauty, some of our most famous fashion brands appear to be travelling in the opposite – and, in my opinion, unwise – direction.’
In an era when stick-thin models are being blamed for bodyshaming teenage girls into unhealthy eating habits, many fashion titles have made an effort to expand their roster of body types to include models who are much bigger than the industry standard of size 8 or lower.
Earlier this year, Graham herself became the first plus-size model to feature on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. Her appearance followed overwhelmingly positive reactions to an ad for online swimwear company Swimsuits For All featuring Graham in a black string bikini that ran in the magazine last year.
“We thought, wow, we’ve hit a nerve,” said Moshe Lanaido, chief operating officer of Swimsuits For All. “I thought this might become an annual point of view for us. Young and skinny is typical. We say it can also be curvy and older women.”
PLUS-SIZE is now said to be the fastest growing sector in the modelling business, with models such as Marquita Pring, Candice Huffine, and Robyn Lawley fronting campaigns for mainstream brands such as Ralph Lauren and Levi’s.
Yet the first agency to champion models over size 8 was founded as long ago as 1977. Big Beauties Little Women, which also represented petite models, was followed a year later by Plus Models, founded by a woman who had been a plus-size model herself, Pat Swift.
But it was when the top New York agencies entered the market 10 years later that the plussize phenomenon really took off on the runways of the fashion world. Ford Models bought Big Beauties Little Women in 1988 and rebranded it as Ford+.
In 2003 it signed a 15-year-old girl from Lincoln, Nebraska, and the Ashley Graham phenomenon was born. “I was always, quoteunquote, thicker than all my girlfriends,” Graham once said. “At times in high school I was called ‘thunder thighs’. But my whole family is curvy and we’re all confident about our bodies.
“Our parents taught us that if we weren’t, no one else would be confident in us.”
In the years that followed Graham became a poster girl for the curvy model posse and was profiled by Vogue when she was just 19. But it was when the US TV network ABC refused to screen an ad she made for Lane Bryant’s lingerie brand Cacique in 2010 that she really hit the headlines.
The network deemed the ads – in which she flaunted her 38D bust – too hot for primetime TV. “I was very surprised,” Graham told the press at the time. “The first thing I thought of was Victoria’s Secret commercials and how they’re just as racy, if not more racy, than Lane Bryant.
“[The models are] just a lot smaller than what I am. [ABC] can’t handle bigger on TV, bigger boobs on a normal-sized woman on TV.”
These days Graham describes herself as a “model and body activist” and has become a forceful and eloquent speaker in the plus-size cause.
She certainly seems happy in her own skin. “I hate the gym,” she said with a laugh in one interview. “I do like Bikram yoga and rollerblading because they make me feel good, and then I take great photos. But I have gone months without working out. It’s been fine.”
It did have an effect on her love life at least once when a personal trainer she was dating turned round to her after three months and suggested she might like to work out more in the interests of toning up. He got short shrift.
However not long before the ABC controversy, Graham met a videographer seven years her senior at the church she attends in New York and she and Justin Ervin were married in 2010.
But as this week’s events show, she still has more work to do if she is to win over everyone in the think-thin world of fashion.