Ashley Graham Talks Her Rules, Her Game for WSJ Magazine February 2021

Top model and the biggest broadcaster of body loving, self-confidence known to women, Ashley Graham is styled by Dara Allen in Balenciaga, Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi, Louis Vuitton, Michael Kors Collection, Prada, Ralph Lauren, Saint Laurent and more. Ethan James Green photographs Graham for the February 2021 issue of WSJ Magazine.

Marisa Meltzer interviews Graham, who gets straight to the point of why women like her.

“My brand is about confidence and owning who you are and being honest with who you are,” she says. “I think that’s incredibly reflective of my Instagram, my YouTube, my podcast. I just wish that I had someone that was as real and honest and open when I was in middle school, high school, moving to New York.”

This is the theme that Ashley Graham asserts over and over about herself — and the heavy lift she’s taken on with women at large. Graham wants women to feel the love in a world that makes it pretty damn difficult for females generally to feel worthy most of the time. Women of color pull an extra-heavy load, and so do women whose size is larger than those featured on fashion runways.

In 2005, when she was 17 years old, Graham moved to New York. “I didn’t know how to cook for myself; I didn’t know how to take care of myself. That’s when I got my freshman 30, and my weight skyrocketed,” she says. “My self-esteem plummeted, and I had my agents telling me if you don’t lose weight, then you’re not going to work. The lowest part of realizing that I didn’t get a job because I was ‘too fat’ actually gave me the courage and the ambition to go and fill a void in an industry.”

It’s not the case that Ashley Graham hasn’t wanted to be thinner, but she’s aware of the battle she’s fighting. Halima Aden gave up modeling recently, insulted that a stylist piled denim jeans on her head instead of a proper hijab.

Graham is very different, and the woman has sufferred true abuse at the hands of the fashion industry.

AOC wouldn’t know, but I’d say Graham has dealt with pretty extreme negativity for years and it has only hardened her resolve to show women at large how to overcome these obstacles around self-confidence, in particular as they are tied to weight.

Demi Lovato describes Graham with a metaphor that resonates. ““When I met her I was still struggling with an eating disorder to some degree, [and there was] this woman with full confidence in her appearance, confidence within herself as a woman,” Lovato says. “Imagine she’s this giant waterproof jacket and someone pours [negativity], and it just rolls off of her.”

Silvia Venturini Fendi, one of the brand’s artistic directors who has now deferred to Kim Jones as the new Fendi creative director, is a designer who has championed Graham: “She is an advocate to embrace and support models of all sizes and backgrounds. The casting for the show in September reflected the idea of a family. I wanted to have the sense of sisters, mothers, fathers and sons, including different ages, different body shapes, like in real life,” says Venturini Fendi. “It’s liberating for me to see clothes portrayed in a different way, on different sizes.”

Vogue Italia’s December 2020 issue featured Graham and three of her sisters — Alva Claire, Jill Kortleve and Paloma Elsesser — in a Fendi fashion story ‘We Are Family’,also shot by Ethan James Green.

“I hate that I constantly have to discuss my body, because I don’t know any man that has to do that. But what motivates me to continue to talk about my body is that I didn’t have someone talking about their body when I was young,” she says. “This is why I don’t post like the ‘perfect’ Instagram photos. I keep it real and raw constantly because I want [people] to know that there are women with cellulite, with back fat, with stretch marks.... There are a lot of curvy women, plus-size women, fat women, whatever you want to call them.”

So what would she like to be called? Graham answers, without a pause: “A woman.”

MacKenzie Scott Upends Philanthropy with Jawdropping Donations to Insecure Communities

5 Ways MacKenzie Scott's $5.8B Commitment to Social and Economic Justice Is a Model for Other Donors AOC Women

MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos) is believed to be the third-wealthiest woman in the world, and the 20th-wealthiest individual overall. As we speak, today February 25, 2021 the head of Vermont’s only food bank, John Sayles is deeply appreciative when he gets the occasional call from a big donor wanting to make a $10,000 gift.

Sayles reports being totally stunned when he learned that the billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott had allocated a $9 million gift to his organization. The sum is greater than the Vermont Food Bank’s entire 2019 operating budget.

Scott, whose fortune comes from Amazon shares she received during her divorce from Jeff Bezos in 2019, donated nearly $4.2 billion to 384 organizations in the final four months of 2020 alone. The finalists came from a list of 6,490 organizations that were vetted, and included 42 food banks and 30 Meals on Wheels programs around the country, writes Food Bank News.

MacKenzie Scott has upended the world of philanthropy in multiple ways. Her low-key, under the radar approach to giving won’t have appeal to people who want their names on buildings. But she definitely has everyone’s attention. Read the five key specifics of Scott’s approach to giving in AOC Women.

As the New York Times noted, “They came like gifts from a Secret Santa, $20 million here, $40 million there, all to higher education, but not to the elite universities that usually hog all the attention. These donations went to colleges and universities that many people have never heard of, and that tended to serve regional, minority, and lower-income students.”

“I was stunned,” Ruth Simmons, president of Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black college in Prairie View, Texas, told the Times after she learned that Scott was giving it $50 million, the biggest gift the university had ever received. She told the paper she thought she had misheard, and the caller had to repeat the number: “five-zero.”

AOC shares estimates that MacKenzie Bezos gave $587 million to racial equity nonprofits in 2020 and another $400 million to organizations that advance economic mobility.

“This pandemic has been a wrecking ball in the lives of Americans already struggling,” MacKenzie wrote in a December 2020 Medium post , “Economic losses and health outcomes alike have been worse for women, for people of color, and for people living in poverty. Meanwhile, it has substantially increased the wealth of billionaires.”

Scott also acknowledged that the billionaire wealth increases resulting from the pandemic’s positive impact on the stock market (go figure) prompted her to offload large sums of her own increased wealth and good fortune.

There’s nothing very glamorous about her giving. MacKenzie Scott and her team focus on supporting “communities facing high projected food insecurity, high measures of racial inequity, high local poverty rates, and low access to philanthropic capital.” And then the facts of her philanthropy sort of dribble out into the media mainstream. Makenzie Scott’s operation has no known address — or even a website, reports the Times.

“If you look at the motivations for the way women engage in philanthropy versus the ways that men engage in philanthropy, there’s much more ego involved in the man, it’s much more transactional, it’s much more status driven,” said Debra Mesch, a professor at the Women’s Philanthropy Institute at Indiana University. “Women don’t like to splash their names on buildings, in general.”

Mesch notes that Scott makes the unsolicited and unexpected gifts with “full trust and no strings attached.” Read about the five groundbreaking best practices the philanthropist employs in her giving.