Ali Michael tell-all

the modeling industry is crazy

• Ali Michael wrote a pretty harrowing trauma dump on Substack about her modeling days. Women my age remember her as the Tumblr Queen who became the unwitting face of eating disorders. I never knew the story behind it. “I was told by my agent that I had gained too much weight to be seen and needed to get out of sight if I had any chance of maintaining a career in the future, which they were hopeful for since I had ‘dominated’ during the previous season when I weighed 98 pounds. I would only be walking Yohji Yamamoto (best one anyway) which I had somehow been confirmed for despite my ghastly appearance… when roughly a week later I woke up to find a photo of myself on the front page of a section of the internationally-distributed Wall Street Journal in an exposé about eating disorders in the fashion industry that included details of my experience being rejected due to weight gain… that was published by a reporter who sat next to my talkative Mother who was my chaperone at a runway show in Paris….” The reporter, Christina Brinkley, never spoke to Michael at all. The original WSJ article is here. I’m not going to be the one that says the reporter should have had a heart, but it’s hard not to argue that it reset the trajectory of Michael’s life. (She had gained five pounds.) The piece reminds me quite a bit of Cory Kennedy’s recent New York magazine profile—the behind-the-scenes was nasty in Y2K.

  

• Reminder: Even though she never tags and you have to reverse image search everything, reluctant-resistant Provence influencer Ashley Helvey is a must-follow on Instagram for those thinking of traveling to the South of France this summer. This weekend, she was shopping at monasteries in Italy.