Paloma Elsesser on Purpose, Representation and the New Rituals of Body Care

**Imran Amed** (0:05)
Hi, this is Imran Amed, founder and CEO of The Business of Fashion. Welcome to the BOF Podcast. It's Friday, July 17th.
Diversity and body positivity have been important themes shaping the fashion conversation over the past decade. Few people have lived that gap and push back against it more visibly than Paloma Elsesser. She's walked the biggest runways, landed the biggest covers, and used her platform to challenge industry standards on bodies, beauty, and who gets to be seen. Now, she's taking that authority somewhere new, building a body care brand rooted in the rituals she grew up with.

**Paloma Elsesser** (0:47)
My mother's African-American. You don't get out the shower and not put lotion on. That's crazy. The central tenets of my work obviously are steeply rooted within the body, but I would love to see body care be personal, and esoteric, and ritualistic, and beautiful. And I think what's so powerful about this expansive tapestry of beauty that we have today is that so many different types of people get to meet themselves and find belonging in those different brands.

**Imran Amed** (1:15)
Paloma sat down with executive editor of The Business of Beauty at this year's Business of Beauty Global Forum to talk about staying true to herself amid the pressures of tokenism, and why, after a decade building other people's brands, she's finally thinking about building one of her own. Here's Paloma Elsesser on the BOF Podcast.

**Priya Rao** (1:39)
Paloma, I'd like to think that everyone in the room already knows you, obviously, but I want to start by talking about your modeling lore. I mean, it's the story that I think every girl dreams up when they want to become a model. You were discovered as a waitress at Miss Lily's, the fantastic New York restaurant, for those of you who've been.

**Paloma Elsesser** (1:59)
I was a terrible waitress, absolutely terrible.

**Priya Rao** (2:03)
You were also discovered on social media. Yeah.
Dame Pat McGrath found you and made you the face of her new campaign when she was launching Pat McGrath Labs.

**Paloma Elsesser** (2:14)
Correct.

**Priya Rao** (2:16)
This is not a typical story. How were you able to break into this industry in such new and innovative ways?

**Paloma Elsesser** (2:26)
Great question. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. I feel very honored. Beauty is so deeply entrenched in my genesis story. Like you said, I started with Pat. I was working at a restaurant. I was really just a girl in New York doing my thing, rough around the edges, but always a preoccupation with fashion, beauty, image, objects, all these different things that I was cultivating a kind of community or an aesthetic or an energy online. This was like pre what Influencer would be titled. I was just a girl on the Internet. I loved Tumblr. I loved MySpace. I loved all of these platforms. So when Pat approached me, I one was aware of fashion, but not that intricacies like I didn't know how to pronounce Lueve. Like why would I know that? Like, you know, like things like that. So when I got approached by her, I did know her from this iconic Jessica Stam ID cover.
And I obliged. I was like, okay, I was on tour with my friend who's a musician. I was tour managing him for the summer.
Crazy. And I did my first photo shoot with Pat. And subsequently, it's interesting to think about lore or history or legacy that so much of my beginning started with beauty. I was gold 1 Pat McGrath, first phase one Glossier, like in the Into the Gloss offices, like pink pouch, like Emily shooting pictures of me in the office, first Fenty Beauty campaign and many others subsequently. So it's really a part of my DNA.
And it was interesting. It's interesting to be here now and to speak on it, you know.

**Priya Rao** (4:13)
You know, obviously, your origins really were in beauty. I mean, I remember that Glossier campaign and Into the Gloss. I remember those articles. But fashion really took off for you. And in step with where you were in fashion, there was another trend rising, which was the body positivity movement. And inadvertently, you became the face of that movement.
But you also told me the other day that you never really claimed it. Will you describe that for us?

**Paloma Elsesser** (4:42)
I think what's interesting about all of these industries, beauty, fashion, media overall, is timing. It's such an inexplicable force that exists in the success or the growth of anything. My timing was that the industry fashion that I'm talking about was desperate for something new.
People were tired of hating their bodies, of subscribing to a certain standard that was inescapable, and people were unhappy. There was a desperation for something new. So I think the demand for models to have a voice was almost, it was like people were foaming at the mouth, like they wanted a new experience. And I came in kind of open-eyed and afraid, but excited to be a voice in that. I think as a person who's always occupied a bigger body, like different sizes of that, I became very familiar with my body at a very young age. So I was able to articulate my relationship with my body, I think, in a new way that fashion hadn't really experienced. So I think I didn't also come in, like I said, being like, I'm a body positive activist. I was just a girl in my body having my picture taken who had some thoughts.