On how her career started:
“I moved to New York City at 16, when I got into a summer program at the American Ballet Theatre. Although I didn’t watch Dance Moms, that was very much the world I grew up in. But I realized I was just not good enough to be a dancer, and I’ll never be perfect at it. And if I’m not going to be the best, I don’t think it’s worth pursuing. I got a modeling job and was able to pay my rent. And I was like, ‘I could just stay here.’ I sent my mom a long email: ‘Found a school. Got a job. What do you think?’”
On living alone in New York as a teenager:
“I was 16 years old, alone in the city. It felt terrifying. Other kids were going home to their parents and their tutors, and I was at Paris Fashion Week with a chemistry or algebra textbook for a class that I was failing. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know anyone in the city. If a guy got on the elevator, I would get off. I lived all of my 20s out of a suitcase, without any furniture. I had a mattress on the floor. And I became financially independent by the time I was 18, so I was super frugal, too.”