Diversity and body positivity have been important themes shaping the fashion conversation over the past decade. Yet a gap remains between the industry’s ideals and its reality. Few people have experienced that gap – and pushed back against it – more visibly than Paloma Elsesser. She’s walked the biggest runways, landed the biggest covers and used her platform to challenge the industry’s standards around bodies, beauty and who gets to be seen.
Now, she’s taking that authority somewhere new: building a body care brand rooted in the rituals she grew up with.
“My mother’s African American. You don’t get out of the shower and not put lotion on. That’s crazy,” says Elsesser. “The central tenets of my work obviously are deeply rooted within the body, but I would love to see body care be personal and esoteric and ritualistic and beautiful,” she continues. “I think what’s so powerful about this expansive tapestry of beauty that we have today is that so many different types of people get to meet themselves and find belonging in those different brands.”
Elsesser sat down with executive editor Priya Rao on stage at this year’s Business of Beauty Global Forum to discuss staying true to herself amid the pressures of tokenism and why — after a decade spent building other people’s brands — she’s finally thinking about building one of her own.
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