by Tyra Banks
“I don’t want to be high fashion anymore,” I said. “I’m bubbly, like Christie Brinkley. I don’t drink, I don’t smoke. I don’t party and neither does Cindy Crawford. I’m not exotic, dammit—I’m the girl next door. I’m perfect for Victoria’s Secret. Just like Stephanie Seymour.”
Victoria’s Secret wasn’t going to book me, the agent said, because the girl next door was blond, baby, not black.
At that moment, I had flashbacks to that secretary, sad desk salad all stuck in her teeth, telling my brown skin it had better learn to type.
JUST CALL ME JOSEPHINE BANKS-ER
My introduction to Paris was, shall I say, shock and surprise. I was embraced in France as I never was in the United States. Paris didn’t make me feel like I couldn’t do something just because I was black. “Oui, oui, oui” is what I heard almost everywhere I went.
Paris was my Josephine Baker moment—I was getting booked for covers when no U.S. magazines would ever think of putting an unknown black model front and center. This is from a French Elle spread by photographer Gilles Bensimon that eventually became a cover for Spanish Elle.
But as soon as I landed in New York City, all I heard was “No, no, no.” Just like the Destiny’s Child song. (What up, Bey!) Every day of my career, I’d had someone telling me what black girls could and could not do. It was like they were reading it out of the Bible, ’cause they often said it like it was gospel.
“Black girls don’t book for winter collection fashion shows, because they look better in summer swimsuits.”
“Black girls aren’t gonna get major advertising campaigns.”
“Black girls don’t book magazine covers.”
“Black girls don’t get cosmetic contracts.”
I was so sick, so friggin’ sick and tired, of always hearing about all the things that black girls couldn’t do. I’d been on magazine covers, and I already had a contract with Cover Girl. I’d proved ’em wrong before. I could do it again.
“Get me a go-see with Victoria’s Secret,” I said to my agent.
BRAD, CHAD, AND TODD: I SEE YOU LOOKING!
I started to notice men checking me out right around the time I started to sprout boobs (I know—shocking, right?). But it was always the chocolate brothas who’d do the full-on stop-and-stare. Every once in a while, I’d catch a white guy looking out the corner of his eye, but if he ever knew that I knew he was lookin’, he turned away super quick and pretended to be really into comparison shopping for the kitty litter, lawn chairs, or whatever else was in the aisle he just happened to be standing in at Target.
And not I-just-got-caught-checking-out-a-woman guilty, but I-just-got-caught-checking-out-a-black-woman guilty.
If the white guys in America had been conditioned not to think that black women were beautiful, the Europeans, child, they knew no such thing.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle, une belle fille! Très jolie!” I’d hear on the streets in France.
In Italy, Mama got it, too.
“Donna bella mamma!” they’d catcall.
“Why all these Italian men tryna talk to me?” she’d ask as she sipped her blood orange juice, sitting outside the pensione in Milan. “All ‘bella donna’ this and ‘bella donna’ that . . .”
It was not what we were used to back home.
Then, after Victoria’s Secret and Sports Illustrated, that started to change. I had just as many white guys lining up at my signings, blonds and redheads coming up to tell me they had my poster in their dorm room or had saved all my magazine covers. White women would come up in the mall and ask if they could get a photo. “My sons are such fans! They just love you, Tyra!”
Huh? Your American sons?
It wasn’t like I was itching to get hollered at (any female who has ever walked down the street in New York understands how annoying, and sometimes even frightening, that gets) or that I needed the validation. It’s just that, after a while, I started to think that maybe something bigger was happening. Maybe the taboos about being attracted to other races were starting to be broken—men of all races could look at a black woman and, instead of immediately thinking, “Not my type” or “That is my type but not gonna share that desire with the world,” think, “Yeah, I kinda like that.”
Maybe there’s a white/Asian/Latino/Native American man out there, right now, who met his wife when he saw a beautiful black girl across the bar at Chili’s in the Dallas airport/on Match.com/sitting next to him in economics class and thought, “Whatever, Todd, just go for it. Ask her out. The worst thing she’s gonna do is say no.”
Carolyn: And well, whaddaya know? Victoria’s Secret up and booked my black baby girl.
Tyra: My first day on set, I was so excited! I kept telling myself, “You’re at Victoria’s Secret. The pizza butcher paper plan worked! You’re at Victoria’s Secret, TyTy!”
I got my makeup done and it looked OK. Decent.
Everyone was nice. They seemed excited I was there.
Everything was going really well.
Then I sat down for hair.
(If you know anything about African American hair, now is the time to hold your breath and pray for me. OK . . . inhale and hold!)
It took me about fifteen seconds to realize that this guy had no idea what to do with my hair. My black girl hair. He was clueless. Straight (pun intended) clueless. He’d brush a spot, stand back and look, then dart in and brush another spot. He was a mother bird building a nest with anything he could find lying around. A little bit of hair spray, a couple of squirts of mousse (yikes!), some water-based gel (double yikes!), brushing again, the curling iron, the flat iron, the blow dryer, the diffuser, water (triple yikes!) . . .
I knew I was in trouble when he doused my hairline with that water and brought out the curling iron to curl it up . . . wet!
I sat there with a smile plastered so hard on my face I felt like my cheeks were cracking. “It’ll be OK,” I told myself. “Trust him. He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t know what he was doing.”
Except that he clearly didn’t.
And I looked a hot mess.
Finally, I took a deep breath and made one last attempt to calm the panic that was seeping into my veins. “Maybe you’re just being paranoid,” I told myself. “And they want your hair to look like you just survived a tsunami. Yeah, maybe that’s the look they’re going for. This hairdo is kinda sexy, in a damsel-in-distress sorta way. . . .”
Except as soon as I stepped foot on set, I knew it wasn’t just me who thought I looked cray-cray.
The photographer’s reaction was written all over his face, and it just said, “Ew.” The art director and stylist wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
After just a few shots, I ummmmm . . . this is hard for me to write . . . I, uh . . . got sent home.
Modeling is all about rejection, and you learn to not take it too personally. But this, this was different. I felt utterly destroyed. My fabulously fantastic future had flashed before my eyes, and I liked what I’d seen.
Then just as quickly, it was yanked away. I felt like a bride left at the altar, standing there all done up in a white dress while her ex-groom-to-be zooms by with a wavy-haired, weaveless brunette on his arm and yells, “We goin’ to Disneyland, bee-yotch!”
To say I was crushed is an understatement. I was eviscerated.
At this point in my career, I was a pro. I knew not to take every rejection personally, and I understood that not every model was going to be right for every client. There had to be some synergy there, where you get together and boom! Everything falls precisely into place—you’re happy, the client’s elated, and the pictures come out absolutely, positively friggin’ fantastic. You couldn’t expect that to happen every single time you stepped on set.
Except this wasn’t just any set. This wasn’t just any client.
This was Victoria’s
friggin’ Secret.
My previous season for New York Fashion Week, I’d only booked five shows, and I used to do twenty-five! So as you can see, I had a helluva lot riding on this. My sent-home-self went home in a daze.
What about my destiny?
It was really over. Just like that?
Over the next year, I booked some jobs. People in the industry still knew who I was, and I still had a name. Sorta. No one was talking about what I had just done, was gonna do next, or how huge I was gonna be.
I’d go to Mama and cry and beg. “You have to do something,” I’d plead with her. “Call the agency and tell them to call Victoria’s Secret back. I need another chance.”
Mama would listen and make all sorts of comforting murmurs, like “Uh-huh, baby. I know, I know.”
“So you’ll call them?” I’d ask, hopeful, as soon as she finished hearing me out.
“Hell, nah. You call them.”
Carolyn: Now, I love my baby girl, and I will always have her back in whatever she does. But does that mean I’m gonna fight her battles for her? Like I told her that day:
Hell to the nah.
Tyra: The first hundred times we had that hell nah type of conversation, I thought Mama was just being scared—she was too much of a coward to call the agency and make my demands. Then it finally dawned on me one day: Carolyn London ain’t never been no coward, and she wasn’t being one now. She just literally wanted me to do it myself. Oh, Lord. Fight my own battles? There’s no way I can do that. I need my mama.
And to my surprise, she was there for me. She dialed the agency’s number (yay!) and then did the unthinkable. She threw the phone in my lap, ran out the room, and slammed the door.
What the—?
At the closing of that door, my agent answered the phone.
Dammit! I started to sweat; my shaky hands and I hung the phone up. In her face.
This was our #BossBitch photo—foreheads on blast, game faces on. Don’t mess with us.
Now the phone was just staring at me. And I could feel my mom staring at me through the door. Mama wanted me to woman up. She would never throw me under the bus, but until I got the message, she’d throw me out of the bus, over and over again. I just had to duck and roll and hope she threw me out near a Häagen-Dazs.
So . . .
I picked up the phone.
“Um . . . you ummmm . . . you have to get me another sh-sh-shot with ummmm . . . Vi-Vi-Victoria’s Sssssecret,” I stammered. “I know I’m right for them. I just need another shot,” I continued, my confidence growing with every word.
“Tyra, it’s over with you and VS. They sent you home.”
“It wasn’t my fault. It. Wasn’t. My. Fault,” I said through tears.
“Fine, babe. I’ll call them. Don’t hold your breath.”
She called me back in a week. Victoria’s Secret had listened to whatever the heck she told them: I had one more chance.
Immediately, I busted into Eye of the Ty-ger mode. I was gonna train hard AF and knock ’em out. I knew what I needed to do, and it was all about my body. And I’m not talking about my abs, my arms and legs. I’m talking about the right kind of body that I needed on top of my head.
My hair.
The night before the comeback shoot, I had my trusty hairstylist, Oscar James, come to my apartment to do my do. He conditioned my hair, flat-ironed it, and styled it, then I wrapped it up as carefully as I could in a satin scarf, like my head was a fragile Fabergé egg. I barely slept, making sure every hour on the hour my scarf was still on my head. (Think Regina King in the opening scene of that flick we all love, Friday.)
The next morning, I walked on that Victoria’s Secret set, whipped my scarf off, and was rhet to go. My hair was did, so I just waved a hello to the hairstylist on set (and stayed as far away from him as possible), and all I needed was makeup. I sat down in the chair, then as soon as the artist was finished, I excused myself (oh, that fake tummy ache worked like a charm) and scooted off to the bathroom, where I redid my entire face myself. I drew in my eyebrows closer together, dabbed just the right amount of shimmer on my cheeks, added more concealer to my natural raccoon-looking eyes, and sculpted my contour like my life depended on it.
My life didn’t, but my career sure did.
I added a final dab of lip gloss to the center of my bottom lip and scooted back to the set. “Everything OK?” they asked.
“Yep,” I said. “Everything is great.”
“Your lips really pop beautifully under the lights,” the stylist said.
I gave her a wink.
That gleam right there was my future, shining bright.
Carolyn: After that, Victoria’s Secret didn’t just book my black girl; they gave her a ten-year contract and put their first black girl on the cover of the catalog.
And that was just the first first. There were more to come.
First VS swimsuit edition cover girl
Original Angel
First black Angel
First black model with a VS contract
First black model to wear the VS Fantasy Bra
First black model to wear the Fantasy Bra . . . again.
Damn!
It wasn’t too long after that when her Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue came whipping around the corner and damn near blew me away.
Those black model barriers that had always existed? Well, it was like they were made of baby back ribs and barbecue chicken, ’cause Tyra straight devoured ’em.
Tyra: Many years later, when Sports Illustrated celebrated fifty years of the Swimsuit Issue with a televised special on NBC, my itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny red polka-dot bikini from 1997 and I were honored with the title of third-best cover of all time. It was a fancy award show type of thing, televised for the world to see, and when they ranked me number three, I was supposed to walk on the stage and give a speech, like they do at the Oscars. Shoot, the ceremony was in the same theater where they shoot the Academy Awards, so I was nervous as I approached the stage. I didn’t have anything planned and there was no speech tucked into my push-up bra, so I just got up there and said what came to mind and spoke from the heart, just like I’d done all those years before when I’d talked about Vanessa Williams and what it meant to me, as a young black girl, to see a black woman be crowned Miss America.
“A lot of the women here say it was their dream,” I said. “But it wasn’t my dream, because I didn’t think it was possible. And I didn’t think it was possible because of the color of my skin. . . . I want to thank Sports Illustrated . . . for thinking different, and I say ‘different’ without an L-Y, for being daring and for making every little black girl that year that saw that issue go, ‘Oh my God, Mama, I think I’m pretty because a black girl’s on the cover just like me.’ I stand here representing everybody with a dream, to know that if you have a dream and you have tunnel vision, it can come true. But remember to dream bigger. Because if you do, those things can be reached, too.”
I was so touched by the recognition, and the next day, I posted on social media about the experience and what I’d said.
The reactions I got were 180 degrees different.
Most black people were front and center, cheering me on. “Wow, girl, you did it!” “I remember where I was when I first saw that cover.” “My son had it on his wall for ten years!”
Other races of the rainbow were clapping, too, but some were kinda rolling their eyes (you can always tell when an Instagram comment was written with an eye roll): “Why you gotta bring race into it? Nobody thinks like that anymore.” And some even typed stuff like, “Get over it!”
At first, when I read those comments, it really upset me. There were serious issues and obstacles, challenges and struggles that I went through as a black model every single day of my career, and I wanted to acknowledge that. Not just for myself bu
t also for all the other black models who had been made to feel less than, who’d been told over and over again that they weren’t as beautiful and as valued; told countless times that a black model’s place was in the back of the issue, but never front and center. I’d been through fashion hell and back (stuff I haven’t even covered in this book—book two, maybe?) to get to where I was, and I wasn’t the only one, and now some people were looking at me like I’d tripped in my heels and landed on the most coveted cover in the world?
Were they truly that blind?
Then I thought about it some more. Could there perhaps be a silver lining to this cloud of ignorance? (Ignorant does not mean stupid. It means lack of knowledge or awareness. Look it up.) A lot of the people making those comments were from a generation that had grown up seeing black models on Instagram looking like their lives and careers were easy, stress-free, and equal. Maybe they didn’t see Jourdan Dunn, Joan Smalls, Chanel Iman, my Top Model girl Winnie Harlow, or the Jasmines—Jasmine Tookes and Jasmine “Golden Barbie” Sanders—and think, “There’s a black model.” Maybe they just saw those, and other successful beautiful black girls traveling the world, Smizing up the red carpet, and owning the runway and thought, “There’s a model.”
There’s a positive and negative to this. Yes, we are moving in the right direction for many people to see past the skin color of a model they love, but we can’t forget what it took to get here, or diminish the fact that black models still struggle a hell of a lot. You only have to read their long, heartfelt Instagram captions about dealing with incompetent hairdressers to get a sense of what they’re dealing with. I’m so glad they now have a voice to speak up about these kinds of ongoing issues. Young people today might not think race in fashion is a big deal, but there are still plenty of bosses in black and board members in suits who do. And sadly, they’re usually the ones in control of the covers, contracts, and campaigns and checks.
