‘Love Island bosses recruit plus-sized model Jada Sezer to welcome “all body shapes” on new series,’ blazed a tabloid headline last summer. The article claimed to reveal that plus size modelJada Sezer, a size 14-16, had been confirmed as a contestant in the forthcoming series of Love Island. It added, ‘Producers hope that body confident Jada will help put an end to the backlash they face for their lack of diversity.’
Only when the series began in June 2019, Jada - who has worked with brand such as ASOS, L'Oreal and Speedo - wasn’t in the line-up alongside Amber Gill, Amy Hartand Anna Vakili et al. While Jada had taken part in several rounds of interviews, she tells Grazia she had by no means confirmed when the news was leaked.
She says that she is glad she chose not to take part in the show because of the potential damage it may have done to her mental health.
‘When that headline hit I got 10,000 new followers in 24 hours and we hadn’t even confirmed anything at this point. It gave me a taster of what it might be like [if I went into the villa] and it was a lot of pressure,’ Jada, 30, says. ‘Some people were DMing me to excitedly say that they never watch Love Island but they would be watching if I was on there. But there were a lot of trolls too. So I thought even if it wasn’t me who was the first plus size contestant, you’d have to be extremely resilient because there were a lot of trolls.’
London born Jada felt it was a ‘tokenistic’ move on behalf of the producers, to throw one plus size woman into the mix alongside the size eights and tick a box for diversity. ‘It can’t be that one person’s sole responsibility to be body diverse on the show,’ she says.
After a host of headlines claiming that series five was going to be body diverse thanks to Jada, she decided to turn down her place. ‘It would be great if there was someone in there [who is plus-size] like me but you’d have to be extremely resilient,’ she says. ‘I thought about it a lot and though I enjoy being open and real online, everyone gets body hang ups. It’s not about my size, it’s about being human. The narrative would have been about my size, not about the marathon I had run or the mental health campaigning I had done, or who I was as a person.’
The Love Island casting team did a lot of digging during their various interviews last spring, remembers Jada - and that’s when she started to feel as if she was going to be ‘pigeon-holed’ in a body diversity story arc. ‘Every show has a story to tell when they cast, and they spot opportunities for stories to grow. So I guess [body diversity] was where I was going to be pigeonholed.’
She adds, ‘What a show like that does, it needs drama to survive, and it picks people apart and you watch them crumble. If they had been to cast me and then there was a cast of girls who were a size 8 I might have felt ostracized - I couldn’t trust that wouldn’t happen once I was in the villa.’
Jada believes that all viewers are hungry to see themselves on screen in shows like Love Island. ‘It isn’t just about body diversity, what about disabled people and other ethnic minorities and religions?’ she asks, adding that the show could - and should - rebrand itself to be more inclusive.
‘If you look at the [body diverse] vloggers and influencers that have millions of followers and are making waves, it just shows and proves that we want to see real people. It’s the narrative that Love Island has created over years of consistent casting, they think it might be aspirational but for viewers it feels one sided. Maybe that’s why their viewers are dropping. It’s outdated the way it is.’
Jada feels like a backlash could be around the corner. ‘Just look at Victoria’s Secret, if they had just kept up with what people want and looked at all the tweets and comments, they wouldn’t have had to shut down their runway show,’ she says. ‘By now they could have subtlety changed how we feel about our bodies and body diversity on screen. It’s not even about diversity it’s about representation.’
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