SPILLING THE TRUTH
Barrier-busting model's unlikely rise
Ashley Graham may be the most famous plus-sized model around, but she’s also endured her fair share of humiliation.
During a photo shoot in Germany, a fashion stylist had to slice the jeans Graham was wearing from her knees to her butt cheeks because they were too small.
The crew laughed at Graham as the stylist cracked, “If this big girl falls on me, we are both going to die. Her from the scissors and me from her.” Recalling that incident in her new memoir, “A New Model” (Dey Street Books, out Tuesday), Graham wrote, “I [felt] like the fattest person alive.”
In the book, she talks about going from humble beginnings in Nebraska to the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. It didn’t come easy. At age 12, Graham, who already had a 36C bust, was hired to pose in a sheer bra for her first job, a print ad for the Midwestern departmentstore chain Pamida.
“I was still in fourth grade when my mom showed up one day [to talk] about my getting a bra . . . by the time I was 11 and in middle school, I had a woman’s body,” she wrote.
Graham remembers being 10 years old and drying off from a swim at her parents’ home when an 18-year-old family friend showed the young girl his “huge erection,” she wrote.
“I just stood there until he took my hand and put it on his penis. ‘That’s what you did to me,’ he said.”
By the time she was 17, Graham’s curves got her signed with Ford Models and she moved to New York City — where she dabbled in cocaine and ecstasy and ended up in the ER after chugging three Long Is- land iced teas in 30 minutes.
She also dated unsuitable guys. “Any male attention was good attention as far as I was concerned,” Graham wrote.
For two years, she dated a Web designer who was abusive and chased her around with a butcher knife. It took a number of frightening incidents before Graham left him and found happiness and stability with Justin Ervin, a videographer she met at church in 2009. The two married the next year.
But wedded bliss led to a whopper of a fashion faux pas for Graham.
The beauty was with her husband the first time she met Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour, at a Los Angeles premiere in 2016.
“We are going to meet Anna Wintour and then walk away,” Graham told Ervin. “Be cool, and we’ll be fine.”
After introducing themselves to Wintour, Ervin unexpectedly said, “Hi, Anna! I just need to give you a hug.”
“It was like I was watching a car accident in slow motion as Justin leaned in and put his arms around her. All I saw were her two little forearms come around and pat his back. ‘Nice to meet you,’ she said, quietly, then took a step back,” Graham wrote.
Soon after the awkward interaction, Graham was told by her agent that she was on hold to attend Wintour’s Met Gala, once a designer was found to dress her. A week later, the invitation was rescinded.
“I don’t know what happened,” the agent told Graham. “But all the leads I had for a designer fell through.”
“I knew exactly what happened,” Graham wrote. “I told Justin, ‘It’s because you hugged Anna Wintour!’ ”