Ashley Graham
It’s midday. The warm glow of studio lighting fills the set, music is booming through the speakers, and the whole crew is cheering. Ashley Graham bounds over to the laptop we’re all huddled around and exclaims, “I LOVE IT!” at her final few shots. It’s been a long morning of outfit changes, heavy wigs, and high-energy poses, but she’s been laughing and dancing her way through it all.
As she starts to walk back to hair and make-up, a young model approaches her: “Ashley I just had to say hello, you’re my inspiration. You’re seriously the reason that I’m modelling now.” It’s Ameni Esseibi, who was dubbed the “region’s first plus-sized model” in the headlines last year. Despite having just spent the last four hours on a shoot, and with a tight schedule ahead of her, Ashley seems genuinely delighted by what she’s hearing and happy to stop for a few minutes.
Later, when Ameni apologetically interrupts our interview to ask Ashley to sign her magazine editorial, she’s equally charming. “Here, I can sign it really quick for you. Congratulations! That’s insane!” she says, giving her a warm hug. She says sorry for keeping me waiting and gets straight back to the question, all while having a wig taken off and a make-up applied for the next event.
“My mum always reminded me of who I was and the daughter that she had raised,” Ashley explains, talking about the tough time she had with criticism at the start of her career. “There was a moment that I wanted to leave New York City and quit everything and she was like 'no'. She said 'your body is going to change someone’s life’. I had no idea what she was talking about but she’s so prophetic, and now look, it’s happening,” she says, gesturing towards the door Ameni just left through.
In fact, the effect that her career has had on young women is something she notes as her biggest achievement – not the cover of Sports Illustrated that made her a household name, the place on the judging panel of America’s Next Top Model, or all the highprofile runway shows in between. She explains that she’s always thought of her fans as if they were her younger sisters.
“The thing I’m most proud about is when I get the emails, when I get the cries, when people say ‘you changed my life’ and all I did was tell my story,” she explains. “… that there was somebody else who had a similar story to me, who didn’t feel that they were ever going to be good enough, and then they realised that they were just fine the way they are.”
She is championing the normality of curves in the fashion industry after a journey wrought with criticism. Ashley remembers her early modelling years when she was told to lose weight and not be so loud – ironically, her killer curves and larger than life personality have been the foundations of a highly successful career.
“Oh it’s completely changed,” she says when I ask her about the industry now compared to when she started almost two decades ago. “If you look at the last 20 years you would see that there was only one curvy girl making a difference or having an editorial per year, and now there’s a whole slew of us. And we’re not just in catalogues – we’re in magazines, we’re in campaigns, we’re on TV, we’re in movies and we’re starting to veer away from this ‘Oh we have a plus size model’. They’re just starting to put us in stuff. We are the norm so why not just treat us as the norm?”
Ashley is no longer confined to the modelling industry. She’s written a book, joined the ranks of the influencer generation with over eight million Instagram followers, and turned her hand to designing. In fact, she’s in Dubai to promote her third collaboration with Marina Rinaldi, whom she describes as “the only high-end luxury curve designer in the market.”
“I’m a sucker for fit. I don’t want the customer to have to tailor everything she buys… that’s been my problem forever, I’ve always had to tailor everything,” she explains. "I wanted to make things cool and younger because their clients have always been a bit older.” And she’s certainly done that, with denim, leather, silks, and now fresh, summery pieces. The collaboration proves that people don’t want to hide their curves under a boring muted palette. Curvy women want a slice of new-season trends too.
Outside of her career, Ashley is extremely vocal on, well… just about anything. Showing her true big sister character, she’s happy to talk about her highs and lows in life so that other women don’t have to make the same mistakes.
“I think it’s important, if you have a voice, to talk about everything that’s going on because there’s somebody else who is going through exactly what you went through,” she reasons. And one of the things she went through was a journey of discovering her self-worth in relationships, which culminated with her meeting her husband.
“I’ve talked very candidly about my relationship with my husband. About how we met and how year five wasn’t the easiest for us and how we persevered,” she says. Ashley has been married to her cinematographer beau, Justin Ervin, since 2010, which is quite the achievement in the traditionally rocky world of celebrity marriages. “My secret with my marriage is that we’re best friends, we make each other laugh, and we talk about everything,” she says.
Ever the realist, she pauses for a moment as if taking the time to think of a useful piece of advice for others. “We’re always working on it and that’s the biggest thing in any relationship, you have to always work on it,” she says, emphasising every word.
And that seems to sum up why she’s had so much success in both her career and personal life – if my morning with Ashley Graham has shown me anything, it’s that this is one woman who knows how to inject a serious dose of fun into hard work.