Katie Halchishick, a plus-size turned straight-size turned back to plus-size model, booked tons of jobs when she was a size fourteen at age 17. When she started losing weight via exercise, she didn’t get work anymore. “As I got smaller I had to wear fat suits and padding, and that worked [keeping clients] for a while,” she tells Fashionista (she’s not the first plus-size model to try this). Her agent then suggested she get down to a size four so that she could do straight-size modeling, but she felt terrible (read: hungry) and wound up at a stable size eight. Now she’s started Natural Model Management, a modeling agency for girls like herself — who are often too small for traditional “plus-size” work, but still considered “plus” by straight-size modeling standards — to provide a more desirable alternative to models who don’t want to starve themselves or wear fat suits. Hopefully the market will put their money where their mouth is and prove that there really is a demand for healthy girls.
