It was the same location, same office, but it felt fresher, somehow: a new beginning, with new staff and new ideas. Only two of the old staff remained – the head and another booker, both of whom welcomed me into the office with a smile and open arms. All the other staff were new, and they seemed friendly enough. A new intern rushed to get me a cup of tea.
I realized I’d have to sit there and eat humble pie after walking out just a couple of months earlier. I felt like a right prat. They seemed OK about it all, though.
‘Honestly, they were awful,’ the head said, sitting in the exact same spot she had the first time I’d signed with her. ‘They were so horrible about girls behind their backs, throwing things at them as they walked out of the door.’
She accidentally confirmed that one of the creepy bookers had been absolutely vile about me behind my back, and while one half of me was happy my anxiety hadn’t made this up, it also made me feel uncomfortable, knowing he’d bitched about me. ‘I never understood why he was so vindictive towards you, or said all those horrible things. He was awful.’ Why hadn’t she stood up for me then?
But any doubts I felt were shoved aside by the excitement I felt at working with the name of the massive American company the agency was now part of. I’d always had dreams of going to America to model, but I’d always been told the likelihood of that happening was … well … zero. I was too short, too big, too imperfect. Now that they were part of this huge American brand, working over there seemed within reach. Despite my anxiety, I had what it took – I just knew it. The head told me all the plans for the agency and the plans for taking it forward. It sounded so exciting.
‘I have one request though,’ I said.
‘Go on.’
‘In my photos on Instagram, I’m finding people are responding well to my curvier pictures,’ I said. ‘Whenever I post those pictures, I get way more likes. So I think we should make my book go down that direction.’
‘Love it!’ she said. ‘Yep, let’s go down that direction.’
Was I hearing this right?! Someone wanted to represent me for me?! I put off signing a contract (I didn’t want to risk a three-month probation if I were to leave again) but within a couple of hours I was back up on their website. It was time to move on to bigger things.
I was practically skipping home that evening back to Scott, when, as though some sort of joke, I got a text from the other agency. My heart sank.
When are you coming in to see us? Xxx, it read.
I’m not, I replied.
My phone rang.
‘What the hell do you mean, you’re not coming back? Where have you gone?!’
I said the name of the agency, which didn’t go down very well.
But I was done being a pushover.
‘I waited for a month for you to call,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, but no. I’m done.’
The first couple of months at the new-but-old agency were great. It was February, i.e. fashion month, and although I never usually worked during this time as I wasn’t a catwalk model, I was being booked for brands I would have never expected. OK, they weren’t Burberry, exactly, but I was earning money here and there, working with bigger and better photographers. I’d made the right choice, I was sure of it!
I was given a chance to work with a new photographer to get new photos for my portfolio. It was meant to be a sexy shoot, in order to promote the new shape that the agency had allegedly been keen to promote, and I spent the day feeling incredibly anxious.
I knew I looked fat. I could see it in the mirror. I’d been up since 7 a.m. downing litres of water in the hope of flushing out any ‘fat’ and extra water weight I may have had. My tummy growled from having eaten nothing since lunchtime the day before. I wanted to look sexy and womanly, and yet at the same time I didn’t. I could be curvy, but not too curvy. I couldn’t let go of the obsessive thoughts about thinness.
‘Please can you Photoshop me thinner?’ I begged the photographer afterwards. I’ll never forget the look on his face as he realized I wasn’t joking.
‘What? There’s nothing of you …’ he said.
‘My cheekbones aren’t defined,’ I replied. ‘Please. I can’t let my agency think I’ve put on weight.’
‘I’m not Photoshopping you,’ he said. ‘I might get rid of a spot or two but I’m not slimming your body.’
Sure enough, two days later, I got a call from the agency. It was one of the bookers, and she wasn’t in a good mood.
‘We need you to come in and measure you to see that you’re not as big as the photos suggest.’
I made my way into central London, trembling. They were going to drop me, I just knew it. Why couldn’t I be thin?! No matter how much I fought my body, nothing was changing.
She measured my hips and my waist.
‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘That’s weird. You’re smaller. Must’ve been a bad angle. Keep toning up, yeah?’
I found the photos recently. The last time I saw them was with my anorexic mindset, where I was viewing someone ten times bigger. Looking at them now, I realize I wasn’t ‘big’ at all. My arms look like they could snap off, my legs are wasting away. I appreciate that my self-image was insane. But I was being encouraged in that behaviour.
The work … well … stopped. I worked once, maybe two months after that for a famous jewellery brand, but that was it.
I wasn’t scared of not working. I was scared of what would happen to my mind when I didn’t. When I was sitting at home doing nothing, my thoughts began to consume me. Anxious, I rang up one of my new bookers to ask what was happening.
‘Should I be worried?’ I asked, which was funny, because I already was. ‘I haven’t worked in weeks now.’
‘I’m trying to be honest,’ she said, which is a polite way of excusing yourself for being rude, ‘but you’ve got to tone up more.’ Tone up, as I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, means to ‘lose weight’. ‘You’ll get so much more work that way.’
‘How much do I need to lose?’
‘Ideally, you’d have a thirty-four hip,’ she said. ‘But it’s mainly just looking as tight as possible. The tighter you are, the smaller you’ll fit into the clothes.’
‘OK,’ I replied. ‘It’s just that when I came in January, you guys said we would push me down the curvier route. I’m never going to have a thirty-four-inch hip.’
‘It’s just the industry, babe,’ she said. ‘You know what it’s like. I’m not saying starve yourself, but you need to be small. That’s the way it is.’
She sent me an email an hour after the phone call, along the lines of: Hope I didn’t upset you earlier! We just want you to do the best you can xxx
Yeah, yeah, blah, blah, blah. I’d heard that line many times before. This wasn’t beneficial to me in the slightest. Me not lining my stomach lined their pockets.
Not at all! :) xxx, I replied. It didn’t matter anyway. My anxiety was back.
‘I can definitely see a difference,’ the booker said as she took photos in my lingerie a few weeks later. ‘I can definitely see more definition.’
My heart leapt. I’d been exercising two hours a day in the gym, running until I could no longer walk properly. I was barely eating anything, and if I’d ever had a problem with salt or gluten before, this was like nothing else. If vegetables had salt on them, I would freak out. I’d have a smoothie in the morning and for dinner, then some poached eggs for lunch. My diet was so strict, so precise, and it was driving Scott mad.
‘Keep going, and you’ll be great!’ the booker said.
My heart sank. For crying out loud – how good was good enough? I was so tired of never being perfect.
When I got my photos back, however, I was quite impressed by how toned I looked. Although it didn’t translate in the mirror in my head, I had abs. I looked better than I ever had. But I wasn’t thin. Worst of all, I’d clearly been Photoshopped to look thinner for clients – the picture frames behind me were wonky from where they’d edited it badly.
I posted them on Instagram, but an hour or so later I had convinced myself I was fat and deleted them. Other models would probably laugh at how obese I looked. No wonder I didn’t get any jobs.
I kept dieting – or, more precisely, starving myself – and the workload didn’t miraculously improve like I believed it would. Yet again, I was thin, but still didn’t believe I was thin enough by fashion standards. At twenty-four I was a woman. My hips weren’t designed to be super thin, and never had been. And yet I kept believing that by dieting I would eventually get to that size. Why – oh why – couldn’t I be thin?
I was also broke. I mean, I’d been poor since leaving school, but I was truly skint at this point. I couldn’t complain – this was a life I’d chosen for myself, and if the money wasn’t there, that was no one’s fault bar my own. I was holding out for my fairy-tale ending, the one big job that would turn my life around. In the meantime I got a job working on a brownie stall. Yes, that’s right – I got a job selling chocolate brownies to punters across the south of London. For an anorexic, this wasn’t exactly easy work. Imagine a drug addict serving people heroin every day. It would be torture. But I was making seven pounds an hour, which was all right when all you’re doing is serving tea and brownies. Told you modelling was glamorous.
But this experience was great for me. Because I was having to deal with people hands on, I was starting to build up confidence. I began looking people in the eye. But you know what was weird? As I developed confidence, this made Scott feel uneasy. It was as though he liked me when I was insecure, but when I was having a fun time he didn’t like it. For example, I remember booking a job with a world-famous photographer and rather than getting excited he told me ‘not to get too big-headed’ about it.
I didn’t fancy Scott any more. He was my friend who knew every secret (well, bar the bulimia, of course), but I no longer respected him.
Every night, I would continually be nagged at: the dishes weren’t clean enough, the shoes weren’t by the front door, there was an unopened letter on the side. I didn’t really care any more, though. I knew that whatever I did wouldn’t be good enough.
I’d always been interested in working in the media, and now that I was regaining confidence at the brownie stall, I wanted to push myself more.
All the way over in west London, a charity was holding courses for people under twenty-five looking to break into the media. It was run by an amazing woman who’d been a famous TV presenter in the 90s, and who had a lot of well-known friends in the industry. We were going to be taken to Google, to the BBC, to the Discovery Channel and shown how to get into presenting. Aside from modelling, nothing had seemed so appealing to me before.
I had barely been at the agency for five months, but that didn’t mean I didn’t refresh my inbox religiously in the hope the email of my dreams would randomly land in my inbox. By this stage, it was though I didn’t exist. My portfolio was never updated. I never went on any castings. One of the bookers came to my brownie stall and that was slightly awkward, trying to look model-worthy with chocolate crumbs smeared down my shirt.
Part of the deal with the media course was that you committed to all the days. But my anxiety still played up. What if I applied and then a modelling job came up? What would I do then?! But the rational side of me also said to give this course a go. I could no longer sit at home all day doing nothing. I had to do something with my life.
The course was wonderful. It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. I made friends from different backgrounds, all of whom wanted more for their lives. We met famous news reporters and celebrities. And you know what? People liked me for me. They didn’t care about Modelling Charli. They liked me for who I was.
Although it’s safe to say I was far from an ideal student, I’d always been told I was a good writer in school, and the media course made me wonder if I’d like to pursue it as a career. I had no idea how to get into writing. But then, by chance, there was a competition the first week of the course to see a new up-and-coming rapper called Stormzy, and so I wrote my best piece of work and won. I got to take a new course-mate with me to watch him in Camden in the press area. It was like attending school, except I was good at it and never got into trouble. I did have a brain, after all.
With my modelling ‘career’ now lurking in the background, I started to ease off the worries about my weight. But then I got an email four weeks into my course telling me I’d been booked on an e-comm job in Scandinavia for £1,800. Wow! That was more money than I’d made in a while. My period was due, and I had a couple of spots on my chin. But, hey, everything is Photoshopped, and I assumed it would be fine. I flew out there, slept overnight, and the following morning got to work.
Well, let me tell you, e-comm work is boring AF. I shot over eighty different outfits that day, and while that isn’t exactly working down the mines, it was still tiresome. But then I was handed a pair of leather trousers to put on. I tried squeezing into them, but the button wouldn’t do up. Have you ever tried putting on leather trousers? There’s no stretch to them whatsoever!
Not to worry, I thought. They’re the one item that hasn’t fit me today.
The woman on the shoot was p*ssed off by this stage. ‘Why don’t they fit?!’ she said irritably. Don’t get me wrong, it was an awfully long day. We were all exhausted. But because the leather trousers didn’t fit, a particular shot she wanted was ruined.
But that was it, so I thought. The pictures were great, so the photographer herself told me, and I flew back to London feeling pleased with myself.
But then a couple of days later I received an email from the agency. They wanted me to come in and see them. This time I knew my paranoia wasn’t playing tricks on me. My gut instinct told me this was it: that my modelling career was over, and I was going to be dropped.
Well, let’s look at the facts. This recent job was the only one I’d had in months. Every time I’d been in to see them I’d been told I wasn’t small enough. The last time I’d visited them, which was about eight weeks before, I’d had to go in for Polaroids while on my period.
‘Can I please do them another day?’ I’d asked nervously. ‘I don’t feel my best and I’m a bit bloated.’ That’s normal, right? I mean, who the hell wants to be photographed in their bra and knickers when they’re bleeding out of their vajayjay?!
‘No, we need these ASAP,’ they said.
And so I went in for the photos. This was so pointless, as any definition I had from the gym was now covered by squishy water weight. But they took the photos as per usual, and then at the end proceeded to tell me how ‘bloated’ I looked.
‘I did tell you that,’ I said. ‘I was on my period.’
I’d never seen them so p*ssed off with me before. They told me what I was doing wasn’t good enough. ‘You have to lose the inches,’ one booker said. ‘This is ridiculous. It’s like you don’t care.’
I did care – more than anyone realized. I wanted to do so well at modelling, but no one could see the lengths I was going to in order to achieve it.
And so, since Period Gate, the work had completely stopped. I was being made to feel bad, and all because my body didn’t look in top shape due to a bodily function. I was being made to feel bad for being a woman.
Then I got a call to see my agent. I definitely wasn’t going to go into an agency to be dropped in a room full of people. That would be mortifying. Instead, I rang her up from the toilets instead during lunch.
‘You wanted to chat,’ I said.
‘Oh … yeah, right,’ she said. ‘Oh. Well, this is going to be a bit awkward!’
What – like dropping me from the agency in person wouldn’t be worse?!
‘Look … we’ve all had a chat, and we don’t feel this is working,’ she said. ‘We got told by the Scandinavian client that you were too big to fit into the clothes. We really appreciate how much work you’re putting in to getting in shape, but you’re just never going to be small enough.’
I didn’t
know what to say. I was a size six. I’d never been thinner. To a doctor, I would be underweight. To say I could never get into shape was the biggest insult I’d had to date.
‘Maybe you should go down a different route? Modelling isn’t for everyone. It works for some people; for others it doesn’t. Some people’s bodies are designed to look like models, and others aren’t. I know you said you were doing a media course at the moment – perhaps you could look into that more …? It’s really nothing personal, but sometimes these things happen. Anyway, I hope we can still be friends!’
I came out of the toilets dumbstruck. A couple of girls approached me, asking what was wrong.
‘I’ve been dropped by my agency. For being “too big”.’
The looks on their faces were priceless.
I tried not to cry as they wrapped me up into a group hug. I just wanted to go home.
This was my biggest fear, and it had come true. I’d been told I was too curvy to ever be perfect.
But instead of being devastated I was … angry?
It had taken till this moment for me to realize something. I’d spent my life catering my body to fashion’s standards … but wasn’t fashion supposed to cater to me?! Aside from being a consumer, I was also a human being. When did it become acceptable for women to starve themselves to fit a dress size, just because one random guy decided that was the way women should look? When was beauty defined by a number?
Along with the entire fashion industry, I was to blame for encouraging these unrealistic expectations for women. Rather than put my foot down, I allowed these standards to dictate to me what was beautiful. I dieted, excessively. I bought clothes because they made me look thinner, rather than better. And in the process of wanting to become someone I wasn’t – someone I’d never be – I’d lost touch with who I was.
Once upon a time, I was happy. I was a girl with big dreams and a big mouth. And that old me seemed like a different person altogether. Modelling didn’t cause me to develop eating disorders – those were already there, lingering in the back of my mind – but it certainly fuelled them. Fashion gave me reasoning behind my madness, leading me to believe that by being thinner I’d be accepted by the elite.
Misfit Page 18
