He’s modelled for High Street fashion brands and haute couture, can go full ‘blue steel’ at the click of a shutter and his bum cheeks are Insta-famous, but for years Tom Tillmon struggled to forge a healthy relationship with food and his body

Words Darren Styles

Tom wears Floral Brief, by Moot Lingerie, chain, by Hatton Jewellers

Photography Markus Bidaux

It’s Thursday So, of course, there’s a man in a meadow before me wearing nothing but flowerbedecked, semi-transparent lace pulled taut across some (but not all) of a peach in human form. “Moot, lingerie for men,” he shouts across to me, with a waggle of the cheeks and a breezy wave. And breezy is as breezy does; it transpires there’s not much more cover at the front, either. But that’s for another day.

Today, we’re here to talk as this former fashion model has asked for an audience with the Attitude Body issue as he has, well, a body issue he’d like to talk about, in the hope that his experience – if shared – might help others. To look at him, you’d have no idea what that might be. He looks well, bright of eye and soul, quickwitted and (deny it not) a good-looking man. And he’s working the ‘if you’ve got it, flaunt it’ gig while surrounded by flora and fauna.

But one shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. He may have been seen on posters in flagship Oxford Street stores, been pictured looking wistfully to sea in a high-profile fashion magazine and been the object of a booker’s inappropriate affections (of which more later), but he’s also been skeletal, worked through anorexia and even, for a while, hated the very body upon which his fledgling career was built. This is Tom’s story.

Where were you born, and what was your childhood like?