The video is almost aggressively unremarkable. Wearing a men’s blazer, Tyra Banks sits for a Harper’s Bazaar food diary in the spring of 2020 and lists her typical daily meals. She then casually remarks, “I am twenty-five pounds heavier than I was on that swimsuit cover,” which will be quoted for the next six years. She laughs at herself and changes it to thirty a beat later, describing long workdays spent comparing fast-food burgers. One day, she says, it will come off. But not right now.
That has a disarming quality as well as a complex one. Because the same woman who spent fifteen years managing a television program in which young ladies stood on scales in front of one another is the one shrugging off thirty pounds on camera. It’s not the number that tells the story here, but rather this contradiction.
Take a look at the 2019 cover. She publicly stated at the time that she was doing the 1997 polka-dot bikini photo shoot twenty-five pounds heavier because the archive was unable to produce the original suit, so the team rebuilt it. Which appears to be confident on paper. As I watch it now, it seems more like a negotiation. A person experimenting with her own body to see how much space the industry will actually allow her. She might have known exactly what she was doing. She might have been improvising as well.
The image becomes more bizarre as you go back in time. She told People in 2015 about the methods she employed to hide her weight gain from Victoria’s Secret while she was an Angel. Organizing, cutting, and controlling the illusion. That’s a woman who was familiar with the inner workings of the fantasy and knew that it was sustained by concealment rather than biology. She then created a program that dramatized weigh-ins.
With Netflix’s Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, a three-part retrospective that leaves very little intact, the reckoning finally came. Keenyah Hill from cycle four was edited into a cautionary tale about appetite, with cameras panning to a barely moving stomach, a seven-deadly-sins shoot in which she was given a doughnut and gluttony, and Janice Dickinson at the judges’ table referring to the look as “piggy chic.” Some contestants were criticized for being too heavy, others for being too thin, and the target was always shifting. In the documentary series, Banks refers to Hill as “Boo Boo” instead of her name and seems to apologize. No one fully accepts accountability. It is categorized under the eras in which we lived.
That defense has never been strong and gets worse every year. At thirteen and fourteen, a generation of viewers devoured those episodes. One recent essay in Inspire the Mind traces a lifetime of scales and calorie counting back partially to those cycles, back to hearing a size six described as plus. Writers have openly stated that the show became a part of their own eating disorders. Approximately 9% of Americans will eventually fit the criteria for an eating disorder. That wasn’t created by the show. It was adorned with couture.
In 2024, Tyra told reporters at the revived Victoria’s Secret show that she was forty or fifty pounds heavier on the runway than when she retired, making jokes about her chest. What should we make of her comparing burgers and selling ice cream through her SMiZE & Dream venture? It was welcomed by some on the internet as tidy, satisfying, and karma. It seems too simple to frame that. When the machine took control of her, she was nineteen. Before she was old enough to question it, she absorbed its logic and spent decades replicating it while claiming to expand it.
Watching this play out over thirty years of video gives the impression that she has been publicly debating herself the entire time. Promoting diversity while conducting weigh-ins. concealing pounds from executives in the lingerie industry before revealing them to a camera. Whether the later version is a true reversal or simply the same instinct—control the story, control the revelation—pointed in a more amiable direction is still up for debate. Perhaps both. Seldom do people change in a clean way.
She once claimed that the fashion industry was “finally catching up,” but it hasn’t really caught up in the interim. GLP-1 medications allowed for the prescription of thinness once more, and the advertisements appeared on everyone’s feed. In contrast, a woman wearing an oversized blazer who refuses to apologize for thirty pounds appears more like a small, obstinate act of stillness than a victory lap. Not a conclusion. Finally, just one person refusing to do the shrink.
