Former model Ruth Crilly: ‘I was constantly thinking I was too big’

For years, model Ruth Crilly was subjected to comments about her looks, her weight, her image, suffering humiliations in varying degrees from bookers, casting directors and photographers.

“I was constantly thinking I was too big, but I was constantly being told that I was too big as well. It was a seesaw. You could go to one job, and I had a very sexy, curvy (look) for a fashion model and I’d be told, ‘You’ve got an amazing figure and great boobs’. Then you could go to another 10 minutes later and someone would say, ‘You need to lose a bit’.

“I had one director that said, ‘The only way you could walk for me in shows is to strap those down’, meaning my boobs. You’d have to bind them in. Thank God I never had any kind of disordered eating, which I feel incredibly fortunate about. It so easily could have been different.”

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Today, at 43, happily married to photographer Richard Grassie with whom she has two children, aged nine and seven, the model-turned-blogger and hugely successful content creator is able to reflect on her 12-year modelling career in the noughties.

“It’s allowed me to laugh about things that perhaps I wouldn’t have laughed about at the time,” says the erudite writer and social media star, who lives in Somerset.

Though she was never really a supermodel, Crilly ditched a law degree at Birmingham University after entering a national model search – posting her details on the back of a casual snap – and went on to grace the pages of magazines, appearing on billboards and in multiple fashion store windows, coming up through the ranks with the likes of Alexa Chung and Agyness Deyn.

Her new book, How Not To Be A Supermodel, charts her 12-year modelling career, from the age of 21 (when she was considered a little old to be starting) to her throwing in the towel to pursue writing, having taken a literature degree, mostly completed in airports and hotel rooms, and an MA in creative writing, and looking back over the copious notes she had scribbled of her modelling experiences while they were happening.

It’s a clever, witty, well-written read, as she recalls travelling the world for shoots, from Tokyo and New York to the Seychelles and the Caribbean, being photographed over shark-infested waters and freezing lakes wearing everything from skimpy lingerie to a bright yellow bodysuit resembling the Teletubbies.

There are tales of a lingerie shoot with heartthrob actor Jude Law, of her naked shoot with Sophie Dahl for a Patrick Cox campaign, of working with Rankin, the enfant terrible of the photography world, and how she never had the typical waif-like ‘heroin chic’ look which was popular in the early noughties.

The book is hilarious and heartbreaking in turns, as the young (and regularly broke) Crilly negotiates all manner of demands from photographers to agents who make her acutely aware of her weight and physical imperfections and rush her off to casting sessions where she assumes a variety of personas to get the job.

There are hilarious moments – a huge red coat she wears for a major casting in Paris bleeds red dye all over her skin during the sweaty, rainy journey – but there are also heart-rending passages as she suffers the humiliations of being deemed too fat (at 5ft 8in and 8 stone 4lbs), or sent for a job in which the end of her ponytail is cut and the hair glued on to her face as a mock moustache, or the time she is asked to wear a rubber penguin hat while on a lingerie shoot.

“That was particularly humiliating. You feel vulnerable anyway when you’re in lingerie. There’s a whole room full of people and everybody is looking at you. You’re stripped bare. So when you’re asked to put a rubber penguin head on you feel like you’re being degraded.”

For the past 14 years Crilly has written a blog, primarily on fashion and beauty but also on off-the-wall stuff which grabs her attention. She has become an award-winning content creator and social media star whose blog has been read more than 50 million times.

The modelling culture has changed a lot since Crilly gave up her modelling career for writing more than a decade ago, she reflects.

“There are a lot of things that wouldn’t be said now that were said then,” she says plainly. “People would have to be a lot more careful now if they were talking to girls about their weight, for example.”

While most of the bad experiences Crilly had were not in the UK, she says it seemed acceptable to have an industry where you had to be extremely thin.

“Now, in all honesty, it is probably the same but it’s masked better. Then, it was a lot more direct and unfiltered, and people were just very frank about it.”

Duty of care is also different now, she reckons. The incidence of casting sessions which saw teenagers going off to do lingerie Polaroids in dubious settings have lessened, she observes, as portfolios and self-filmed clips are sent digitally to casting directors.

“But I was a 21-year-old girl landing in Istanbul at four in the morning after a delayed flight, having to try to find a cab with no smartphone, when email didn’t really exist.”

She didn’t experience any sexual harassment or feel threatened by people she encountered at work, she says, but maybe because she started modelling relatively late at 21 she could fend for herself a bit more and wouldn’t have been such an easy target.

“I had weird experiences but there wasn’t a point where I ever thought ‘I’m in danger here’ and felt terrified for myself, but other girls have had awful experiences.

“I also met my now husband straight away and I wonder whether he afforded me some level of protection because he was older (he is 11 years her senior) and he was known in the industry as a photographer.”

Today, Crilly believes that the pressure to strive for unrealistic beauty standards and body ideals is greater than it was when she was modelling, partly because it’s easy to edit pictures online for perfection.

“There are people that are filtering themselves. So what people are looking up to isn’t even real.

“When people were retouched in magazines, and that’s what you were limited to, at least you sort of knew that for a lot of the time it was almost unattainable. But now we’ve got people who are influencing other people, and people look up to them as though it is attainable. A lot of the time what you see on social media isn’t the truth.”

When her nine-year-old daughter sees Crilly videoing herself for her website, she plays it down.

“I try to play it down that appearance isn’t the be all and end all, which is quite difficult, considering that almost all of what I do to earn money is appearance-based. I feel a massive responsibility towards her and towards the people who follow me.

“Part of the reason I haven’t had any treatments or Botox is that I want to keep it real for the people who follow me. When I’m online, I try to be the truest representation of myself that I possibly can be.”

How Not To Be A Supermodel by Ruth Crilly is published by Blink Publishing on August 29th.