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Tyra Talks Back

Originally posted Thursday January 25, 2007 12:00 PM EST

Banks says it was important to her to tell girls that – despite nasty tabloid comments – this photo "is not ugly." Photo by: FAME

Then Banks's body began to change. "She wasn't fat, she was curvy," says her mother, who managed Banks's career at the time. That's not how the fashion industry saw it; Banks recalls that her modeling agency printed out for her a list of designers with the heading, "Will not book Tyra because of hips." A particularly painful moment came when, during a fitting for a show in Milan, she heard two seamstresses calling her "grasso" (fat). "I was 126 lbs. at the time!" she says. "If some designer said it, it would hurt – but it hurt even more because maternal women were saying it."

Banks responded by trying to stick to a diet of salad with chicken – but she couldn't do it: "I was going against my natural habits, and the food didn't satisfy me. It didn't feel right." She knew she was being airbrushed (as are most fashion pictures, to be fair) to bring her in line with the industry's standards of beauty. By age 22, "the agency wanted her to lose 10 lbs.," recalls London, a creative consultant for Banks's talk show, who is divorced from her father, Donald Banks, 59, a computer consultant. "I sat there and said, 'Have you lost your mind?' "

Mother and daughter proceeded to have a heart-to-heart over some pizza in Milan. "During that meal, we started thinking," London says. "I [had] sat backstage during the fashion shows, and I would watch young girls with hip bones that protruded so far it made me wonder if it was painful. Before I let her go that route, I said, 'Let's work with what you've got.' "

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