I am a cat-loving, crime-investigating, coffee-saturated college student. My friends tell me I could have a promising future in stand-up comedy or as a public speaker. I hate spending money on clothes. My bed is always made, and I like my waffles still-frozen and hot dogs uncooked. I am also a size zero model struggling with Anorexia-Nervosa.
Not so much “‘I’ll skip dinner so when I drink tonight I can get wasted faster” anorexia and not “I want the flu so that when I throw up I have a flat stomach” anorexia, either. Definitely not “Commenting ‘I look fat’ on my tagged images’” anorexia (since that would draw attention to my embarrassingly lithe frame). I mean “debilitating, in-and-out of residential eating disorder facilities, fearful of my heart stopping in my sleep, relationship-fracturing, hiding behind baggy sweats, constantly feeling embarrassed” anorexia.
Every symptom of anorexia I listed matters. They are all issues that need addressing — especially in a society that normalizes disordered behavior and appearance. When I was in residential rehab for my anorexia, every girl’s reason for their disorder and unhealthy behaviors varied, yet we all shared ridiculous strength, courage, and determination to fight.
According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, because “every 62 minutes at least one person dies as a direct result from an eating disorder[,] eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.” Studies have shown that fashion magazines and social media, among other popular culture mediums, negatively influence young people’s perceptions of their bodies. And my peers in my industry have spoken out about the impossible expectation to look a specific way.
What’s “normal” for models or “beautiful” for society with respect to female appearance needs to change, even if happens slowly; one step, one op-ed, one on-campus Ashley Graham-led discussion, one body-positive Instagram post at a time.
So how can I, as a model, inspire a different outcome than influencing girls to lose weight and potentially develop a horrible, life-threatening illness?
I was scouted when I was a ripe 14-year-old growing up in Missouri, who wore a daily uniform of Nike shorts and graphic tees and played hockey everyday after school. I had a Midwestern accent and did not have anything close to an eating disorder. But I went from struggling to walk in heels to being shipped off to New York for Fashion Week, eventually signing worldwide with the esteemed agency Next Models. I walked the runways for companies like V-Files and have shot for WMag, Marc Jacobs, Estée Lauder, and Maybelline. A casting director for Calvin Klein told me I was beautiful. “Le monde est à toi,” she said, The world is yours.
But it wasn’t — at least not entirely — because part of me was imprisoned by my eating disorder. I could never be fully happy and confident with a voice in my head reminding me I was too thick and too short and that my hips were too wide and my nose would protrude too much and my lips perpetually chapped and my skin, dotted with moles and gleaming with pores, would always need retouching and smoothing.
But I was a model with a capital “M.” I had the badge of approval from designers and magazines, and an agency that especially booked me! So I was finally beautiful enough, right? I didn’t need to change? Wrong. It was too late; I was too deeply involved in the fashion industry. Girls like me with pre-existing anxiety around our appearances and character, desperate for outside acceptance, are not meant for modeling.
This is my truth: I have endured years of self-hate, inauthenticity, low self-esteem, and anorexia.
These are my lies: All models are perfectly slender and tall. All models overflow with confidence. All models ooze self-assurance. I am the only model who wishes the fashion industry didn’t place pressure to look just one way — skinny.
Online and in real life, models like myself and numerous others outside the industry have advocated for a redesign of what is accepted as the standard, “cookie-cutter” model. We should not have to be size zero, perfectly coiffed and primed from head to toe. We shouldn’t need to change what we were given at birth. We should be allowed and encouraged to have genuine curves, scars, marks, differences, anything — because these aspects make us human, make us beautiful, make us healthy.
Is it hypocritical that here I am, a size zero, arguing for body positivity and size acceptance? Not in my eyes. If the fashion world had been as accepting towards perceived imperfections when I started my career — as the industry is becoming now — I doubt my anorexia would have festered into the terrible wound I live with today. I wouldn’t have felt pressured to lose whatever baby fat my 14-year-old body carried around, I wouldn’t have worked out so much, dieted so frequently, starved so often… I’d like to think my life would be exponentially happier without the modeling industry exacerbating my eating disorder.
I want to push the global modeling industry, and everyone that participates in society, to redefine what beauty is and appears as. That’s why I adore the impact and work of strong women like Ashley Graham, who is speaking on Sunday, Mar. 31 at The New School alongside New York Times Fashion & Style editor Joanna Nikas at an event titled “Reshaping Beauty with Ashley Graham.” I’m attending this event because I want to continue this conversation.
To me, Graham is a beacon of light in the modeling industry, offering a genuine form of beauty with a message that is simple enough: Just be yourself, in whatever flawed, ever-changing, and alternative form that may be. Graham is well known for her plus-size curves, which is refreshing amongst the skin and bones that typically grace Vogue. She represents what most American women actually look like. Even still, she receives criticism from people who think she doesn’t belongs in fashion because she isn’t a size zero or two and others who think she isn’t that big or “curvy enough” to be a plus-size advocate. She’s been attacked for losing weight and for having a flat stomach.
I think they’re all wrong. Ashley Graham is not advocating for a less-defined, curvier ideal of beauty that fits her exact mold to benefit herself and her career; she is pushing for an inclusive, boundary-less, and definition-less standard of beauty without any specific norms of what’s deemed “perfection.” Any body shape, from one with a flat stomach one month and love handles the next to one struggling to keep itself strong, is beautiful.
Ashley helps me see that even I am beautiful, with my embarrassingly lanky arms and knobby knees, bloated stomach and dark circles, as I gain weight with perseverance and dedication to my recovery. As the Times’ event page says, she “encourages women [like me] to celebrate their authentic selves — no retouching required.” I personally wish all women, men, and people advocated for this change in the fashion world and entire world.
At The New School, we have agency to make a difference. We can’t just throw out all of the mannequins in Parsons, even though they have been of extremely limited size variety. Up until a student started a petition in 2016, our fashion department had just one truly plus-sized mannequin out of a sea of standard, uniform-sized forms. We must design for and celebrate bodies of all shapes and sizes.
Tell your friend she is just as lovely today as she was last year, five pounds ago. Love your body for all that it is and isn’t. Be like Ashley Graham and play a part in changing what is beautiful, because everyone is beautiful. You just might help someone like me beat their eating disorder.