Welcome to Unstyled. I'm your host, Christine Barberick, co-founder and global editor-in-chief of Refinery 29.

Each week, I invite a notable person to come in and talk with us as we explore the funny, inspiring, sometimes heartbreaking tales of life, work, and love, as told through the things that we wear.

In every generation of models, there's always one serious trailblazer.

Someone who shatters the paradigm and ultimately changes the game for everyone. In the 1960s, Donya Luna appeared on British Vogue and was touted the first black

supermodel.

Gia Karanji changed the face of 1980's fashion while living as an openly queer woman.

These icons pushed the boundaries of our consistently narrow beauty standards.

And then Tess Holiday came along and threw them all right out the window.

Fuck your beauty standards, she said.

A new groundbreaker was born.

The truth is, Tess was an outlier from the start.

At 15, she attended an open call for plus size models.

The casting agents told her to quit.

At 5'4 and a size 16, Tess was both too short and too big. She knew they were right, but she didn't care. Tess was used to adversity. Her childhood was marked by violence and hardship. Her mother was

disabled after being shot by a boyfriend, and Tess was bullied so brutally

at school that she left early and got her GED.

Tess knew she was different from other aspiring models, in many ways, but something urged

her to keep going.

So she did, for 10 years.

Finally in 2011, something began to shift. She was working as a receptionist,

doing occasional photo shoots and posting self-produced photos online. Her face was getting out there,

but not her name. And all that changed in 2013. When Tess first used her now famous Instagram hashtag, F Your Beauty Standards.

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