Summary: Chari Howard on starvation, sample sizes, living the dream in Paris and 'that' Facebook post. This week I chat to model and founder of The All Woman Project, Charli Howard. After years of criticism and starvation Charli was pushed to breaking point and she wrote a Facebook post expressing her anger at the sizeist fashion industry. Her post went viral and she has since become a prominent voice in the battle for more diversity within the fashion industry. While 'living the dream' modelling in Paris (but actually hating it) she was told to lose an inch in a week, just like that scene from Zoolander. But real. Knowing that her career depended on her shifting that final inch she walked and walked and didn't eat and went to sleep at 6pm, waking up in the middle of the night with hunger pains. She was living in a model's house with a bulimic flatmate, who would be wined and dined in the evening by rich men and then come home and threw it up. Which also couldn't have helped. She tells me that being a model is a fulltime job - she could never have a blowout, she had a fear of salt, bread, most foods. But after trying everything she was unable to meet the required measurements. Even though she was skin and bones. The clients response to her agency was openly "why did you send her when she's not thin enough". But at that point, rather than feeling angry with the industry, she felt shame, embarrassment and as though she had let them down. She suffered with anxiety around food and panic at having to eat in social situations - and it contributed to the end of her then relationship. She also sporadically made herself sick. Yet she didn't see it at bulimia, to her it was getting rid of stress, feeling control and to manage her anxiety. She kept it secret fearing that she would be made to stop if people found out. After an incident involving leather trousers she was dropped by her agency and Charli, thank god, flipped out and decided she couldn't take any more shit. She wrote a raw Facebook post that went viral and was, the next day, picked up by pretty much every newspaper. She then got signed up by an American agency and started getting work, including a campaign for Maybelline and it was at this time that she also created the All Woman Project.
