HE CASTING DIRECTOR, a Dutch man in his 50s with a large paunch, looked at me, his eyes darting around my body. “Take off your top and show me your torso,” he said. I was exhausted after 14 hours of castings, and so I did what I was told and removed my undershirt to reveal my rather pallid chest. After a quick glance, the casting director returned to his seat in the adjacent room and muttered to his stylist, “He’s beautiful, but he’s fat.” Sound travels easily in a hard-floored warehouse; I had moved to the changing room, but I heard his words clearly. I felt humiliated.
I had walked the catwalk twice at Paris Fashion Week, worked with a range of talented photographers and stylists, and was part of a world filled with staggeringly beautiful people. But this wasn’t the first time I had been called overweight, despite my jutting rib cage and hips. At a fitting for a Japanese menswear show in Paris in the summer of 2014, a group of elderly women from the designer’s team gathered behind me to laugh and lightly slap my buttocks as the material stretched to cover my rear. On another shoot, a stylist who had started drinking vodka at 9 a.m. told me I was “handsome” but needed to “stop being lazy and do some fucking crunches.” I didn’t like any of it—and I certainly didn’t like being called “beautiful” but “fat.” I decided then, that summer, to quit modeling.