Crystal Renn

Crystal Renn (2012)

Crystal Renn (born June 18, 1986 in Miami , Florida , USA ) is an international American model . She was best known in the fashion industry for her work against excessive leanness.

Life

As a 14-year-old, Renn was approached by a model scout that she could become a super model, but would have to lose 40% of her body weight. She then went to the gym for up to eight hours a day to lose weight. The resulting anorexia became so critical that it already began to lose hair. When she collapsed with a body weight of only 45 kilograms and a height of 1.75 meters, she not only changed the agency, but also her life strategy. In 2009 she published her experiences in several languages.

childhood

Crystal Renn grew up in Miami, Florida with her grandmother, who sold Mary Kay cosmetics, and her great-grandmother, a former teacher of gifted children with emotional and developmental problems. Her mother, who was still very young at the time, left Renn with her mother when she was 3 months old. The father is still unknown today. To this day there is regular contact with her mother and her later founded family.

The great-grandmother gave Renn lessons in writing and reading very early, so that she could read at the age of 4. Then she attended a state primary school from the 1st to the 3rd grade. At the age of 7, a neurologist diagnosed Renn's attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He prescribed Ritalin for her , which she took until she was 13.

The grandmother tried to bring Renns a balanced upbringing. She made sure that Renn took regular piano lessons and devoted himself to martial arts from the 3rd grade onwards. At the age of 11 she already had the brown belt in the martial arts Kempo . After the 4th grade, grandmother took Renn from the state comprehensive school and sent her to an evangelical private school. Since the rules, regardless of whether it was a dress code or punitive measures, were tough, Renn suffered greatly from this time. The separation from her birth mother was also increasingly causing her problems, so that she longed to live together with both grandmother and birth mother. Her grandmother was to grant her this wish at the age of 12, and both of them moved to the home of their mother and her family in Clinton, Mississippi. Renn attended high school there until she was 16. The coexistence in Clinton failed: Renn's biological mother could not accept the grandmother as a legal guardian, and this kept fueling new conflicts. Just a year later, Renn and her grandmother moved into a two-room apartment in Clinton.

As a 14-year-old, Crystal Renn was approached by a model scout. He showed her pictures of Gisele Bündchen and promised to make her an equally successful model. There was only one catch: Renn had to reduce her hip circumference from 109 cm to 86 cm. At the age of 16, her waist measured the desired 86 cm - Crystal had starved herself from 1.73 to 42.5 kg and had thus reduced her previous weight by 40%. The agent kept his promise and arranged an appointment for the 16-year-old with a New York-based agency. In order not to finish her high school in Mississippi without a degree, Crystal Renn passed the so-called General Educational Development Test (GED) with flying colors.

Model career

Renn signed a 3-year contract for $ 250,000 with the agency. Just one day after signing the contract, she registered in two different gyms. She needed two because she didn't want to suspect she was a sports addict, so she commuted back and forth between the two on weekends. First Renn completed four hours in one, then four hours in the other. In addition to the hard training at the weekend, she had 10 to 15 auditions a day, most of which she rushed to on foot. Crystal Renn became more and more anorexic . Their diet consisted only of steamed vegetables without fat, salad with reduced-fat dressing, sugar-free chewing gum and diet colas. In the meantime she suffered from severe panic attacks, lack of energy, depression, chronic constipation, insomnia, palpitations, joint pain, hair loss, headaches, breathing problems, very dry and flaky skin, bruises on the legs and circulatory problems. In order to get through her eight-hour sports program on the weekend, she started to swallow stimulating diet pills and to keep herself awake with lots of caffeine. Nevertheless, the great success did not materialize - there were no major contracts.

Between the ages of 17 and 18, she gained weight again. Her weight was now 60 kg. The casting that she then had was canceled without further ado, and the client wanted to sue her agency for damages. Her agency still offered her a new job for $ 40,000, but again only on condition that she lose weight. At that point, Crystal Renn realized that she couldn't go on like this and that the $ 40,000 job of losing weight wasn't worth it either. She talked to her agent about her problems. She showed her empathy and made her an appointment with the Ford Models agency , which also arranges plus size models . Ford loved Renn's dark mane and expressive eyes. After her former agency fired her from the models' apartment that same day , they let Ford move into theirs. It took her months to recover halfway. During these months, she changed her eating habits and put on size 42, her new feel-good weight. She now had more zest for life and energy and began to make friends with her now female body.

After several smaller jobs, she got a job at Teen Vogue magazine with a new body and new zest for life . As a result, the jobs came more and more frequently: She now made recordings for the Italian Vanity Fair , the Italian Elle , Cosmo Girl and Nine West . Then at the age of 19, orders for French Vogue , Dolce & Gabbana and Glamor followed .

Hungry

Renn published her experiences as a skinny model in 2009 in several languages ​​under the title Hungry . This enabled her to tell her story in a large number of interviews: including in the New York Times , Time , the Daily Mail and in Germany in Stern , Spiegel and Brigitte .

From 2007 to 2009 Crystal Renn was married to Greg Vrecenak, a trained English teacher. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

After appearances for Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld in 2010, there were frequent indications in blogs and in the tabloid press that Renn had become anorexic again. In November 2010, she stated that she did not intend to lose weight to the standard size 8 again, but that she also did not feel comfortable in the plus-size sizes 12-14. Since she regularly practices yoga and sports, she cannot eat as much to reach these sizes. That would just cause a new form of eating disorder.

Renn reported on fall fashion for Glamor from New York Fashion Week 2010.

For 2011 she is the face for the spring / summer campaign by shoe designer Jimmy Choo and for the plus-size jeans collection by Marina Rinaldi .

Fonts

• Crystal Renn, Marjorie Ingall: Hungry: A Young Model's Story of Appetite, Ambition and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves. Simon & Schuster, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4391-0123-0 .
• Hungry . “I wanted to eat. But I also wanted to be in Vogue ”. Heyne , 2009, ISBN 978-3-453-16393-5 .

Web links

Commons : Crystal Renn  - Collection of Images

• Literature by and about Crystal Renn in the catalog of the German National Library
• Homepage
• Model profiles
• Image galleries
• Harper's BAZAAR Australia photo shoot May 2009

Individual evidence

1. ^ New York Times
2. ↑ TIME
3. ^ Daily Mail
4. ↑ star
5. ↑ I was in hell
6. ↑ How model Crystal Renn defeated anorexia
7. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original dated May 30, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ↑ Crystal Renn talks about her character ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ Cindi Leive: On The CL: Meet Our Brand-New Fashion Week Blogger (Our Whole Staff Has a Girl Crush). Glamor, November 2, 2010, accessed November 28, 2010 . 
10. ^ Amy Odell: Crystal Renn on Her Weight Loss, New Exercise Routine, and Walking for Karl Lagerfeld. In: New York . January 6, 2011, accessed January 26, 2011 . 
11. ↑ Crystal Renn: the movie of the new MR Denim campaign on vogue.it. (No longer available online.) In: MarinaRinaldi.com. November 19, 2010, archived from the original on July 14, 2011 ; Retrieved January 26, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.