Growing up in a small town, Tess Munster was constantly bullied for her size. When she learned about plus-size modeling at age 15, she was told she was too short and too big to model. Fortunately, Tess Munster, now known as Tess Holliday, doesn’t take no for an answer.
Standing at 5’5” and a size 22, Tess Holliday has been creating a model portfolio for a long time now. Her major achievements include being named a top model by Vogue Italia and shooting an entire campaign with Benefit Cosmetics. However, on January 27, 2015, Tess scored her biggest achievement yet. She became the first model of her size to be signed to a major modeling agency! Now that she has “made it big,” the number of followers for body positivity campaign has tripled in size. #EffYourBeautyStandards started in 2013 as a hashtag she used on Instagram. It blew up and Tess began to publicly promote body positivity and self-love at any size. “I feel like it’s breaking ground,” the model told the New York Daily News of her contract. The Instagram account has more than 70,000 followers, and after the announcement of her deal, praise and support poured in on social media. Tess also noted that she receives a lot of negative feedback along with the support. When asked how she feels about it, Tess says that a lot of people act like they are concerned for her health but don’t realize that she’s very active, has a trainer, works out at least four days a week, swims, hikes, and walks. On the same subject, her new manager at MiLK Model Management said, “I see a lot of negative comments as well, and I ignore those. I know she’s healthy and active; we’re all built differently. She goes hiking, she’s in love, she has a son, and she has a gorgeous husband. Maybe people can lose weight if they walked more and ate less, but it’s so easy to say that. Everyone has their things in life.”
When asked about all the progress she’s made so far, Tess notes, “It doesn’t feel like it’s me. Every time I have a big thing happen in my career, it’s an out-of-body experience,” Holliday said. “I’m always still that 13-year-old girl in Mississippi who people told I wasn’t good enough. I never could have imagined that I could be here.”