Being a plus-size model saved my self-esteem

In a defiant blast against body shamers, David Hasselhoff’s daughter Hayley says...

‘Seeing beautiful, voluptuous, healthy, toned women who I could look up to was empowering. I am so unbelievably glad I started modelling at 14. When you have hindering thoughts as a teenager . . . I was on set with women that I aspired to.’

Fourteen is young to start working, she acknowledges — many agencies require models to be at least 16 — and when Hayley’s career took off she had to be home-schooled.

Stories abound of young models being pressured to look a certain way or pushed into shoots they’re not ready for, and suffering damage to their selfesteem as a result. In the plussize world, however, she says her experience was very different.

‘It wasn’t too young in my case. Do I believe it is right to have laws where you can start modelling after 18? Yes. But in my case, being a plus-sized model at 14 when the media didn’t speak so openly about curve was important. I was protected.’

That may be thanks in part to the guidance of the family she still speaks to every day.

Her father and mother, actress Pamela Bach, divorced in 2006. A year after the divorce, a video leaked of David drunk, trying to eat a hamburger off the floor. Hayley’s sister Taylor, now 29, is in the video begging him to stop. He later checked into rehab for alcohol addiction.

Hayley will only say she doesn’t drink alcohol, ‘out of preference’, and is ‘proud’ of her parents.

She and Taylor were at her father’s wedding to another Hayley, a 38-year- old former Debenhams sales assistant from Wales, last year.

‘There was never a moment where I realised my family was famous,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know anything different. It’s more that when you grow into being your own person, you realise your parents have paved an amazing path, continuously doing amazing things in their careers.

‘Growing up, I dealt with a lot of trying to find who I was. We all do. The most beautiful thing family can do is allow you to express yourself and mine did.’

She always loved acting and dressing up. Taylor and Hayley liked to dress up as each other as children and ask their parents to spot the difference.

As well as modelling, she has a role in a new TV drama for U.S. network CBS, Why Women Kill, alongside Lucy Liu. ABC’s breakfast show Good Morning America has appointed her its curve style host, and she provides fashion tips on ITV’s This Morning over here.

‘I don’t get much sleep,’ she says. ‘I have flying between the UK and US down to a T.’ She’s even in a long-distance relationship with a Brit — her boyfriend of two years is actor Dominic Farrell, ‘based in the English countryside’. She means Kent. They met through his brother, a friend of hers. ‘We moved in together a month after meeting. ‘He cooks for me. Who doesn’t like an English roast? Not too often, though.’

Now she hopes she, and others like her, can make sure ‘curve’ is more than just a trend.

‘Women still feel that when a curve model is in a campaign, it’s just to tick a box.

‘I applaud that box being ticked, but I don’t want designers to feel [a lack of diversity] will just go away because they have [ included a range of models] once.

‘I want them to show people of different sizes, ethnicity, people with disabilities. We should all be represented.’

Hayley is modelling the a/W19 collection available at simplybe.co.uk.