Supermodel Tyra Banks was told she was too big to be successful in the modelling world, but her mother helped her realise her potential in the industry while sitting in a pizza parlour.
“At the start of my career, I lived in a two-body’s world. One was full of beautiful white girls who would excitedly be like, ‘OMG, you are so skinny!’ The other was my beautiful African-American community of friends and family, who were always trying to fatten me up,” Banks wrote in her new book “Perfect Is Boring”, reports femalefirst.co.uk.
After she began to gain weight in her 20s, casting agencies told her she was too big to model and advised her against pursuing jobs in the high-fashion industry.
But her mother, Carolyn London-Johnson, inspired her to rethink her attitude toward modelling, and focus her energy on working with the clients who embraced her “a**” rather than focused on her weight.
“Now, she said, ‘Write down every client in the industry that likes a**.’ ‘A**” ‘Who likes that a**’!’ she demanded. By the time we’d finished our pizza, I had a list of commercial clients who booked the bold and ‘bootyful’.
“I sat back and looked at the list, now mottled with grease stains and dots of tomato sauce, and I slowly started to smile. My career didn’t have to be over. It just had to be different,” Banks said.
