Ever since Ashley Graham graced the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2017 Issue, there’s been an increasing belief that the fashion world’s concept of beauty is moving beyond the unhealthy realm of the excessively slim. But a recent Instagram (META) post by professional model Ulrikke Louise Lahn Høyer shows we still have a long way to go.
On Thursday, the 20-year-old Danish model took to Instagram to post about an unfortunate experience that she had while in Japan to appear in a Louis Vuitton cruise show in Kyoto. According to Hoyer, she was fired from the show for being “too big,” despite being a petite size 34 (a size 4 in U.S. terms).
Hoyer claims the caster, Alexia Cheval, said she had “a very bloated stomach” and “bloated face,” and as such needed “to drink only
When she woke up at 6:30 am, ferociously hungry, she had “the absolute minimum” at breakfast with the other models. When Alexia arrived, she “looked at me, then down on my non-existent plate and up at me again,” to check to see if the Hoyer had eaten any food.
That evening, she was told that she had been canceled from the show and would be sent back home.
In a longer post on Facebook (META), Hoyer elaborated on this humiliating experience, and said that “the demands and expectations that is given to the high end fashion models in the industry are often completely unattainable and directly damaging to the human body.”
She recalled the number of times she would go to castings and see skeletal young girls, many of whom “don’t have their periods, and/or changes the color of their skin because of bad and incorrect nutrition and almost everyone have a completely distorted relationship with food,” and reproached the people in this industry that “find pleasure in power over young girls and will go to the extreme to force an eating disorder on you.”
Luckily, Hoyer, who came into the spotlight as a professional tennis player and actually made her modeling debut at a Louis Vuitton show, didn’t let this incident get her down. But she recognized that if she were a novice she would “have ended up very sick and scarred long into my adult life.” How many stories like this do we have to hear until this abuse stops?
Ulrikke Louise Lahn Høyer has not yet responded to a request for comment.
Diana Bruk has written extensively about dating, travel, Russia-American relations, and women’s lifestyle for Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Elle, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Guernica, Salon, Vice, The Paris Review, and many more publications. As the former Viral Content Editor at Hearst Digital media and fellow at BuzzFeed, she also has a special understanding of the Internet and vast experience in human interest stories. You can learn more about Diana on her website or Twitter.
