This Model Who Was Told She Was 'Too Big' Stripped down to Send a Powerful Message
By:
A size six model strips down in a viral YouTube video and confronts her body-shaming former agency for saying she was "too big."
Charli Howard, a London-based model, recently appeared in a clip for popular YouTube page StyleLikeU to disrobe as a way to call out the industry workers who made her self-conscious about her size. Over the course of the 13-minute video, she gradually removes nearly all of her clothing as she recounts some of the self-destructive things she did to herself as a result of being told she was too big to be a model.
"I started kind of feeling like, on the shoots, that I was the more curvaceous one and that was made quite clear quite a few times," she says, adding that she was forced to wear certain clothes for being more "womanly" than the others. "I was like, for fuck's sake. I'm a size like, two to four."
Her non-model friends would tell her that she lost weight and looked thin, but she says she developed a bit of body dysmorphia as a result of all this. She survived off one chocolate bar a day and even conducted body measurements on herself five times a day to make sure she hadn't "gone up" in size.
"Salt was a no go," she says. "I was terrified to go out for a meal with someone. It ruined my relationship with my ex-boyfriend. We couldn't ever do anything nice because I'd be constantly worried. I was literally psycho, I feel so bad now."
By the end of the video, however, she is down to her bra and underwear and ready to embrace herself.
"I feel happier than I've ever been [now], and I feel like I'm being myself for the first time in my adult life and teenage life, and I'm making up for lost time that I spent worrying about my looks," she says. "That's why I feel good."
Many have shown support for Howard's video, which has more than 365,000 views, on YouTube:
StyleLikeU - youtube.com
Last fall, Howard famously wrote a "fuck you" open letter to her former agency on Facebook for calling her "too big" and "out of shape." As Mashable noted in October, it's unclear which agency Howard was condemning. She is now represented by Muse Management.
"I will no longer allow you to dictate to me what's wrong with my looks and what I need to change in order to be 'beautiful' (like losing one fucking inch off my hips), in the hope it might force you to find me work," she wrote in her 2015 viral Facebook post. "I refuse to feel ashamed and upset on a daily basis for not meeting your ridiculous, unobtainable beauty standards, whilst you sit at a desk all day, [shoveling] cakes and biscuits down your throats and slagging me and my friends off about our appearance. The more you force us to lose weight and be small, the more designers have to make clothes to fit our sizes, and the more young girls are being made ill. It's no longer an image I choose to represent."
Watch the full StyleLikeU video of Howard below:
