Watch Aerie Model Iskra Lawrence Strip Down While Discussing Her Insecurities
Iskra Lawrence may be fronting body-positive campaigns for Aerie and leading the #EveryBODYisBeautiful campaign on Twitter, but that doesn't mean the 25-year-old model doesn't have hang-ups just like everyone else. She shared some of them while stripping down to her underwear as part of StyleLikeU's "What's Underneath" video project.
Of getting started in the modeling industry in London, Iskra says, "I would go down to the agency and they'd just keep measuring my hips and I remember my hips were 36 inches and they needed to be 34 and I literally physically couldn't get them any smaller."
She did everything she could to lose weight from her hips, including the maple syrup diet (aka the Beyonce diet, a master cleanse that consists of drinking only lemonade made out of cayenne pepper, lemons, and grade B maple syrup) and protein only diet (which, as its scary name suggests, means cutting everything except protein and vegetable from your diet). Neither of these fad diets are considered healthy or nutritionally sound.
Iskra adds that she counted calories obsessively and exercised to make sure she burned twice as many calories as she consumed, and still her curves wouldn't budge. As such, her agency dropped her, leaving her crushed. She went to a lot of other agencies, and they all gave her the same excuses for turning her down. She was too "curvy," she remembers being told, too "womanly," too "commercial."
At 18, she heard about plus-size modeling from a friend and decided to try that out. This time around, she says she got rejected for not being big enough. She was a U.S. size 6, and the plus-size market catered only to models a size 10 and above. Finally, a tiny agency took a chance, took her on, and the rest is history.
But even once she became a successful model living in New York, Iskra says she had to deal with the insecurities brought on by the pitfalls of the modeling industry. "I started booking jobs and I'd get there and they'd say 'You're too small.' And then they'd be like 'Yeah, we need to pad you out a bit.' And by the end of it you look at yourself in the mirror and you're two sizes bigger."
And then there's the pressure of endless retouching and Photoshopping. "You get the photo [from a lingerie shoot] back, the cellulite has been retouched, your waist has been slimmed in, all of these things have been done to you," she explains. "In your head, you then think 'That's a flaw, that's bad.' Now I have to attain to this perfect me that I'm not even." When Aerie named her its AerieReal Role Model as part of its body positive campaign, Iskra says was the first time in her life that she got the validation she so badly wanted.
