Ashley Graham on shattering boundaries with a smile

The multi-hyphenate talent Ashley Graham has innovated a career that has spread across fashion, beauty, television, and podcasting. Ashley started modeling when she was just 12, but it wasn’t long before she was breaking boundaries — and changing the face of — the size-obsessed industry, becoming the first curvy model to cover Vogue and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue (among others), to walk Michael Kors, and to land a major beauty contract (Revlon). On this episode of Back to Biz with Katie and Boz, the model, entrepreneur, TV host, and producer talks to her friend Bozoma Saint John about pushing for more inclusivity and fewer labels at every step of her career. “There was always a label kind of looming over me,” she tells Boz. “Nobody wants to be labeled, yet people still put you in a box for who you are and who you stand for and who you’re rooting for and who you’re not rooting for. And all I simply wanted was to just be accepted for who I was.” Boz and Ashley also talk about motherhood, the need for diversity in all industries, and what it has been like quarantining with her family in her hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. “We must be very abnormal,” she says, “because it’s working!”

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