Gerren Taylor was still playing with Barbie dolls when she walked the runway for the first time at Los Angeles Fashion Week in 2003. Just 12 at the time, she was the youngest person ever to be represented by the runway division of L.A. Models. Although most agencies require girls to be 14, it's not unheard of for 12-year-olds to get influence. Actress Milla Jovovich made the cover up of the Italian manner magazine Lei at 12, and Brooke Shields, Gisele Bundchen and Kate Moss were stars before they turned 16.
With her long legs and confident walk, Taylor looked as though she would follow in their footsteps. Then, during Richard Tyler's show, the last one of the week that April, she stepped onto the runway in a wedding gown and stumbled hard. She tripped once, then over again on the train that was in front of her, because the clothe was unexpectedly put on backward. When her eyes welled up with crying, even the most set fashionistas wanted to give her a hug.
I wrote about that moment, the one that made Taylor a novelty � the 12-year-old, plucked from the crowd on an L.A. street corner, who tripped on the high-fashion runway. It made for a good news report. Other mass thought so too. Oprah Winfrey came calling, and designers seamed up to book her.
That September, she went to New York to see if she could make it on the earth stage, and walked in the Tommy Hilfiger, Betsey Johnson and Tracy Reese shows. Hilfiger even paid to have her teeth fixed, telling Taylor she was departure to be a top model. Making enough money for college seemed a sure reckon after she became the first African American in a Marc Jacobs ad campaign. "We're all expecting her to be a big star," Jacobs said.
Then she disappeared. A yr later, Taylor didn't al-Qur'an a single runway job. The ad work dried up overly, and so did the magazine editorials. She went to Europe to try her circumstances at the fashion weeks there only was told by booking agents in Paris that 38-inch hips on a pole-thin 6-foot frame made her to a fault big to model. (They wanted her to diet down to 35 inches.) In less than 2 years, her career had come to a halt.
That's where the story ends for most. Fashion designers and editors move on to the next missy and the next. It's just the way of an industry built on selling a fantasy that depends on novelty and impossible ideals. Women try to intellectualize the constant stream of airbrushed images, skinny models and too-expensive products, just the allure is too strong. So we go on trenchant for some notion of beauty that is constantly just out of get through. And we don't think much approximately what happened to last year's model.
Except with Taylor, documentary film producer Darryl Roberts was there to pick up where the industry left off.
His film "America the Beautiful," (in limited release and which screenened in Seattle in early August), follows the arc of her brief life history, trying to understand why we are obsessed with physical beaut. We see Taylor and her mum, Michele Gerren, struggling to navigate the sexualized reality of fashion, while tilt about whether it's to a fault soon for the lester Willis Young model to start wearing a bra. We hear from Taylor's school principal, who says with prescience, "How can buoy you savvy at 12 or 13 that you're going to be discarded?"
Then, in 2005, when Taylor returns from Europe mortified, we watch her pip rock bottom. Agonizing over the flaws she perceives in her pancake unconditional stomach, her flawless face looks straight into the camera and she says, "I'm ugly."
She had scripted herself off at 15.
Today, Taylor is about to start her senior year of high school in Santa Monica, Calif., where she's a volleyball star. She never did ready enough money for college, but she's applying anyway, to study psychology. Some kids would have gone to therapy to header, but Taylor went to church and found support from peers who had the same issues with their bodies, even as they had envied hers in adolescent magazines.
"It was going so well. Then when it stopped I didn't know what I had done wrong," she said over a recent lunch, her Yorkie, Arlington, sleeping at her feet. "I was always so nice to people; I never off my back on people."
Of course, she knows at present that success in manner has nix to do with being nice.
Taylor is still spectacularly beautiful, with perfect peel and legs so long, they stick out from the other side of the table. She is wearing jeans that ar a footling short, even with the bottom seams ripped out, a tank top, right-down shirt and ballet flats. Her momma is close by, as she e'er was, making sure Taylor wasn't wearing anything overly revealing on the runway or risking a future paycheck by saying on camera that she doesn't like soybean plant milk.
"Sometimes I felt uncomfortable," Taylor remembers. "But I didn't believe there was anything I could do. I was scared to say I didn't want to wear thin something, to be that girl world Health Organization had an attitude or didn't collaborate. I liked having my mom there so she could say it."
It's unmanageable to know why Taylor's career all over so presently � if she got lost in the politics of moving from one agency to another, or whether at 6 feet and a size 4 after she grew into her teenage body, she was overly big for industry standards.
"That started in New York, calling her obese at a sizing 4," says her mother, an amateur model herself at age 19.
"Having that be a rumor was hard," the teenager says. "I thought I needed to diet. ... I was doing all this to make my mom proud, to draw money, and all of a sudden it stopped. I would just eat salad. I didn't want to go to the beach because of my stretch marks."
Three years later, it's as though one slight happened just last week � that moment in Paris, caught on film, when a modeling agent asks Taylor if she has gained weight since her pictures were taken. "Tell me if you want me or not!" Taylor says. Her voice gets louder. "Don't ask questions, criticize me, say things that are hypocritical and look at me as if you are entirely satisfied with the way you look. I'm human; you're human!"
She hasn't in full regained her self-esteem. Then again, she is an 18-year-old womanhood in a looks-obsessed reality. "At school, at lunchtime I'm in the privy holding girls' hair spell they thrust up. My friend's pappa took her for a consultation with a plastic surgeon to get disembarrass of her love handles."
At 140 pounds, Gerren is thinner than most. (The average American woman is 140 pounds and 5-foot-4; that system of weights looks a lot different when you're 8 inches taller.) Now, she worries about existence curvy enough for boys to card her. "Nobody is satisfied," she says. "I had a model friend world Health Organization was also small. Pants were invariably way overly big for her."
She says she has no regrets, because she has a story to tell. And the film has become its have kind of opportunity. Taylor and her mom cause traveled with Roberts to promote it. At the Durban International Film Festival in South Africa, Taylor participated in a seminar for adolescent girls around self-esteem. She also sculptural in a runway show.
Which brings us back to the fashion fantasy, and whether she could fall into it again.
"I don't think on that point is anything wrong with modeling," she says. (Taylor is static represented by Elite L.A.) "There is Seventeen and Teen Vogue; those ar fun. They have teachers on-set."
At the same meter, she dreams of starting a denim line for women of all shapes and sizes, and a self-esteem camp for girls, similar to the one run by Tyra Banks.
Taylor � care most women � wants to arise above the fantasy, regular as she keeps it alive.
"I still haven't granted it up for dear," she says. "It's still fun for me. C184% if I always do some other runway show, I'm sledding to be walking for the authorisation of women, not just walking on a stage."
And somehow, I believe her.
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