Ashley Graham Quotes

I know what it's like to be a model and go to castings where some people like what they see and others look at you with distaste.

The first entry into modeling doesn't build your confidence. They pull out the tape measure and pick you apart. I'm a curvy woman, so I was definitely told I was 'too curvy.'

I've had designers say to my face, 'Oh, I want to dress you now that you're skinny.' And that's really rude.

There was a solid six-month period where I was going out on castings and I was laughed out of the room because I'm much more petite than other models.

When I was up for the film 'Dreamcatcher,' to play the role of an overweight kid, I was told I'm too fat to play the fat guy. That's like telling a Mexican to get a tan.

I had so many agents tell me that at size 18, I would never work or work again. I heard, 'Go home and lose some weight.'

I was known for being talented, but I was still the fat girl. And it wasn't what people were looking for. There's a lot that you hear. There's a lot of cruelty out there. Some of it comes from the executive offices. It comes from other artists at times. It was a very difficult thing to overcome.

Our idea of a healthy body is so destabilised that insecure people have come to bolster their own bodies by deeming others - those with fat bodies - less worthy, less capable and less employable.

I'm being mocked because I don't live up to a socially determined view of what other people think a person should look like.

When I try to get work in the US all they say is that I need to lose weight - but I bet they never said that to Mae West.

I never weigh myself, but the brutal truth of television is that they don't employ old people or fat people.

People think that, somehow, size makes you uncoordinated or incompetent. There is a lot of size discrimination out there, and I see the difference in the way people treated me when I was 360 pounds versus how they treat me when I'm 290 - from the industry to day-to-day people on the street.

I was called the girl that was 'pretty for a big girl,' 'the fat model.'

All fat women look the same; they all look 42.

'Curvy' is just a polite way of saying 'fat.'

When I first started in the industry back home in Australia at 18, there was a lot of push and shove as to how I should dress, if I was allowed to cut my hair short, if I had too many tattoos. If I didn't get a campaign, or if I didn't get a role, they would always come back to, 'Well, she dresses like a boy.'

I did a little modeling in Minnesota, but because I was a heavier 'model,' I didn't pursue it much when I lived there.

Though designed as a mere convenience, clothing sizes establish an unintended norm, an ideal from which deviations seem like flaws. There's nothing like a trip to the dressing room to convince a woman - fat, thin, or in between - that she's a freak.

I sit at this really weird crossroads. My job requires me to take in calories. I take care of myself. I eat healthy. I exercise a lot. But then I have to go to events in cocktail dresses and look fancy, and people want to interview me about what I'm wearing, and then I'm compared to people who are wearing size 2 all the time.

I did a bit of modeling before I took up acting, and I was up for this big campaign - I can't remember which designer - and all these execs were looking at my portfolio. Then one said: 'We'd like to use you, but can you come back next year when you've lost this.' And he tapped the underside of his chin.

People are branded as either 'fat' or 'skinny' from an early age. You sort of never shake it, even if you end up losing weight.

When I was heavy, people would say to me - and it was such a backhanded compliment - they would say, 'You've got such a beautiful face,' in the way of, like, 'Oh, isn't it a shame that from the neck down you're questionable.'

For so long, I have been an outsider because of my size. And I think that fashion has always, in some way, catered to celebrities or to a thinner idealistic model.

I wasn't just known as one of the singers in Little Mix, I was known as 'the fat, ugly one'.

That always stuck with me. When I finished school in 2015, I started going to open calls in New York. But I was getting the same response every time: 'Get your measurements down. Take X inches off your thighs and hips.'