Celina Ralph 'Suited and Booted' by Ina Levy for The Sunday Times Style UK
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“I’d been contemplating cutting my hair for ages before I actually went through with it,” says model Celina Ralph in her brief March 2, 2025 interview with the Sunday Times Style London.
“I think there’s always been a rebellious streak within me. From a young age, I was questioning authority. Then, as my modeling career progressed, I found myself questioning the idea of the male gaze. I guess I had the sense that how I was being presented never felt like the true version of me. There was definitely an element of ‘f*** the system’ in my decision-making process.”
The buzz-cut model Ralph does business class, styled by Verity Parker in masculine suiting, crisp shirts and a tie for images by Ina Levy [IG]. Brands include Bally, Bottega Howell, Celine Homme, Hermès, Giorgio Armani, Loewe, Loro Piana, Margaret Howell, The Frankie Shop, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, Tod’s, Wales Bonner and more.
Celina Ralph’s body conform to industry standards. Her hips are not what the fashion industry would deem to be ‘sample size’. Ralph’s body [a UK size 10 to 12] is classed as ‘midsize. Ralph has much to say — and so do we on this topic.
Celina Ralph’s Body Type v Size 0 in Luxury Fashion
Much larger models previously called anyone who raised concerns about well-documented, long-term health outcomes of obesity ‘fatphobic’. Today, these same models are shrinking before our very eyes, thanks to the new highly-effective weight-loss drugs.
It could be that fashion comes to rest around Celina Ralph’s body type as much more aspirational than in the past. And Ralph is in good company with the above-mentioned, shrinking-bodies, industry players coming down closer to her size. She cites her concerns generally on this topic:
“We have to be careful of tokenism,” she says. “Of course we celebrate when designers and brands celebrate women of different sizes, but there has to be longevity, and we definitely haven’t got there yet. What we need in this industry is variation — we need all different versions of beauty.” She’s right to worry. Body diversity where the designer catwalks are concerned is not in great shape. During the spring/summer 2025 round of shows last September, 4 per cent of the model castings were considered “midsize”, with just 0.8 per cent fulfilling the plus-size category.
The Body Sizes Challenges to Luxury Brands Are Not Top of Mind
Some of this negative critique on body-sizing is just not top of mind in the luxury market these days. Luxury brands have far bigger problems at hand — like surviving the threat of US tariffs or, goddess forbid — a global, economic slowdown triggered by the Trump Administration. The latter is very possible.
Factually-speaking, about 50% of luxury sales in clothing are coming from 1% of the population.
Very, very few of those women are not model size, and they’ve always been thin. AOC agrees that post ‘90s supermodels were US size 4-6 [UK 8-10], and then heroin chic hit, and body sizes shrank even further. This history is also before the dramatic rise of Asia’s purchasing power.
Greater Exposure of Larger Models Did Not Translate into Luxury Brand Sales
It’s difficult for us to argue that luxury brands MUST feature models that do not represent real women clients. The assumption that if you show an abundance of large-size models, it will translate into sales is faulty logic. That has not happened, as luxury brands tried to do better with body-size representation.
What Celina Ralph and her Sunday Times colleagues are arguing is that luxury brands owe it all women to make us feel great about our bodies, including the 90% of us who will never buy their clothes due to lack of income and our body types. Note that we are being generous to Ralph with 90%.
AOC promises you that the majority of luxury brands will take care of the large-body woman who is a regular client. Every brand accommodates Oprah with made-to-order clothes, whatever size she is this year — which is back to being thin with one of the Ozempic-like drugs.
The Pushback Against ‘Groupthink’
We only speak for America on AOC, but there is huge pushback among the Elon Musk crowd wrecking total havoc across our country against uber-progressive ‘groupthink’. The success of models of color shows no signs of any erosion in representation from AOC’s perspective — and we are watching diligently.
We will go to the mat with Bernard Arnault himself on models of color — and that is not at all necessary. Damning him and his brand leaders for not making luxury clothes that will never sell, because those women cannot afford to buy his clothes, is a sustainability issue for those who care — let alone a bad business practice.
Why are models arguing for the creation of throw-away clothes and huge hits to business profits, so that all women feel represented by their brands? To the best of our knowledge, there’s not one case study to support their arguments.
Furthermore, a larger-size woman influencer/talent — an actor or music star wearing custom luxury clothes on the red-carpet — achieves far more ‘halo’ effect for the brand than almost any model on the runway.
Very few women watch fashion shows and study brand campaigns, compared to tracking prominent and popular women on IG and Tiktok.
Also, while the Chinese luxury market is under pressure, the size of that market with its significantly smaller women is another challenge to the ‘colonial mentality’ argument. Are we seriously arguing that the size of American and UK women — the largest in the world in America — should determine runway sizes for Chinese women? And Thai women. And South Korean women? Do we believe that Asian women aspire to be as big as we are? As someone who has spent much time with Asian women, they do not aspire to carry around our amount of unneeded weight, as a sign that they have ‘arrived’ to first-world status.
Bottom line for AOC, as long as luxury brands keep models like Celina Ralph and Ashley Graham on the runway, we’re are not critics on this topic. BTW, Paloma Elsesser looks as fabulous these days as her heavily-featured in media, stunningly-gorgeous Brooklyn townhouse. ~ Anne
