Supermodel Ashley Graham has reached yet another career milestone — a beauty contract with Revlon. Graham is an ambassador for the makeup giant’s “Live Boldly” campaign, making her one of the only plus-size models to land a major beauty contract, reports WWD.
courtesy Revlon
“Historically, curvy girls are not given beauty contacts,” Graham told the site. “It’s kind of groundbreaking, because in my generation of models, this hasn’t happened yet. This is one of those moments where I’m over the moon, I cried a little.”
“There was a moment in my life…[when] I wanted to go home, I wanted to go back to Nebraska from New York and I wanted to give up and I was just done with modeling because it was such a hard, cruel world,” Graham said. “[My mom] said, ‘Ashley, your body is supposed to change someone’s life,’ and when she said that to me I didn’t get it at first. She also told me, ‘you have to talk better to yourself’ and she helped me understand what affirmations were.”
The campaign features other top models posing with Graham like Adwoa Aboah, Imaan Hammam, and Raquel Zimmerman. “When models become successful they tend to only do photographs alone,” Linda Wells, Revolon’s chief creative officer told WWD. “They don’t share — in magazine days, it’s like, ‘the girls won’t do a double’…as a result, you get the sense that being alone is beautiful. So often beauty is photographed and filmed in studios because it is a controlled setting where there’s no wind to mess up the hair and no natural light. It has this feeling of distance from life, as if beauty cannot exist in the world but has to be in this hermetically sealed room.”
The Revlon campaign follows an impressive list of successes for Graham, including a TV gig on America’s Next Top Model, getting her very own Barbie doll, and making last year’s Forbes list of highest-paid models in the industry.
