The Vanishing Model

After decades of fighting starvation culture, model Shereen Wu discovered a new threat when her face was quietly replaced by AI code.

[Speaker 1]: There’s this horror story from the modeling world of the 1990s. It’s one of those things that sounds like an urban legend, but wasn’t. [Speaker 2]: The cotton ball method. [Speaker 1]: Exactly. Models would literally dip cotton balls in orange juice and swallow them. The idea was to feel full, to stop the hunger pangs, without absorbing a single calorie. [Speaker 2]: It was a brutal, physical mechanism to force the human body to disappear. [Speaker 1]: And for decades, the fight in fashion was about stopping that. It was about health, regulations, body positivity. But today, we’re looking at why the industry has suddenly abandoned ten years of progress for a new reality. [Speaker 2]: Because the newest supermodels don’t need to swallow cotton balls. They don’t even have bodies to starve. [Speaker 1]: Coming up: Why a model named Shereen Wu walked a runway for free, only to find her face replaced by a white AI avatar. [Speaker 1]: It’s Thursday, January 15, 2026, and you’re listening to The Angle. [Speaker 1]: So, I think most of us had this sense that the fashion industry was getting better? Like, slowly, but surely. [Speaker 2]: The curve was definitely bending that way. If you look at the timeline, it’s a pendulum swing. [Speaker 1]: Start us back at the beginning. [Speaker 2]: Well, you have the "Heroin Chic" era of the 90s. Kate Moss. The waif look. That was the baseline. But the real turning point, legally speaking, was 2006. [Speaker 1]: What happened in 2006? [Speaker 2]: Two high-profile tragedies. Models Luisel Ramos and Ana Carolina Reston died from complications related to anorexia. Reston weighed just 88 pounds at the time. [Speaker 1]: That’s... horrific. [Speaker 2]: It was. And it shocked the system. Italy and Spain actually introduced the first BMI-based regulations right after that. They basically said, "You cannot work if you are this underweight." [Speaker 1]: Okay, so that’s the regulatory start. But culturally? [Speaker 2]: Culturally, the big shift was 2017. You had the #MeToo movement exposing systemic abuse in casting rooms. And that September, the two biggest conglomerates, LVMH and Kering-they own Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Dior-they signed a charter. [Speaker 1]: A charter doing what? [Speaker 2]: Banning size zero. Requiring medical certificates. It felt like a guardrail. By 2020, plus-size representation on the runways peaked at about 2.8%. [Speaker 1]: That sounds small. [Speaker 2]: It is small, but in this industry? It was a revolution. [Speaker 1]: So what broke? Because we are sitting here in 2026, and it feels like we’re back at square one. [Speaker 2]: Two things broke the trend. One was a drug, and one was a piece of code. [Speaker 1]: The drug being Ozempic. [Speaker 2]: Right. Or GLP-1 agonists generally. And the code was AI. While we were watching the runways, the tech was quietly shifting. Back in April 2017, a photographer created Shudu Gram. [Speaker 1]: I remember her. The "digital supermodel." [Speaker 2]: She was the first. A Black supermodel created entirely by a white photographer. Then in 2023, Levi’s partnered with a studio called Lalaland.ai to generate "diverse" models. [Speaker 1]: Instead of hiring them. [Speaker 2]: Exactly. And now, we have the hard data from the Spring/Summer 2025 season. And it’s brutal. [Speaker 1]: Later in the show, we’re going to talk about the environmental trade-off-why the industry claims replacing humans is the "green" choice. But first, let’s look at this data. You called it brutal. How bad is it? [Speaker 2]: It’s what industry researchers are…