Her real name is Ryann Hoven, but I won’t know this until much later, when we’re a couple drinks in at a tiki bar older than time. When we meet she’s Tess Holliday, plus-size model and social media phenomenon, and she’s sitting with her fiancé and her stylist in her stylist’s Burbank, California, apartment with clips in her auburn hair. “We have an issue,” she says as soon as I walk in.
Her apartment manager Terri just called. Terri needs to get to the doctor — something about emphysema and juniper bushes — but she’s stuck out in Pasadena with no ride and no cash, and there’s been some kind of insurance snafu.
Holliday has a photo shoot at BuzzFeed’s Hollywood studio in two hours, before which she needs to be transformed into Venus, the Roman goddess of sex and fertility. Her fiancé Nick Holliday (she’s been using his last name professionally since January) is from Australia and can’t drive. There’s talk of Ubers, traffic, routes, and other logistical schema.
“Let’s just go,” she says, and within seconds she’s out of the chair and hair clips are flying. Because sometimes Holliday is a savior, despite her best intentions. She’ll grab her keys, her fiancé, and the reporter she met two minutes ago, and she’ll take a woman to the doctor, modeling career be damned.
Earlier this year, Holliday became the first woman of her size to sign with a major modeling agency. It’s a dubious sort of record in a culture obsessed with thinness, in an industry that feeds that obsession. The announcement brought Holliday international media attention and jobs with companies like Torrid and U.K. brands Yours Clothing and Simply Be. It also let loose a deluge of scrutiny over her body and her health, all of which Holliday dismisses.
“People should just mind their own fucking business,” she says as she speeds toward Pasadena in her red Toyota Yaris. The car’s dominant theme is Hello Kitty: steering wheel and seat covers, decal, rearview mirror charm.
For the record, Holliday is 5’3½” and wears a size 22. She eats what she wants and exercises when she has time. She doesn’t care if you think she’s healthy, or beautiful (see her #EffYourBeautyStandards campaign). She doesn’t care whether you call her plus-size or curvy or any other euphemism for “fat.” You can also just call her “fat" — it’s OK.
“The reality is I am fat. It’s a word. It’s an adjective. And I don’t care.”
Holliday takes a call on speakerphone from her friend Nadia Aboulhosn, who’s also a model.
“They want me to do the photo shoot and do three posts for them, and I told my agent they’re nuts,” says Holliday.
“Three posts? OK, no. Do one post and a photo shoot,” says Aboulhosn. “And you can also throw in a behind-the-scenes on Instagram.”
Holliday makes a wrong turn down an alley under the highway and pulls a U-turn while holding her phone.
“Let me let you go because I’m on my way to get my friend to take her to the hospital and I’ve got a journalist in the car with me right now,” she says. “FaceTime me later.”
Holliday was discovered on social media — a fairly recent trend in the modeling world. What started with a Myspace account is now a platform with 650,000 followers on Instagram; 820,000 people have liked her Facebook page. And it’s no secret that this online following is responsible for her success.
“I’d never scouted someone like that before,” says Anna Shillinglaw, founder and managing director at MiLK Model Management, who stumbled on a photo of Holliday one night while scrolling through Instagram. She thought Holliday was “a cool size with an incredible face.” And, Shillinglaw adds, “She had more social media stats than all the top plus-size models put together.”
Holliday has complicated feelings about her online popularity. “I want to get jobs because of my ability and not rely on social media for validity,” she says. Understandable, if also a bit idealistic. “Making it” used to be about the people you know; now it’s about how many people know you.
We squeeze into an exam room, the three of us and Terri, a 65-year-old riot of a woman in black spandex leggings and a blonde bob who thinks I work for a news outlet called BugFeed. Holliday looks younger than in photos. With a good pout and perfectly arched brows, she bears more than a little resemblance to Marilyn Monroe. And I promise this is a compliment — she has one of the most gorgeous resting bitchfaces I’ve ever seen.
“I don’t want you to be late, honey,” rasps Terri from the exam table. Her birdlike legs dangle above the floor.
“What am I going to do, leave you to die?” says Holliday. “I don’t care about the photo shoot.”
After about an eternity, the doctor wheels in what looks like a portable record player but is actually some kind of breathing machine that makes a sound like a jackhammer while Terri sucks air through a plastic mask. She keeps moving the mask to tell me about Holliday.
“You see how bighearted she is?”
SUCK
“She’s the best.”
SUCK
“I’m so proud of her; I really am.”
Tess Holliday photographed on April 22, 2015, at BuzzFeed Motion Pictures in Los Angeles.
Macey J. Foronda / BuzzFeed News
We get Terri squared away with her doctor’s bill and her prescriptions — Holliday pays for everything — and we drive back to Burbank to finish the goddess curls. Holliday inspects a chin pimple in the rearview mirror. “I can’t wait to get my makeup on,” she moans.
When I talked to Shillinglaw, she alluded to a secret project with photographer David LaChapelle and told me to expect to see Holliday in the glossy high-fashion magazines. If there were ever a time to believe a paid hype person, it may be now. The fashion industry — that immovable rock barring the road between the beautiful and the rest of us — is showing signs of, well, moving.
Some of it is trickle-down from the entertainment industry, where women of diverse sizes are dominating these days. There’s Mindy Kaling on the cover of InStyle, Melissa McCarthy on Elle, Lena Dunham on Vogue, the Broad City ladies in a glam photo spread for Vanity Fair. Some plus-size supermodels have launched careers abroad, like Robyn Lawley, the first plus-size model to appear in Vogue Australia or any issue of GQ (see her November 2013 spread in GQ Australia). She became a Ralph Lauren model and made it into this year’s Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. The runway is changing shape too. In April, France voted to ban models under a certain BMI. Denmark’s Fashion Ethical Charter now requires health screenings for every model and “healthy food” at shoots.
Despite all the media attention she’s getting, Holliday is still modeling almost exclusively for plus-size brands. This is probably because of her size. The mainstream fashion world might embrace Lawley, who’s reportedly a size 12 (smaller than the average American woman), but Holliday’s body is still an anomaly in her field. “Past a size 18, there’s no one besides me,” she says. “There’s not an 18, there’s not a 20, there’s not another 22.”
Not that she’s complaining: “I literally have accomplished my wildest dreams,” she tells me in the car.
And there’s plenty of work for her right where she is. There are more plus-size clothing lines than ever before. Major retailers like Forever 21, Target, and ASOS have all launched plus-size labels of their own. Rivkie Baum, founder of SLiNK, a plus-size magazine based in the U.K., said the customer base has always been there, but women didn’t always feel like they had a voice. “We had to make noise in order for brands to take notice,” she said. “Brands used to tell customers what to wear. Now brands are using social media to find out what people want.”
Plus-size clothing has been around since the 1920s, when a maternity-clothing company called Lane Bryant started marketing “Clothing for the Stout Woman.” But the term “plus-size” didn’t catch on until mid-century. “The plus-size woman who wistfully follows willowy mannequins through the pages of fashion publications will no longer have to do without French couture fashions,” wrote the New York Times in 1964, announcing Lane Bryant’s first couture collection. Press photos for the collection featured thin models wearing smaller versions of the plus-size clothes.
Macey J. Foronda / BuzzFeed News
We’re an hour and a half late to the shoot, which feels like an accomplishment given the morning’s turn of events. The studio is a cavernous garage. Holliday’s makeup artist sets her up in one corner, under an interrogation-bright light. Mariah Carey’s "Fantasy" plays tinnily from a laptop on the other side of the room. Americans have just discovered the MyIdol app, and everyone is obsessed. Holliday shows me one her friend sent of her friend’s cat on the stripper pole. It’s mesmerizing.
The growth of the plus-size industry has sparked some backlashes. A recent viral campaign #DropThePlus is calling for the fashion industry to banish the term “plus-size” altogether. “It is ‘harmful’ and ‘damaging’ to the minds of young girls to call models ‘plus’,” wrote Stefania Ferrario, an Australia-based model and co-founder of #DropThePlus, on the campaign’s Instagram. “Let’s #droptheplus in ‘plus size’ altogether and stop labelling women’s sizes, it only causes confusion and segregation.”
“Nick!” Holliday says, looking around. “She’s asking about #DropThePlus.” She wrote up notes because it’s such a touchy subject, but she forgot them. I suggest she just say what she thinks. “I feel like it’s a complete and utter waste of everyone’s time,” she says. “The term is never used in hate; it never has been used in hate. It’s an adjective. I am plus-size. It’s like getting mad that somebody calls me a redhead. I am a redhead.” She says the term is more than a label; it’s a community that accepted her and a lot of other people when the rest of the world didn’t. It’s an identity that has gotten women through abuse and depression — some say it saved their lives.
When I asked Baum of SLiNK, she agreed that arguing about semantics is beside the point. “It’s not like if we got rid of the term [plus-size], those girls would start shooting Vogue or Elle. Those magazines wouldn’t use them because they don’t have the sample sizes to put them in.” The real work, she says, is in getting brands to expand their lines and getting retailers to carry those lines.
Until recently Lane Bryant was considered a respected but dated plus-size brand — the great-aunt who reliably brings coleslaw to the family picnic. But in April the company launched the “I’m No Angel” campaign for its lingerie line — a not-so-subtle jab at Victoria’s Secret. In the ad shot in black and white, six lingerie-clad women vamp in front of a bare wall. “How boring would it be if we were all the same?” asks one seductively.
But the campaign stumbled when bloggers complained that the models weren’t diverse enough. “All of the models have similar, proportional figures, and all of them are around a size 16,” wrote body-positive blogger Amanda Richards. “I don't understand why Lane Bryant can't opt for more diversity in their advertising, given that it's what plus-size women want and what they have been quite literally begging for on social media.”
Holliday thinks the backlash against Lane Bryant is also stupid and that the industry could show more diversity in size, gender, and skin color. But also, she kind of doesn’t care. “I don’t ever really knock people down for trying,” she says. “Could they have tried harder? Yes. But at least they did it.”
The concept for Holliday’s shoot is Botticelli’s "The Birth of Venus." Venus is naked in the painting; Holliday wears a long white dress. An intern grips a floor fan and tilts it to various degrees. Holliday’s hair gleams under the lights. The photographer shoots on counts of three.
I spend the better part of an hour standing next to Nick, who keeps up a steady stream of commentary in my right ear. Holliday really knows how to work the angles, he says. She’s a quick learner, he says. She’s got something special. She’s one of the best in her field.
It’s clear that Holliday, like any model, knows how to flatter her shape. At one point she rejects a suggestion from the photographer because, she says, “I don’t want it to make my tummy look so round.” Her poses aren’t flashy, but there’s something transfixing about the way she moves. It’s like watching clouds — how first they look like one thing then all of a sudden they’re something else, and you can’t tell if they’re changing or you’re seeing them a different way. She holds her dress in one hand. One, two, three, click. Her gaze lowers. One, two, three, click. Her pout deepens. One, two, three, click. Her shoulders go up just an inch. A series of imperceptible shifts and then she’s someone new.
It’s the day after the shoot, and I’m sitting with Holliday on the L-shaped couch in her apartment. She’s just back from the dentist — the same dentist she worked for as a receptionist just a year and a half ago. “I have a fucking cavity!” she tells me, pointing to her bicuspids.
Holliday may be a celebrity model on the internet, but she’s not living like one, at least not yet. We’re in the same one-bedroom that she’s rented since 2010. Her 9-year-old son sleeps in the bedroom; Holliday and Nick sleep where a dining room table might otherwise be. They met three years ago when he complimented her on Tumblr and she wrote back, “My jaw just hit the floor. You’re really handsome.” He moved from Melbourne to be with her. He’s been in the States less than a week. Everything he owns is on a freighter somewhere in the Pacific, months away. Nick doubles as Holliday’s manager. Her stylist is a friend who does hair for proms and weddings. Her personal assistant’s main gig is doing makeup for RuPaul.
But Holliday looks regal today, posed on her couch in a sheer black top and moto leggings, black eyeliner sweeping toward her temples. Her accent carries nothing from the Bible Belt where she grew up, in towns across Mississippi, North Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee. Her dad would uproot her family without warning, sometimes in the middle of the night. She counts 60 moves in her lifetime, an impossible-seeming number.
Holliday’s life gets called a Cinderella story a lot, which is an understatement when you consider the facts. She delivers these facts with all the emotion of my rental car’s GPS, probably because when you’re 9 and your mother’s boyfriend shoots your mom twice in the head, you become a little removed. And because when middle school bullies taunt you for not only being fat but also for having a paralyzed mom, you disconnect a bit. And when your stepdad sits on your stomach and punches you repeatedly, it’s helpful to stop feeling things.
“You either find some way to deal with it or you let it destroy you,” says Holliday. “I’d seen a few people in my life who let it destroy them. They became shells of people, and I didn’t want to be that person. I chose emotional eating. It wasn’t the best way, but it was all I knew at the time.” She says this as an explanation, not an apology.
Holliday has wanted to model since she was 15. She had a Myspace account where she’d post photos, but she was always told she was too short and too fat, even for plus-size work. She dropped out of high school in junior year and got her GED. She had Riley, her son, when she was 20 and working at a Walmart in Mississippi for $8.50 an hour. “I realized that I needed to get the fuck out of Mississippi. I couldn’t bring him up in that environment. Having him pushed me to fight for what I wanted even more.”
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