When British Vogue needed a face for its April 2023 manifesto issue declaring “The New Supers,” it chose Paloma Elsesser. The premise was a quiet revolution: a supermodel rooted not in a single sample-size silhouette but in representation. A decade earlier, Elsesser had been a psychology-and-literature student posting selfies from a New York apartment. That she now helps define the word “supermodel” — on her own body’s terms — is the story.
From London to Los Angeles
Paloma Elsesser was born on 12 April 1992 in the London borough of Camden. Her heritage is central to who she is and how she is cast: her mother is African-American, from Tennessee, and her father of Chilean and Swiss descent. She was raised in Los Angeles, in a predominantly Black household. In 2010 she moved to New York to attend The New School, where she studied psychology and literature — arriving at fashion as a writer and a thinker rather than a teenager scouted at a mall, which is why her public voice on body politics has always been unusually articulate.
The work: an Instagram scout, runway firsts and a wall of covers
Around 2015, while still in her early twenties, Elsesser was discovered on Instagram by the makeup artist Pat McGrath — one of fashion’s most powerful figures — who made her one of the first faces of her namesake beauty line. It was a textbook case of social media rewriting the rules of talent scouting: no agency gatekeeper, just a following and the right eye finding it. Signed to IMG, Elsesser built a résumé that reads like a deliberate dismantling of size barriers at the top of fashion. For the Spring/Summer 2021 season she became one of the first plus-size models ever to walk for Fendi, and she has since walked for Lanvin, Versace, Marni, Miu Miu and Balenciaga, and fronted campaigns for Savage X Fenty, Nike and Glossier.
What made her ascent feel different was its speed and its sources. She arrived without the usual apprenticeship — no years of go-sees and catalogue work — and within a few seasons was fronting campaigns for some of the most culturally potent brands in fashion and walking for houses that, until very recently, had never cast a body like hers. She did not soften her presence to fit; the industry, slowly, widened to make room. By her early thirties she had assembled the kind of cover-and-campaign portfolio that, a decade earlier, would simply never have been offered to a model her size.
The covers stacked up. Her landmark moment came with American Vogue in January 2021, one of four covers that month; in April 2023 she shared British Vogue’s “New Supers” cover with Precious Lee and Jill Kortleve. The accolades followed. In December 2020 models.com crowned her a Model of the Year, and then, in December 2023, she made history as the first plus-size (curve) model named Model of the Year at the British Fashion Awards — a milestone that a few years earlier would have been unthinkable.
Redefining the supermodel body
Elsesser’s significance is bigger than any single booking. She has become the face of a structural argument — that bodies like hers belong at fashion’s apex, not in a separate “plus” ghetto. Crucially, she resists being flattened into a slogan. “I don’t consider myself an activist,” she has said, framing herself instead as an advocate: “I’m leaving pictures so maybe a girl hates herself a little bit less.” She is also clear-eyed, and pointed, about backsliding, warning in recent interviews that size inclusivity in fashion is in “decline” — part, as she put it, of “a zeitgeist shift toward a sanitizing of humanity.” That candour has cost her: after her 2023 win she was targeted by online detractors.
The British Vogue “New Supers” framing was not a marketing gimmick so much as a statement of intent. For most of fashion’s history the word “supermodel” described a narrow physical ideal; Elsesser’s inclusion argued that the title should describe influence and presence instead. She has been careful never to let that argument curdle into mere positivity, insisting that representation is a structural question rather than a feel-good one — that the goal is not to be praised for existing but to make her presence at the top of the industry unremarkable. It is, she has suggested, the only kind of progress that actually lasts.
The Private Side
Elsesser keeps her romantic life out of public view, and there is no reliably reported partner; the most concrete glimpses she offers are of family rather than romance. She comes from a strikingly creative one: her siblings include a film director and a fellow model, and she has spoken warmly about the multi-generational household she grew up in, which once posed together for a Vogue family portrait. That rootedness — in family, in Los Angeles, in a sense of self formed before fashion found her — is a recurring theme in how she talks about a career she never set out to have.
Earnings and net worth
There is no reliable, authoritative net-worth figure for Paloma Elsesser. The aggregator sites that publish one offer low, unsourced estimates with no disclosed methodology, and they should be cited only with that heavy caveat, if at all. What is documented is the calibre of her clients — LVMH-owned Fendi, Rihanna’s Fenty, Nike — which signals genuine top-tier standing without putting a verifiable number on it.
Where she is now
Elsesser remains one of fashion’s most in-demand faces. In October 2024 she walked the rebooted Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show alongside Ashley Graham, part of the brand’s more inclusive relaunch. She has deepened her move into design, co-creating a size-inclusive collection with the label Ganni, and continues to pair high-fashion work with vocal advocacy. More than a decade after a makeup artist found her online, the psychology student who never planned to model has become one of the defining faces of what a supermodel is now allowed to look like.