Interview with Carson Kressley

AE: Back to the show, what part of the process was hardest for the women?
CK: I think probably the hardest for them — and for me — is the first moment when we take a candid look at the woman's body in that room full of mirrors. I mean, I'm in there practically in tears. "Wow, my butt's huge, too!" The hardest part is just being honest with yourself and saying, "Here's what we're working with."

As we go through the process of correcting her self-perception and showing her that maybe she's viewing herself a little incorrectly, and maybe she thinks she looks different than she really does. Doing the lineup [the woman places herself in a line-up of women according to where she believes her body size falls] and all those different kinds of comparative moments that she can really see that her thinking is off, it becomes easier. Ultimately, we get to what I call the "coming out moment," when I say, "Do you want to do this photo shoot nude?"

People are freaked out and they think it's such a crazy idea, and I was concerned that it was gimmicky at first, too, but it's really about saying, "You know what? I'm fine with who I am. I love myself for who and what I am, and I'm going to show the world. If people don't like it, that's too bad."

That's very similar, I think, to the coming out process.

AE: The lineup is one of my favorite parts of the show. It's a powerful moment to show how off our minds can be about the way we view ourselves.
CK: Yeah, and we discovered some other things about it after we were doing it. The first thing is just, I could talk until I'm pink in the face about how great this woman looks, and how she has so many great features, and we shouldn't be dwelling on the bad ones, but you really have to show them sometimes, and not tell them. That's where the lineup comes in handy and really illustrates that some of these women's reality checks have bounced.

The second thing that we discovered after we started doing it was that we're showing all these other women who comprised the lineup that were bigger and smaller, but were still beautiful and confident. They were kind of like role models or like a support group, saying, "We're out here baring it all and we're happy with the way we look and who we are." It's kind of a bonus of the lineup that we have all these other women there who are great to look up to.

AE: Did any of the women get angry at having the image of them in their underwear shown on the side of a building? Because I think that would freak me out.
CK: I think almost everybody did. That's the initial shock at seeing that. Again, we didn't do it to be a gimmick or for the shock value, it was so we could get real feedback from random people on the street saying, "What do you think of this woman's body?"

Most of these women have been so covered up for so long, they've never heard anyone talk about them. They don't have any idea of what people's perceptions of them are. So that's the point of that exercise, but yeah, they were really shocked at first.

AE: Besides being the whole twist and the title of the show, how important is the final nude photo shoot? What does it accomplish?
CK: I think the moral of the story is before you can look good in clothes, you have to be comfortable with who you are and in your body. After we've gone through this whole process, the women are starting to feel better about themselves and really accepting that beauty doesn't have to equal perfection, that's the final thing to cement it into their psyche by doing this incredibly brave thing. Saying, "This is me. Love me for who I am, because I do." I think it's more about going for it and doing it than actually getting a nude photograph.