“What size are models?”

This was a question Portia de Rossi asked her friend, and love interest Kali when they went shopping for the first time since her moving to the United States… Life was different for her in Australia where she was born and lived until the death of her father. Life was quite different then… She was happy and never felt as though she needed anything else. Since moving to the United States when she was a child, Portia has struggled with her image and more deeply, her purpose. It was this particular day that Portia decided that she was going to go clothes shopping for the first time in forever in order to get “normal” clothes for a gig she landed on the famous show Ally McBeal. Portia did not know what size she was and the very thought of the answer killed her inside to know.

It all started when she was twelve years old. On her first day of school she noticed that she was not like the other kids… kids and their helicopters, their yachts, and their fancy cars… They were rich, they had everything they could ever want and more. She did not have this… she was poor. From this day, she developed a frustration and felt the need to do more. This is when she decided that she was going to become a model and she was going to make sure that the world knew her name… well not her real birth name of course. Amanda Rogers was not a name the world would remember… it was the name of someone plain, someone ordinary, and she wanted to be anything but ordinary.

The name Portia came from a night at a local night-club when she was just fifteen. She craved attention and fame and so she lied about her age and name in order to conceal her true identity… her true self. And this is when the name Portia de Rossi was born. A name that the world would indeed soon know.

Going back to the question “what size are models?”; Portia became a model when she was twelve years old and this is when she started to become conscious of her image, her size, and her food intake. This is when her unrealistic notion of how a woman should look came into play. This was the beginning of her eating disorder, a disorder that would start to control her every move, as well as her every thought.