This Ontario model is the first queer plus-size Sports Illustrated rookie

Lauren Chan photographed for Sports Illustrated Swimsuit as the first queer plus-size rookie (Credit: James Macari/SPORTS ILLUSTRATED/ https://swimsuit.si.com/swimnews/meet-2023-si-swimsuit-rookie-lauren-chan).

An Ontario model is making history as the first queer plus-size Sports Illustrated rookie.

“Atop the list of things I never thought I’d do, in escalating order: be in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, be gay and come out to the world in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit,” Lauren Chan wrote in the publication last week.

The 32-year-old, Brantford, Ont.-born model and former Glamour fashion editor penned an essay coming out to the world on April 19.

In it, a vulnerable version of herself spilled out – how she uncovered repressed emotions tied to her sexuality, got in touch with them, and divorced her husband – all in the last year.

“I spent my career representing and working for women who looked like me, based on my body, and I was really ready for a chapter in which I got to celebrate us for who we are on the inside as well,” Chan told CTV News Toronto on Thursday.

She took an interest in fashion while at Western University in London, Ont., after an appendix rupture ended her dreams of a basketball career. Until that point, she had aimed to play semi-pro overseas.

Without basketball, Chan had newfound time to religiously follow fashion blogs. One day, she came across an open call for plus-size models at an agency in New York. She got in the car with her dad, drove south of the border, and was signed the same day.

Lauren Chan, an Ontario model and Sports Illustrated's first queer plus-size rookie (Credit: Lily Cummings).While in New York, at 25, she was hired at Glamour and honed a personal focus on making fashion more size-inclusive.

“It was all very in-line with my personal mission of making our readers who had felt excluded from fashion because of their size feel equal and elevated,” she said.

Since then, Chan admitted she has had nine lives, nodding to the magnitude of recent changes in her life.

“I decided to share my personal story in my casting tape (for Sports Illustrated) and that was the story of what I had been going through in the last year about getting divorced and coming out and selling my company,” Chan said.

Lauren Chan is a model from Brantford, Ontario (Credit: Osvaldo Ponton). A luxury plus-size clothing brand she launched in 2019 was acquired earlier this month. But beyond career development, she began to turn inwards.

That meant intense therapy sessions, reading academic journals, listening to audiobooks like “Untamed” about coming out, and actually beginning to “feel her feelings,” thinking deeply about how she felt in clothes or while watching a queer TV character.

“The moral of the story is that creating your most fulfilling life starts with getting to know your truest self,” Chan concluded in her personal essay.