Ep. 181: Beauty Bio: The importance of ‘90s model Jenny Shimizu when it comes to race and sexuality

At just 5ft 6 with a slight, toned build, American model Jenny Shimizu looked more like a car mechanic than a runway model – because that’s exactly what she was when she was discovered. She refers to herself as a ‘gay Japanese mechanic with short hair and tattoos’ and never planned a career in modelling or acting but by doing exactly that she became a poster girl for young, queer Asian women who had never really seen themselves in the media before. I’d love to know what you think – and I’d love to know if you have a favourite model from any era that you’d like me to focus on in a future episode. You can get in touch in my DMs at @beautymepodcast on Instagram and Twitter and there's a video all about Jenny over on my Instagram and my TikTok @charissekenion. Also, did you know that you can now listen to BeautyMe on Amazon Music? Wherever you listen, I would really love if you could hit that subscribe or like button. Feel free to leave a rating over on Spotify, or write a review on Apple Podcasts. Don’t forget there’s also my newsletter beautymenotes.substack.com where I often share imagery from each episode. Thank you so much for listening. Links: Cargo Collective article: https://cargocollective.com/savikuruppu/My-Girl-Jenny-Shimizu Allure magazine 2017 article: https://www.allure.com/story/jenny-shimizu-interview-sexuality-and-aging Refinery29 2017 article: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2017/03/144359/jenny-shimizu-model-police-officer-training BeautyMe on Twitter: https://twitter.com/beautymepodcast BeautyMe on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beautymepodcast/ BeautyMe newsletter: https://beautymenotes.substack.com BeautyMe on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@charissekenion BeautyMe on ShopMy: https://shopmy.us/beautyme