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Backstage with Victoria's Secret models
Victoria's Secret models Gigi Hadid and Adriana Lima chat backstage about preparing for the big fashion show.
PT1M19S 620 349A former Victoria's Secret model has spoken out about being pressured to lose weight in order to model for the lingerie brand.
Erin Heatherton, who walked in the Victoria's Secret Fashion Showfrom 2008 to 2013, told Time 's Motto sectionshe stopped modelling for the company after they repeatedly told her she would need to be thinner to make it onto the catwalk.
"My last two Victoria's Secret shows, I was told I had to lose weight," the US model said. "I look back like, 'Really?'"
Erin Heatherton walks in the 2013 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. Photo: Getty
Heatherton said that, although she ate healthily and exercised twice a day, she felt nothing she did would be enough for her to continue walking in the brand's prestigious, over-the-top annual runway shows.
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"I was really depressed because I was working so hard and I felt like my body was resisting me," she told Motto . "And I got to a point where one night I got home from a workout and I remember staring at my food and thinking maybe I should just not eat."
While Heatherton attended the launch of Angels , a photography book featuring portraits of Victoria's Secrets "Angel" models in September 2014, she has since severed all ties with the brand.
The comments come after Heatherton, 27, posted a picture of herself to her Instagram account wearing a shirt bearing the slogan "empowered by failure" last month.
"I was struggling with my body image and the pressures to fulfill [sic] the demands of perfectionism upon me," she wrote in the picture's caption. "I am not perfect. Through this struggle, however, I found the strength to love myself."
A photo posted by Erin Heatherton (@erinheathertonlegit) on Mar 10, 2016 at 7:46pm PST
After Heatherton's admission, other models have come forward to say they felt significant pressure to remain unhealthily thin in order to book jobs.
In an essay for the Daily Dot , Polish-born Zuzanna Buchwald, who has modelled Victoria's Secret, Calvin Klein and Prada, wrote that she developed anorexia during her early years as a model.
"Up until now, I was silent," she wrote. "Silent about my illness, silent about being objectified, silent about being under tremendous pressure."
Buchwald, 28, explained that she had been subjected to a regime of agency measurings, due to agents' anxiety to have their clients fit designer's small sample sizes.
"You often get a deadline, a time of when the next measuring will be," she wrote. "The skinnier you get, the better. You begin to crash diet to meet the expectations of your agents and their clients. If you lose weight, you will be praised by all for how good you look and sent out to castings. If you don't, you will be sent away to continue dieting."
The model's statements come as a bill aiming the regulate the health of working models in the state of California passed its first vote on Wednesday afternoon.
If implemented, Assembly Bill 2539 would require all modelling agencies to be licensed with the state's Labor Commission, and specify that models signed to agencies work as employees not contractors, granting them additional rights under occupational health and safety standards/
Legislation explicitly regulating the BMI of working models has been introduced in France and Israel over the past five years.
While New York, where Victoria's Secret is based, has recently introduced laws to give underage models the same protections as other child performers (significantly disincentivising designers from hiring underage models by introducing additional registration requirements, including that every underage model must have a trust fund established in their name), it has no legislation regulating a fashion model's weight.