On the cover of model Crystal Renn’s new memoir Hungry, the 23-year-old runway veteran is the picture of health. “I’d like to see everyone take on the attitude that there are women of all different shapes and sizes as ‘the beauty ideal,’ and that it’s not one type or another. There are women who are naturally a size 2 — you can’t forget them, and that’s discrimination the other way,” Renn said in an interview with AP. “All women bring something different to the table and we have to appreciate them all.”
This from a woman who once tried so desperately to hold herself to typical modeling standards, that she hyperventilated over calories in Diet Coke and lost hair in clumps. In Renn’s tome she exposes her struggles with weight, health and self-esteem. Now a plus size model, she loves how she has been embraced by the fashion world.
“I got to my lowest point, when I couldn’t go lower, and it was either, ‘I’m going to die and not accomplish the dream,’ or, ‘I can become a plus-size model and keep the dream,’” she said in an interview. “I am healthy now, the healthiest I’ve ever been in my life — both physically and mentally.”
She says some in the fashion, modeling and magazine industries have been receptive to the idea of plus-size models, noting that she’s still working with her fuller figure in Vogue, Glamour, on the runway with Jean Paul Gaultier and in ads for Dolce & Gabbana.
But she is saddened by earlier modeling shots of her with what she calls “graying skin and lifeless eyes.” As a 12+ model for Ford, Renn said she finally started seeing images of the young woman she knew she was meant to be.
Runways are still crowded with young women starved within an inch of their lives, and Renn is hesitant to believe they will one day be filled with curvy types. “I believe there is a cycle to everything — Wall Street, the housing market, and modeling, too. Back in the Victorian days, it was all about a full figure, in the 50s, it was about the boobs, in the 80s it was shoulders and in the 90s it was waifs,” she said. “It can only go up from here.”
Photo courtesy of Simon & Schuster.