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IT IS MID-SEPTEMBER and fall is mere moments away, but on this morning in Brooklyn it is already nearly 90 degrees, a sultry, salty breeze blowing in off New York Harbor. I arrive at DUMBO House, the members-only social club right on the East River, and step up to the lobby check-in at precisely 9 a.m. I am meeting Ashley Graham, I say to the woman at the desk, whose widening eyes are focused just past my right ear. Suddenly I sense a presence, someone standing thisclose. “I’m right here,” says Graham in a faux-husky voice, steaming the back of my neck. Punked, right out of the gate.
A fashion-editor friend of mine who’s known Graham for years told me, “She’s the opposite of hard work—she’s the best girl, period,” and I immediately get what she means. Graham has an uncanny knack for making you feel not just relaxed and happy but like you might actually be a better, funnier person than you think you are. Within minutes, we’re cackling like eighth-graders in a sex-ed class, and it does not take long to understand why the universe seems to be tilting in her direction, everyone finally coming around to her POV, which is one of radical transparency, a kind of punk-rock commitment to being forthright about nearly everything—body positivity above all. Which is exactly why Revlon has made her a face of its brand, and why she is an ambassador for several more, including Marina Rinaldi and Swimsuits for All and Addition Elle. It is why Ellen DeGeneres chose Graham to host her digital series Fearless with Ashley Graham, where Graham talks to everyday folks who, as she puts it, “take a chance at something they never thought they could do.” And it’s also why Kim Kardashian West and Lilly Singh and Gayle King are all too happy to visit Graham’s podcast, which is in its second season and which she is confident enough to have named Pretty Big Deal.
Graham is five months pregnant when we meet, and wearing a black chiffon dress from The Row that skims the floor. “I love this dress,” she says as she turns to show it off in profile. “See? It’s great for pregnant——” here she pushes her belly out as far as it will go and starts laughing. “And then look! Here’s my party trick!” She sucks her pregnant belly all the way in and smooths the dress out flat. “And not pregnant!” Then: “Are you hungry?” Yes. “Oh, good. I have to eat. That’s my new thing. Like, if there’s no food? We don’t need to stay.” But wait. “Do you want to see the pool really quick? The view is kinda maj.” Up to the stairs we go, Graham exuberantly greeting everyone we pass: Hey, baby! Oh, hiii, sis! Standing by the pool, we take in the sweeping—in point of fact, major—view; it is the ultimate palimpsest, one that allows you to see all of the layers of New York history. In the summer, Graham tells me, she and her best friend hang out here on weekends. “You have to show up at 6 a.m. and wait in line to get a bed by the pool. So my best friend, who lives across the street, will come and wait in line for me. I show up at 7:30, and then all day we have our own bed. Instead of going to the Hamptons, which isn’t our thing, we come here. Just walk across the street! This is our hood!”
But for a few months in a cramped apartment in Chelsea, Graham has been a Brooklyn girl since 2006. Indeed, she has lived at the same modest address in Park Slope since she was 17, when she signed with Wilhelmina and began modeling in earnest. Rachel, the aforementioned best friend, was the real estate agent who found her the apartment. “She’s been my ride or die for 16 years,” says Graham, who’s now pointing out a building off in the distance where she and her husband of nine years, cinematographer and documentarian Justin Ervin, finally bought themselves a serious home: a whopping three-story loft—a dope triplex, as she might say in one of the many voices from her repertoire—that has been under renovation for many, many months. One day soon, the best view in New York City will be hers. “I’ve been putting away my money,” she says of renting for all those years. “I mean, I wasted money or other things like clothes and . . . caviar.” She laughs. “But this apartment is a really big deal for me.”
We head back downstairs, find a table, and order breakfast. I notice her nails, shellacked to a fare-thee-well. “Homegrown, baby!” She holds them up for inspection. “I think this color is called High Maintenance.” Her left ear is like a wind chime, dangling with so many earrings you can hear them clinking together. “Seventeen holes,” she says. Suddenly her big black bag starts to vibrate, not with the zzzzt . . . zzzzt . . . zzzzt of a cell phone but the continuous low-frequency hum of, say, a vibrator. “Call me out, Jonathan!” she says, laughing as she digs in and finds the culprit: a handheld fan. Really, I say. “Oh! When you’re pregnant? And it’s hot? You need one of these walking around the city.” And then she pulls a smaller bag out of her big bag. “I carried this last night to the Fenty show—little vintage Chanel moment. I’m giving it back to my stylist tomorrow. Don’t own it!”
It’s Fashion Week, and Graham walked for Tommy Hilfiger x Zendaya three nights ago. “Tommy told me I was the first pregnant woman who’d ever walked his runway. It was kind of like a block party in Harlem, all kinds of women, all genders, races, and everybody’s heels were so high. It was not a normal catwalk—it was concrete, still under construction, with potholes. And I was praying I wasn’t going to fall down. Which is an awful lot to ask of a model in her second trimester—I have wounds on my feet!”
Last night, she attended Serena Williams’s fashion show, where she was seated with Kim Kardashian West and La La Anthony. “Kim immediately started telling me, ‘Ashley, the pregnancy may be the hardest part, but the birth is the easiest.’ I’m just taking in advice from everyone and not putting too much pressure on myself.” She went backstage after the show. “Serena was like, ‘Call me; we should talk.’ ”
“I text her anything that rolls off my mind,” says Williams. “I was one of those people who wanted to know every ugly detail of what happens . . . down there . . . what happens everywhere. Like, why are my nipples so big a week into being pregnant? This makes no sense; the baby doesn’t need to eat yet. I wanted to know every single thing, and I still love talking about it. Because I feel like it’s important to kind of change the narrative and be like, it’s normal to feel scared, and not be one of those women who are like, ‘Oh, it’s so great!’ Just be scared out of your mind. That’s normal.”
Not long ago, Graham met Amy Schumer at a party, and Schumer instinctively scooped her up and brought her into the fold. She recently gave her a tour of her nursery. “I was like, ‘Come over and I’ll just tell you what I have learned and what I wish I knew,’ ” Schumer says. “And then I was like, ‘And the nicest thing I can do for you is tell you that you won’t hear from me again, but you can call me anytime.’ ’Cause it’s a lot. People are so in your face when you’re pregnant because they’re so fucking excited for you. And you don’t get it. You can’t possibly get it. And then after you’ve had a baby you’re like, ‘Oh, I get it!’ ”
Graham was a bit startled by all the pregnant-lady love at first. “I need my alone time, but when I do go out, I’m usually the life of the party. Now all anyone wants to talk to me about is being pregnant.” She laughs. “There’s just this camaraderie. It’s a secret society that I didn’t know about. I was hiding my pregnancy for the first four months. I’ve always had control over my body—when everyone else wanted to dictate what it should be, I took full control over it—but I had this life inside of me saying, It’s not yours anymore, it’s mine. And you have to just succumb. And I felt like I didn’t have anyone to talk to. I was gaining weight rapidly. And I felt alone. And the one piece of advice that my stylist, Jordan Foster, gave me was, Make pregnant friends. None of my friends were in relationships, let alone pregnant. And now I have nine pregnant friends.”
As a rule, Graham is unflappable. “Nothing much fazes me.” And then she got body-snatched by hormones. She started crying in public for no reason. “This is what happened to me the other day: I was with Justin, eating an almond butter–and–jelly sandwich, and I took one bite and all of a sudden, I starting welling up. And then full-on crying! I was chewing and eating and sobbing and I was like, I DON’T KNOW WHY I’M CRYING BUT I’M REALLY UPSET THAT WE’RE NOT GOING TO BE IN THE NEW APARTMENT AND THE BABY IS GOING TO BE HERE!!!!” She lets rip with one of her full-throated, bone-rattling laughs. And then she tells another story, about their anniversary, the day they announced their pregnancy and flew to St. Barts. “We get there and I’m brushing my teeth and Justin is washing his hands, and there was something about the way he put the soap on his hands that made me hysterical with laughter. THAT’S THE FUNNIEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN!!! But it wasn’t funny. It was my hormonal emotions. And I started laughing so hard that I went into hysterics. I said to Justin, ‘If you said something to me right now that was sad, I might start crying.’ And he just stared at me. And then: the tears!”
THE NEXT MORNING AT 9:30, I meet Graham at her doula’s town house in Williamsburg. Latham Thomas, a yogi who founded Mama Glow, an online hub for expectant and new mothers, is a celebrity wellness guru and birthing coach with a devoted hip-hop and fashion following. Her studio consists of two rooms on the ground floor. Painted millennial pink, the space is modern-girly in the extreme.
We hear Graham before we see her. “Smells like yogaaaa in heeeeeere. . . .” She swans into the studio in head-to-toe skintight black gear, ready to go, carrying a boxy little Dior book bag. “This just came out,” she says, “but only in Japan. Isn’t it cuuuuuute?” And then, rubbing her belly: “I think my stomach got bigger this morning.”
“This very morning?” says Thomas.
“Like another inch!” Yesterday Graham interviewed Cindy Eckert, the cofounder of the company that developed Addyi, the female Viagra, for her podcast, which is also filmed for Graham’s YouTube channel and is obviously where her heart lies these days. “The ultimate goal is to have my own television show,” Graham says. “My crew is all women, except for one nonbinary person. And we were all on the edge of our seats because Cindy was talking about sex, drugs, and making billions of dollars!” (I sat in on Ashley’s interview with Gayle King, and she not only coaxed King into talking candidly about her late-bloomer career and being single at 64, but also somehow got her cackling gleefully over ribald sex talk, admitting that she posed naked for a photographer in college, and debating the pros and cons of sending revealing selfies.) Graham thinks of Pretty Big Deal as conversations with women she is inspired by and wants to learn from—and she is a sponge, a pupil. “With Viagra, it’s a blood-flow issue, but for women, when you have no sex drive, it’s all in your head. So this drug turns on sexual fantasy. It’s not like it does anything here. . . .” she grabs her crotch. “For women it’s all like, we have a checklist: taking care of kids, worried about our husband, worried about our body. But the drug flips that and makes you want to have sex.”
The three of us get to joking about how this may explain everything: For men it’s purely physiological; for women—can you please get my shopping list out of my head? For someone who brings up God and her faith regularly and goes to church most Sundays—who, indeed, met her husband in church—Graham is remarkably sex-positive. She talks about it all the time—though somehow, there’s nothing remotely provocative about it. She manages to be uncommonly frank about, say, bodily functions and still maintain a sense of decorum, even as she pulls up her dress to show me her brand-new SKIMS, or asks to see the scabs all up and down my arms from the poison-ivy outbreak I had a week prior. When I finally roll up my sleeve to show her, she lets out a big, bellowing joyful note, like an opera singer in the finale.
“I feel like every relationship goes in waves of sex,” she says. “You’re like, Hey, do we need to plan this? And now, with pregnancy, things have been real-ly diff-er-ent.” She laughs. “Because there’s this huge bulge that can be sensitive if you lay on it or go into a new position. I’ve been literally asking every single one of my friends who have had babies or who’re pregnant, like, ‘What positions do you guys do?’ This has to be a normal conversation among mothers.”
It’s no surprise that she and Schumer clicked. “She’s a goddamn fire starter,” says Schumer. “Ashley just knocks the wind out of you. She’s one of those rare, really authentic people. There’s just no horseshit, you know? That’s a compliment, right?”
Graham and Thomas head into the yoga room and get down on their mats, but before they begin to inhale and exhale and seal in the day’s intentions, a little gossip. “So my publicist was freaking out,” says Graham, “because she’s like, ‘Mama Glow is your doula? She’s DJ Khaled’s wife’s doula!’ ”
There is a long pause as Thomas fixes Graham with a you’re-not-gonna-believe-this look. “That birth was Snapchatted.”
“It was?”
“I do not recommend,” says Thomas.
“He Snapchatted?”
“Yes, girl. While she was giving birth, his publicist was texting me. ‘Latham, you gotta get him off Snapchat.’ It was so wild because when you’re Snapchatting, there’s geolocation, so people showed up.”
“Oh, no, to the hospital?”
“YAS. So first we were like, Can you not do that? And then he would hide, and then he just figured out how to film in a way that we didn’t see it. Thankfully, he wasn’t, like, in her vulva, but it was definitely as the baby was coming out and there was video.”
For better and for worse, pregnancy has become pop culture. Something that was once considered so private as to be hidden away from the world now unfolds live on social media. Serena Williams wonders if it all started with Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, naked and pregnant, shocking all the squeamish prudes and church ladies. “I was only 10 at the time,” says Williams, “but I remember thinking that was cool.” Ten years later, when Us Weekly focused its attention on questionable gossip and paparazzi shots of actresses pumping gas in Beverly Hills, the whole bizarro obsession with the “baby bump” took off. Tabloid copycats escalated their pursuit of the possibly pregnant, raising it to the level of stalking. One afternoon of bloat while leaving The Ivy and suddenly: IS JENNIFER PREGNANT? And then social media came along and women began to own their narrative by curating the journey of getting and being pregnant and giving birth and bouncing back—or not.
“I think it’s a good thing,” says Williams, “but it also puts a lot of pressure on women. For me, the whole lie about ‘the snap back’ was what bothered me. I had a little problem with the lies of girls on Instagram—like, coming out of the hospital holding the baby and . . . you know . . . looking thinner than before. That’s not happening to me! That’s one thing I’ve learned, and the thing I tell Ashley: Everybody—literally every body—is different. You might jump back in an hour. I didn’t.”
Thomas is now nearly climbing on top of Graham, coaxing her pelvis to open up to ease the pressure on her back. “Girl, look at this flexibility you hidin’,” says Thomas. “I’m very flexible,” says Graham, her head buried somewhere underneath her belly. “It comes in handy. How do you think I got like this?”
When the session is over—and after Graham reenacts some of her yoga poses so that Thomas can take Instagram-ready photos so that Graham can post them right away, because that is how it all works now—Graham and I head farther into Williamsburg to meet her husband for breakfast at The Hoxton hotel. “I think Justin is messing with me,” she says as she stares into her phone in the Uber on the way there. “I just texted ‘Almost there!’ and he texted back, ‘It’s in Manhattan, right?’ He’s a jokester. He likes to get a rise out of me.”
One day in 2005, when Graham was still working in relative obscurity as a “plus size” catalog model, she was running the elevator as a volunteer at The Journey, a nondenominational church in Manhattan she attended. A newcomer got on. “Hi. Welcome to the Journey,” she purred. It was Ervin, who was so enchanted that he skipped Sunday service and rode up and down with her all morning. A couple of days later, “in an uncreepy way,” she says, he found Graham on Facebook. Eventually they went out for coffee, dated for a year, and got married when Ashley was just 22.
When I tell Justin that it took us about four seconds to start behaving like we’ve known each other since high school, he says, “Ashley could have been cast as Wonder Woman, because she actually has a golden lasso. That old TV show with Lynda Carter? She would toss that golden lasso, put a lariat on somebody, and they would tell the truth. That’s what Ashley does: She disarms people into being able to tell the truth—immediately.”
“Well, and have fun,” says Graham. Justin stares at me for a second. “Yeah, it’s not like you’re under duress.” We get to talking about how fame is changing, that there seems to be zero tolerance for anything that reeks of fake. “I think in this generation, authenticity is everything,” Graham says. “It’s gold. There’s nothing sexier than being your true, honest self. And the more you are, the more accepted you are, and the easier it is to navigate through success. I don’t have a persona. This is it. Just be yourself!”
Graham wasn’t always so self-confident. She was discovered in a mall in Omaha when she was 12 years old, and her first job was modeling bras for a defunct Midwestern chain that sold everything from makeup to electronics. “I don’t know if it’s even legal to have a 12-year-old model a bra,” she says. Right out of the gate, Graham was labeled with the vague-yet-too-specific words “plus size.” “If you would have asked me then if I felt plus-sized, I would have said, ‘Well, I’m 12 years old and a size 10.’ I had no correlation with that word. And as I grew up in the plus-size industry, it was like everybody was trying to do away with that label—get rid of it!—and now we are in a generation where women are embracing plus-size again, they’re embracing the word fat, they’re embracing curvy and big girl, because women are not one--dimensional. Why use just one word to describe such a wide variety of women?”
Graham got cast in a Lane Bryant show when she was 15. “It was one of the last big shows they did,” she says. “I remember Mia Tyler was in it, and I had dinner with her father and Aerosmith, the whole band, afterward, and I didn’t even know who they were. I turned to their drummer and said, ‘So, what do you do for a living?’ My mother kicked me under the table!” By the time Graham moved to New York, “the curve models,” as she calls them, weren’t getting any recognition. “You’d heard of Emme, you’d heard of maybe Kate Dillon or Sophie Dahl. I became best friends with Crystal Renn. We sort of raised each other in New York. She was just a year older than me, and we were figuring it out—she was the editorial queen. So she would teach me how to flip my hair naked in the mirror and how to pose and how to change my face. But I just never had the opportunity to do those things editorially until I was on the cover of Sports Illustrated. That’s when people started taking me seriously.”
But the turning point came when she appeared in the infamous 2010 Lane Bryant ad that nearly got banned from television. “It was dubbed ‘too risqué,’ ” says Graham. “And it was just me in lingerie and a trench coat going to meet my boyfriend for lunch and, you know, eating an actual meal. And it almost got taken off the air.” But the media declared it a fat-shaming moment and the pressure forced them to keep it on. “Because why would a size 16 model in lingerie be banned from television and not a size 2 model?” Suddenly, Graham was doing Leno and fielding dozens of radio and press interviews. “It put me on the map,” she says, “and it started a conversation.”
Had she ever tried to fit the mold, to be thin? “I’ve never been thin, so I don’t even know what that feels like. But I’ve had people tell me I needed to lose weight. I’ve tried every diet known to man, but they don’t work, because I’m a curvy woman—a big-boned, healthy, corn-fed Nebraska girl. It is who I am. And once I accepted that, the more confident I became, and that’s when my career really started to take off.”
We have all ordered the same enormous full English breakfast, and we have all cleaned our plates. “Honestly, it’s Justin’s fault,” says Graham. “I eat like him.” And then funnier, in gravely macho voice: “I eat like a MAAAAN.” She laughs. “But it’s perfect right now, because I’m pregnant.”
Unbeknownst to me, the couple planned to reveal the baby’s gender to Vogue this morning. Now, though, they get into a hilarious, bickery back and forth about exactly how to tell me. Finally Graham says, “Can you tell what I’m carrying? Because there’s, like, a thing, where you can tell by, like, the shape of the bump.”
For some reason, I think it’s a girl, I say.
“That’s so interesting,” says Justin. “Everyone says that. Maybe it’s just that people feel like it’s on-brand for Ashley to have a girl.”
We get into a conversation about how pregnant couples have to constantly answer the same questions, every day, over and over: When are you due? How are you feeling? What’s the sex? “It’s the natural progression,” says Justin. “Oh, you guys are dating? How’s it going? Do you think you might get married? Oh, congratulations! When are the kids? What is the gender? When’s it due? So it’s just this progression of small talk that people feel like they have to engage in throughout different stages in your life as a couple.”
Graham rolls her eyes. “And also they’re just curious.” Pause. “Like other mothers. They really, really want to know.”
Finally Graham just comes out with it: “It’s a boy.” She grew up with two sisters and is super close to her mom. “I don’t know anything about boys, so I’m so excited.” Justin chimes in: “She owed me a boy. What with all of this wonderful, divine, feminine energy she has around her 24/7, I want a little sidekick.” Just like every other prying little busybody, I can’t help but ask, When are you due? “Okay,” says Graham, heaving a comic sigh, faux put-upon. “I’ll tell you: January 11. He’ll be a Capricorn—just like his dad.” They are both beaming. Graham looks around and realizes that we are the only people left in the restaurant. She looks at me, and then Justin, and then lets it rip: “It’s a booooooy!!!”