“[…] you guys are pretty lucky to witness […]”

“[…] that's when you'll all laugh at me […]”

“[…] you don't have to tell me now […]”

“So, why did I do that?”

“I will demonstrate for you now 10 years of accumulated model knowledge […]”

“I know we're getting personal, but I was a young girl.”

“‘I am insecure.’”

“And if you ever are wondering […]”

“[…] we all feel more comfortable […]”

“Image is powerful, , but also, image is superficial.”

“in this picture, I had actually never had a boyfriend in real life.”

“I was totally uncomfortable,”

”and the photographer was telling me to arch my back and put my hand in that guy's hair. ”

“The real way that I became a model is I won a genetic lottery”

“we have defined beauty not just as health and youth and symmetry that we're biologically programmed to admire, but also as tall, slender figures, and femininity and white skin.”

“unfortunately, I have to inform you that in 2007, a very inspired NYU Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four percent, were non-white.”

“I will demonstrate for you now 10 years of accumulated model knowledge, because unlike cardiothoracic surgeons, it can just be distilled right now”

“I live in New York, and last year, of the 140,000 teenagers that were stopped and frisked, 86% of them were black and Latino, and most of them were young men.”

“And there are only 177,000 young black and Latino men in New York, so for them, it's not a question of, "Will I get stopped?" but "How many times will I get stopped? When will I get stopped?"’

“When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53% don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78% by the time that they're 17.”

"I'd also note that I'm quite privileged to be able to transform what you think of me in a very brief 10 seconds"

"image is powerful, but also, image is superficial. I just totally transformed what you thought of me, in six seconds"

"So the first question is, how do you become a model? I always just say, "Oh, I was scouted," but that means nothing"

"I will demonstrate for you now 10 years of accumulated model knowledge, because unlike cardiothoracic surgeons, it can just be distilled right now"

"

When I was writing this talk, I found it very difficult to strike an honest balance, because on the one hand, I felt very uncomfortable to come out here and say [...]"

"But I'm also happy and honored to be up here and I think that it's great that I got to come before 10 or 20 or 30 years had passed and I'd had more agency in my career, because maybe then I wouldn't tell the story of how I got my first job, or maybe I wouldn't tell the story of how I paid for college, which seems so important right now.

"If there's a takeaway to this talk, I hope it's that we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures."