When you’re a model, nobody calls you fat. “What they say is ‘curvy,’ but you know they mean fat,” says Lara Stone, who is Dutch and so soft-spoken, you have to lean forward to hear what she’s saying. However, she enunciates that word—fat—clearly and forcefully, as if it were caught at the back of her throat. The word hovers over the din of the hotel lobby where we are seated in downtown Manhattan, laced with irony and just a tinge of bitterness.
Worse than being called fat is a gaggle of stylists whispering in a corner after you’ve been trying on clothes for ten minutes. “That,” she says, “is when I know I’m about to be canceled.” It doesn’t happen nearly as much as it used to. In the last three years, Stone’s star has risen to the point where her face, a beguiling mixture of tough and naive—imagine Sandra Bernhard crossed with Grace Kelly—has appeared in ad campaigns for Givenchy, Calvin Klein, and Hugo Boss. She’s walked the runway for almost every major designer, including Marc Jacobs, Balmain, and Isabel Marant. In modeling, she has endured long past the usual sell-by date. The fact that she has done it while being a good two sizes larger than the minnows currently walking the runway makes her all the more unusual. But it has not been easy.
This is an excerpt from a Vogue feature on Lara Stone. You can read the whole article on the Vogues website here.
