Ashley Graham Is One Messy Mother

I think the waiter stopped bothering us when Ashley Graham revealed she had (past tense) varicose veins on her vagina: “Those hurt like a bitch.”

He refilled our waters sometime around her mention of “breast milk shits.” Kind of sort of disappeared when the supermodel—unmissable in navy pinstripe slacks, an unfussy button up, and a scrunchie-tied slick bun—started miming the backbends her midwife and husband, filmmaker Justin Ervin, coached her through (with a scarf tied around her hips, mind you) to get her firstborn to drop into the birth canal and eventually into a makeshift tub in her Brooklyn home six years ago. The apartment, she recalls, smelled like lamb stew. “Now every time I smell lamb stew, I kind of go back to the bathtub,” Graham says.

But then the vagina veins—and well, he'd had enough.

I, however, needed to know more. When I meet Graham in late March at the midtown outpost of the Italian hotspot Locanda Verde, I am just entering the fifth month of my first pregnancy. We order caprese frittatas with a side of bacon (her) and potatoes (me), but what I’m being served up is much more filling: the raw realities of motherhood.

She doesn’t mean to shock, though she’s fluent in it. Much of the 38-year-old’s career has hinged on saying the quiet part out loud and using her size-14 body—and everything that comes with it—as both subject and argument. Whether in her memoir, on her podcast, on magazine covers or fashion runways or social media streams, she’s made candor her brand: Here’s a photo of her breastfeeding; a revelation about postpartum sex; the truth about Fashion Week. If people are startled, that’s often the point.

But here, as a mom of three, her motivations are simply to be helpful, offering tips I can sink my teeth into rather than the usual platitudes first-time moms hear in those early months. Having a boy? Scotchgard everything. “I have a very gorgeous, huge cream couch, and there has been diarrhea, vomit, all kinds of foods [on it]; it’s all come up because we Scotchgarded it,” she says. Those vagina varicose veins? There’s underwear for that, she says, adding: “They have like a bungee cord on them…it would relieve pressure from my stomach. Then I would put an ice pack on my vagina, sit on a Bosu ball, and go back and forth.”

The thing about unmedicated labor is that “there’s nothing gorgeous about it,” she continues. “It's the worst pain you'll ever feel in your life. When it starts coming, it doesn't get any better; it gets worse.”

When I begin to think I can’t stomach much more, her tone shifts into big sis warmth and infectious confidence, reminding me even the most unsavory parts of motherhood are—and totally within—my realm of capability. “Your mindset going into the day is really the majority of it,” Graham says. “If you tell yourself you can do it, you can do it…All these women did it before. Your sister did it, your mother did it, your aunties did it. You're gonna be fine…that was the mentality I had.” As I relax into my breakfast, she adds: “I definitely pooped…Just so you know, it's probably gonna happen.” Fork down.

Graham, it’s clear, is comfortable in the mess.

I witnessed it firsthand a few days earlier, on set for her cover shoot, where her three kids—Isaac, 6, and four-year-old twins Roman and Malachi—tag along. She sneaks them gummy bears while expertly manuevering her Ralph Lauren gown around their sticky hands; later, in Chanel, she requests their favorite Lion King tunes. When it’s time to get the shot, Graham goes still, elegant, composed, as her kids spring off props behind her, tumbling, crawling, and crashing to the ground, only to get up and do it all again.

“I can handle organized chaos,” she tells me over breakfast. She’s always been a “type B” girlie—she describes her single girl era home as “piles of clothes. I know that's dirty, I know that's clean, I don't know what's under that pile, but we'll get to it.” Marriage helped her clean up her act a bit, but now, with three kids under 10, she’s not only okay with chaos, she’s leaning into it. “When everything gets dumped out of a drawer, I laugh. I'm like, Who cares it's a mess? I know that I'm gonna miss the messes. I know I'm going to miss the: ‘Mommy, where are you? I need a hug.’"

She offers endless hugs on set, especially when her eldest has a mini meltdown (every good shoot needs a diva moment), because Graham won’t let him show his face for the camera. Despite her's and Ervin’s careers in the industry, they don’t share their kids publicly or reveal their faces on social media—or, despite Isaac's pleas, in photos for this story.

“There's just some things to me that are so sacred,” she says of the decision. “We live in such an oversharing world…I feel like I've shared a lot of my life with so many people, [and] there's three little things that I don't want to share and they're called Isaac, Roman, and Malachi.”

She went “full throttle” on social media when her career began, but she says the world, or at least the scary realities she now pays attention to, has changed since—AI; online predators who target kids or steal identities. So she stands her ground no matter how much Isaac craves the spotlight. When he grows up he wants to be a chef with a “menuless restaurant” and be on Broadway; a career inspired after seeing his mom star as Roxie Hart in Chicago in 2025. “He's the one that's like on the fireplace mantle with the microphone like giving us the whole performance,” she says. “His favorite is anything from Aladdin.”

With the connections Graham and Ervin have—and Isaac’s budding ambitions—it would be easy to imagine him on the Disney audition circuit or at the very least launching a YouTube channel. But not if Graham has her way. “Right now, I want my kids to just be kids. I want them to play and have fun.”

She says this with the perspective of someone who was discovered at 12, at a mall in Omaha, Nebraska. She has no regrets about how her career began—at the time, she saw it as a way to pay for college, if she chose to attend, and was happy to “perfect something at such a young age.” But now, on the other side of the industry, she’s more protective of her children’s innocence. “Knowing how harmful it can be for a kid who even is just a little bit insecure…there's levels of ‘you're not good enough, you're not this enough, you need to be more of that.’” Instead, she wants a simpler upbringing for them, like finding worms by the stream in the their New Jersey neighborhood. “That's exactly what it should be as kids. Go out and explore and get dirty and come back home when you're filthy and you have to soak in the bath to get the dirt from underneath your nails.” That’s the focus, she explains. “Not, ‘Do you wanna be a star?’ They've got time for that.”

Quality time is important to Graham. Perhaps because it’s been a scarce commodity in her life for so many years. She still carries guilt over not giving Isaac more attention when he was a toddler, having to split her focus with two nursing newborns. She’s making up for it now during date nights—each boy gets their week.

Ervin included. Despite being together almost 16 years, she says that it was only six years ago, when COVID hit and they temporarily moved into her mother’s basement in Nebraska, that they had an uninterrupted stretch together. “That was the first time [Justin and I] ever spent that much time together…It's been like two ships in the night, and then all of a sudden we’re together and we’re like, ‘Oh, I really do like you a lot.’”

She describes their marriage as “a roller coaster of emotions” thanks to its timing. They met in a church elevator in 2009 and were married by August 2010, just before her career skyrocketed. The Lane Bryant ad, the Jay Leno appearance, the Sports Illustrated cover, thrust them into a life of fame neither had anticipated. “We had no idea that I was gonna be who I am, and it really just all happened so fast.”

Through it all, Graham says, “he truly is the calm to my storm. We are the yin and the yang. I feel like a whole person with him.” She credits their shared beliefs as the “glue” of the relationship. “Anytime we've ever had a hiccup,” she says, “ we always go back to our faith. Whether that's fasting together, praying together, going back to the word.”

That unity extends to their parenting, too. "I have big dad energy, and she has big, fun mom energy and that's the fun dynamic," Ervin tells me over Zoom. He also says communication has been key in finding their parenting groove; it’s even something Graham has been learning from Ervin and the dynamic his family had growing up.

“My mom and dad were not communicators with each other or with us…their answer was ‘just because we said so,’” she says, adding she was a “sneaky kid” as a result. “Justin and the way he was raised, his mom and dad said, ‘Open door policy. You can ask us anything, talk about anything.’…That's really what I strive for, even at this age, all the way through until the day I'm dead. Just building that respect with [my kids] and trust.”

Just before our breakfast wraps, Ervin happens to text her, totally unprompted. It’s a photo from their twins’ maternity shoot, him cradling Graham’s round belly. Beaming, she shows me the message. “He has no idea that I'm here,” she says, shocked by both the timing but more so the thoughtfulness. “How freaking cute is he?”

While Ervin is quick to remind her of everything her body has accomplished, Graham is still in the process of seeing it that way herself.

“I'm living in a different body and it's been hard to get to know her,” she says. “I can't say that I can look in the mirror and be like, ‘I love you.’ It's not that for me. It's that, Wow, I made some children. I was as fit as I could be in 2019 when I got pregnant…I'm still trying to get to that, but I've had to get over it in my head that I’ll look like I did in my late 20s, early 30s. She's gone. Let's focus on the new girl. That has been like the last four years of my conversation in my head.”

While it feels natural, commonplace even, for Ashley-the-mom to speak candidly about postpartum insecurities, it lands differently coming from Ashley-the-model, whose name became shorthand for the modern body positivity movement in the mid-2010s. As one of the first visibly plus-size models to break onto high fashion runways and land major magazine covers, Graham helped push an industry long defined by exclusion toward something more expansive. At the time, it felt not just refreshing, but long overdue, and proof that real change was taking hold.

Now, in an era of GLP-1s and reports that runway bodies are shrinking once again, that progress feels precarious. “It's really disheartening,” she says. “There was a pendulum that swung that was so body acceptance, positivity, everybody be who they want to be. And now it's going back this whole opposite way that feels like a smack in the face to the women who have felt like they've had a voice.”

Still, Graham resists the urge to consider it a total backslide. In her nearly three decades in the industry, she says she’s “seen more movement for plus-size women than some people give the whole industry credit for.” And fashion, she adds, has always been trend obsessed: “It goes with the times—and GLP-1s are a time…I know that there are and there's gonna still be women who are considered plus size forever,” she continues. “This drug isn't going to wipe out a whole statistic of women.”

That resolve is what Graham needs to keep doing the work. Keep showing up and taking up space as herself. “Why would I stop now and why would I get angry about the work I've done?…I put my head down and I focus on the women we've built the community with.” And that community she helped build is now inspiring her right back, having evolved far past what she could’ve hoped in 2016.

“There's so many [plus size influencers and creators]…they're all over the place with their sizes and their proportions and how they look and how they're relatable. And to me, that's the coolest part about all of this. Seeing that these girls, who were raised on social media at such a young age are now coming in and they have a platform to say to the younger generation, ‘Be yourself, be who you want to be. If you have cellulite, who cares?’"

That doesn’t end on social media—it extends into what women can actually wear. In 2025, she began collaborating with JCPenney on a plus-size line that launched its third collection this spring. It’s not just a licensing deal to her. “I'm also putting so much of my creative power behind it,” she says. For Graham, that’s meant expanding what the market offers for women in this size range. “She’s only been fed one thing…and it’s not been fashionable necessarily,” Graham says, pointing to years of limited silhouettes and uninspired basics.

“It’s incredibly important to continue to advocate for women of all shapes, all sizes, and all backgrounds to have clothes that fit…to have people who don’t have confidence, have confidence in themselves.” And that’s not limited to one category. “I also don’t think that my community is just curvy women. I think it’s all kinds of women because, really, confidence at the end of the day, it doesn’t discriminate.”

Graham wouldn’t hesitate to have another kid, even two. Ervin, though, has had a vasectomy. So instead of more children, she has plans to channel that energy elsewhere: building businesses. Enter Lucci, a Lambrusco wine that launched earlier this year.

The idea was born over dinner at L.A.’s Bestia with longtime friend and business partner Danny Epstien. Soon after they were in Italy’s Emilia-Romagna region, working with a family-run winery to develop the product from the ground up. The result is a chilled, sparkling red that “feels like a party in your mouth.” Like much of Graham’s career, the brand is rooted in something that’s been overlooked. “[Lambrusco is] a category that’s been pushed aside for a long time—kind of like plus size girls.” She and Epstien invested a lot of time advocating for and educating on the product—“we kept knocking, we kept pushing”—and eventually landed Southern Glazer's as a partner.

On a Zoom in early April, Epstien credited a lot of their success to Graham’s eternal optimism. “There’s twists and turns along the way,” he says of starting a brand. “And she’s up for it all…it's great having a partner that comes with that positive attitude. We're always gonna figure it out, but you can get there a lot quicker when you have the right mindset—and she's always there.”

Just don’t call Lucci a passion project. “It's the fourth child that I'm not having,” Graham quips. As it turns out, she has several other business ventures in the gestational phase. She teases something in the home world, inspired by one of her kids, coming soon. She’s also got a skincare brand “already mapped out” with a close friend (they’ve developed products to the point that they are a regular part of Graham’s beauty routine).

When it does arrive, maybe in a year or two she guesses, it won’t follow the typical playbook. She’s a proponent of several wellness techniques—gua sha, cupping, acupuncture, vibrating mats—and doesn’t get Botox and fillers. The brand’s philosophy will echo her beauty ethos: “What does that mean to love your original face…to preserve what you have, but also know that as you’re maturing to love it as well?” She recalls beauty advice from older friends: It’s about honoring who you are and your body and what it is today—because things change.”

To juggle it all, Graham leans on her village for parenting help—her mom pitches in a lot, even accompanying the kids on set—and has also learned techniques that help her stay balanced in the chaos, including a "reentering ritual." What she describes is a series of meditations she does during her commute time.

“I'm walking into work, I'm like, Ashley, these are your goals for what we're walking into. And I put motherhood to the side so I can focus on work. Then I'm in the car, I'm almost about to get into the house, I'm like, Okay, reentering, we're putting our phone away. All the emails, the text messages are done. And I've got that first moment you walk into the house and everybody comes in, "Mommy!" I don't look distracted.”

We're at the point of our interview where it's time for Graham to really reenter; there's a JCPenney fitting to get to, but not before dispensing a rapid-fire round of mom advice. With boys, it’s all dinosaur talk, she says, so find a favorite quickly. I can take hers: Ankylosaurus. Do I need a doula? Take hers, too.

The waiter returns, eager to clear our table. His presence brings my attention to the food, the dirty dishes, for the first time in a while. I stall him; I want more time to chew over all of Graham’s offerings, unsavory and useful alike, over the dregs of my matcha latte. It was as if Graham's best mom advice had already sunk in: There’s no reason to rush through the mess. Sit in it awhile. It’s only temporary.

Ashley Graham Isn’t Here for Mom-Shaming | Marie Claire - YouTube

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