Q&A with Natasha Ward: Being Yourself in the Modeling Industry
Natasha Ward is an American model in the sports apparel industry for some of the biggest brands in the world. As an influencer, Natasha has also become a powerful and eloquent voice for self esteem and body image in the Instagram community, utilizing her platform to educate and encourage us to ask the tough questions, embrace our vulnerability, face our fears, and chase our dreams. We asked Natasha about her perspective on beauty in the modeling industry:
Describe THE relationship between you and your body.
Just like any relationship I think it’s truly about communication. I'm learning how to understand what my body is speaking to me and I'm constantly in a place of learning how to communicate with my body; to use kind language, to ask more questions and make less statements or accusations. It’s been tumultuous. The reason being, I know that I have body dysmorphia, which started only after I became a successful model that led to an on and off eating disorder for about 5 years and is still not completely under control. I tend to swing from one end of the pendulum to the other: hyper-restrictive to over-indulgent. Learning how to love myself in all of the seasons my body needs me to in order for it to take care of me the way that it does is a process.
Do you feel represented in the media?
I don't think it’s a completely yes or completely no question, at least for me. Yes, I see women with my skin tone and curly hair in mass media. Mixed girls are kind of like the latest 'fad', but that in and of itself is painful to know it is not considered beautiful, but trendy, kind like this unhealthy obsession with mixed babies by predominantly white celebrities… “mixed fetishism.” It’s extremely dangerous when a particular type of beauty and colorism becomes popular in the same way as a pair of shoes or a breed of pet.
Do you have any particular advertisement that has stuck with you positive or negative?
There’s a campaign I did for Adidas that really changed the trajectory of my career. It was called the "I Got This" Campaign. It was their new women's line featuring the hero product which was a high support larger cup size sports bra. I was nervous to be chosen because I felt my chest was too big, the bras never fit, I was too muscular, they never had people who knew how to do my makeup or hair (as a mixed African American girl)…I just went in thinking, “I'm not the type of girl who is the face of a world wide campaign.” When the director and producer told me that all of those things were exactly why they had chosen me, it changed the way I looked at myself. I felt so beautiful. And then to see myself all over the world and the response from women and girls speaking about how beautiful and aspirational I was; to see myself as a standard of positive and healthy beauty for someone else really changed the way I saw myself.
Do you remember any other specific times when your perspective on beauty shifted?
I think my perspective also shifted in a positive way when I began to realize that the normalized standard was actually very homogenous in nature… that the trends were very prescribed to this one facial structure, skin color, hair type, proportion kind of avatar wherein everyone was beginning to look the same. Because autonomy and kind of going against the grain is such a core value of mine, it actually began to make me value the things about myself that were different and didn't fit into that mold - thereby making me more unique and stand out.
“Because autonomy and kind of going against the grain is such a core value of mine, it actually began to make me value the things about myself that were different and didn’t fit into that mold”
If you could hop in a time machine to go back and talk to your younger self at any age, what age would you choose and what would you say?
I think it would be 15. I would tell her that the attention of men and the jealousy of women is not synonymous with love, or respect, or worth, or beauty; That her body, though brilliantly beautiful, on the list of the most valuable and profound things about her, is not remotely the most important thing. Or even in the top 5. I would tell her to fall in love with her dreams, to spend so much time dreaming about what her heart and her spirit show her in the little flashes that make her come alive, that whisper to her she can change the world. I would tell her with all her might to make friends with that whisper, to spend time with it as often as she can, to write it down, to seek the pictures the little flashes are painting more fiercely than the attention of the most beautiful boy she's ever seen. And that her body is one of the most precious and costly and valuable gifts she could ever give to a man. To protect and honor it.
What do you want to tell young girls growing up in this digital era?
Don’t delete the pictures you don’t like about yourself, because when you get used to seeing yourself only through the lease of filters and edited perfection, You forget the face that is actually you.