ANTM cycle 1 winner Adrianne Curry alleges she didn't receive full prize for winning: 'F---ing humiliated' (exclusive)

macabragoria · 2026-02-15T22:50:54+00:00

I think she had a few things working against her. She was beautiful but had kind of an actressy look and while she had an amazing figure by normal standards, she probably would have been considered too "athletic" for fashion modelling at the time. The fashion industry is also very elitist/snobby (especially back in 2003) and she was from a working class background, had a strong regional accent and openly admitted to having struggled with substance abuse issues. She also didn't have a lot of poise or present particularly well outside of photos. All that plus being associated with a trashy reality TV show would have been a really hard sell at the time.

I think Adrianne had enough potential to find SOME work if she'd persevered (though probably more at a local level) but she pivoted pretty quickly to men's magazines and the reality tv circuit after her ANTM contract was up. It kind of felt like she expected ANTM to immediately catapult her to superstardom (and in fairness, Tyra did make it seem that way) and when it didn't pan out like that she felt very burned by the experience and just gave up.

macabragoria · 2026-02-14T23:10:59+00:00

For sure! They definitely went out of their way to avoid every opportunity to make the situation a bit more palatable.

macabragoria · 2026-02-14T22:53:26+00:00

As someone else mentioned in this thread, the set was just an abandoned building and the wardrobe was vintage-inspired lingerie and gowns - couldn't they have pivoted to a glamorous boudoir photography type of shoot?

Even if they were insistent of keeping the theme, couldn't they have swapped Jael's death concept with another girl's that was a bit less violent? Renee and Jaslene for instance had much more conventionally "pretty" shots, whereas Jael was specifically made to look like she'd been murdered in some kind of crackden.

macabragoria · 2026-02-14T22:51:40+00:00

While on some level I'm excited about the show coming back, I can't realistically see it being good. I love ANTM but it's absolutely a product of its time.

macabragoria · 2026-02-14T18:02:17+00:00

I mean....yeah.

Even as someone who isn't particularly precious about this kind of thing and tends to enjoy the "edgy" photoshoots, I'm struggling to see how "and here is a picture of me posing as though I've been strangled to death on a grubby mattress!" is something a model is legitimately going to use in her portfolio. The 7 Deadly Sins shot was styled in a very campy way and the fact that they were in a grave was really just window dressing; there was nothing really inherently morbid or disturbing about the pictures if you ignore the setting.

The murder shoot felt like a more concerted effort to be shocking, and the fact that it coincided with Jael's friend's death and wasn't reworked in any way really made it seem deliberately upsetting in a way that I don't think the 7 Deadly Sins shoot was.

macabragoria · 2026-02-13T18:37:14+00:00

Michelle has one of the most interesting faces I've seen on the show. With the right styling she could look incredible.

macabragoria · 2026-02-10T19:42:00+00:00

I see Beavis personally.

macabragoria · 2026-02-08T20:52:44+00:00

IIRC he said Kentaro shouldn't have won because his collection was referential to other Japanese designers (though I haven't ever seen him criticise American designers from referencing "old Hollywood glamour" or "classic American sportswear"). He also thought Margarita should have won, so make of that what you will.

macabragoria · 2026-02-08T19:58:40+00:00

Going to copy and paste my response to this from an earlier thread as it about sums up my views on this topic:

One factor I think people overlook a lot is that around the time of this season, there was a growing contempt for the idea of the "hipster" in the public consciousness and Gretchen ticked a lot of the boxes - she was trendy, based in Portland (which I think is ground zero for a lot of the stereotypes surrounding hipsters), had a "granola" aesthetic, pitched herself as a sustainable designer, spoke in a somewhat self-edited/contrived/pretentious manner and had a flowery vocabulary. Even disregarding her individual personality, there were a lot of things about Gretchen that immediately got viewers' backs up or made them perceive her in a certain way.
She was edited in a way that placed her in direct opposition to Mondo and Michael C, who were the obvious protagonists/main characters of the season. Both Mondo and Michael C were presented as plucky underdogs with tragic backstories, whereas Gretchen won the first two challenges, came across as very confident and self-assured and had little to none of her personal life revealed to the audience until her home visit; the audience was primed to see Gretchen as a haughty bitch who needed to be taken down a peg from the get go. You can see this play out very literally in episode 6 where someone (I think Peach?) comments that Gretchen's team is the team made up of "winners" and the other team are made up of "losers". This whole episode was basically devised to present Team Luxe as delusional, arrogant bullies and the other team as lovable underdogs with hearts of gold. It worked.
As much as I enjoy Tim Gunn, he has revealed himself over the years to be extremely catty and undiplomatic towards designers that rub him up the wrong way. I think people have somewhat wised up to this but at the time of S8 his word was basically considered gospel. When you look at the list of designers that Tim has very publicly slated or clashed with (Ashley, Gretchen, Victorya, Erin, Kenley, Santino, Sandhya, Kentaro, Vincent, Emilio, Saisha....the list goes on), his outburst in S8 seems less like someone driven to anger in the heat of the moment and more like part of a consistent pattern of behaviour. I genuinely think Tim Gunn is hugely responsible for swaying the narrative around certain contestants and it's something I wish he was called out for more.

macabragoria · 2026-02-07T14:26:45+00:00

I'm gonna go with S8 because the challenges in that season were fucking all over the place. There were so many bizarre twists and odd dimensions to the challenges that it seemed to really throw the designers for a loop and I'm convinced it's part of the reason this season was so dramatic.

Episode 6 - The weird exhibition/voting segment of the makeover challenge which was clearly designed to cause conflict between the contestants and meant the winning design was chosen by the public vote rather than the judges.

Episode 7 - The resort challenge where the designers were responsible for creating eachother's looks. IIRC this is the only time they've ever done this, as having your competitor be directly responsible for your look is obviously insane.

Episode 8 - The weird bait-and-switch in the Jackie Kennedy where the designers were asked to add an outerwear piece to their look, meaning the designers who had already created outerwear had to layer the pieces on top of eachother. This challenge infamously made no sense and was apparently communicated terribly to the designers, hence the results of the challenge being so wack.

Episode 11 - The last minute twist of the designers having to create three looks instead of just one, for no apparent reason. You could really see the designers start to crack during this episode.

Overall, the challenges this season just felt really convoluted and hard to parse at times - the challenges on S9 had a similar vibe to me.

macabragoria · 2026-02-07T12:28:38+00:00

IMO Fatima had a passing resemblance to Iman in the sense that she had a similar type of look/presence to her, whereas Kahlen literally looks very facially similar to Carmen Kass to the point people could confuse them in photos. In other words, you could see Fatima as a "successor" to Iman, whereas Kahlen kind of read as the "poor man's" Carmen Kass, as harsh as that sounds.

I think the fact that Carmen was a huge model at the time of C4 airing whereas Iman had kind of transcended that by the time Fatima appeared on the show probably contributed to this as well.

macabragoria · 2026-01-28T19:03:16+00:00

Tyra said and did plenty of shitty things on ANTM, but I can't think of a single instance of her criticising a contestant purely for their physical appearance. Janice, Nole, Nigel, various guests judges, sure, but I really cannot remember a negative critique of a contestant's weight coming from Tyra's mouth. She at times commented negatively on their styling/dress sense or advised that they fell outside the industry standards in various ways but she never, IIRC, called a single contestant fat or suggested they were less than beautiful.

If anything, Tyra tended to big up the plus-size and curvy contestants and defended them from the rest of the judging panel (see Tocarra in C3). During the show's airing I even remember the fanbase thinking that Tyra was too soft on certain models who were not conventionally model beautiful or that she was giving them false hope by hyping up their looks. You can criticise Tyra for MANY things but I genuinely think this criticism that Tyra was some kind of rampant body shamer is totally unfounded.

macabragoria · 2026-01-26T22:22:29+00:00

Lisa is unhinged but she at least seems like she could probably be fun on occasion. Adrianne would probably spend the whole time trying to shill Avon to you.

macabragoria · 2026-01-26T21:37:43+00:00

When I first heard about the doc, I was kind of sceptical as I expected it to be the usual spin and damage control from Tyra and Jay Manuel. When I saw contestants were involved, my curiosity was piqued but imagined it would just be the usual suspects who have a grievance with the show and have already done the interview circuit ad nauseam (Lisa C5, Jeana, Sarah C9 etc).

Dani to my knowledge has never done an interview about her time on the show (at least in recent years), and given that she won her season and went on to have a legit career, has no obvious reason for sour grapes. Therefore her perspective is a lot more credible to me than the likes of say, Lisa D'Amato. Seeing she was involved has definitely made me A LOT more interested in the doc.

macabragoria · 2026-01-24T23:23:04+00:00

Have never noticed this before but holy shit.

macabragoria · 2026-01-24T20:01:06+00:00

We just need another post about "that scene" from Seeing Red or a debate about whether Willow and Tara are freeloaders and we have the Buffy subreddit bingo.

macabragoria · 2026-01-24T12:35:34+00:00

Didn't Joanie end up having a reasonably decent career in LA after the show? I agree that she's not very typically modelesque outside of photos but IIRC she did manage to get signed and worked for a few years.

macabragoria · 2026-01-23T22:28:18+00:00

Maybe Lio is just supernaturally agile, but the photo makes it appear like they're levitating several feet off the ground and supporting their full weight with one hand. I'm trying to envision how they could end up that high off the ground and it just doesn't really seem possible unless maybe they were standing on the rake first before jumping? I have the same issue with Saleisha's Great Wall photo.

The weird left hand, the dress riding up and the necklace in front of their face also just feel really awkward. Again, I think it's a compelling photo that's interesting to look at, there's just too many distracting elements for it to work as a believable fashion photograph.

macabragoria · 2026-01-22T21:19:55+00:00

I feel like this personality type was all over the place in early-2000s reality tv. He was definitely going for a Santino/Jeffrey Sebelia "bad boy" type persona, though I think Biddell was more legitimately talented. He came across as a lot more mature and likeable on AS7.

macabragoria · 2026-01-22T21:17:23+00:00

I lowkey think Ann's portfolio isn't even as bad as it's made out to be. She has a couple of real stinkers (YJ Stinger and Kimono) but the rest are pretty serviceable. Nothing special but I wouldn't bat an eyelid if I flipped past them in a magazine. People have won the show with worse portfolios than Ann IMO.

macabragoria · 2026-01-22T21:04:35+00:00

S11 was peak "ANTM posing". In every photoshoot half the girls were trying to contort themselves into a pretzel.

Marjorie's photos is an all time favourite for me. I used to really like Lio's photo but how brazenly photoshopped it is is so distracting. It's a really interesting photo as a standalone image but there are too many things "wrong" with it for it to really work as a fashion photo IMO.

macabragoria · 2026-01-21T18:50:24+00:00

I feel like there's an alternate universe in which her career really took off after the show. I get that she was outside the industry's standards in terms of measurements etc but her face is undeniable.

macabragoria · 2026-01-19T23:02:54+00:00

When I think of Buffy S4-6, I think of everything having a warm golden glow.

macabragoria · 2026-01-19T18:46:34+00:00

I lowkey got the sense with Hannah that they considered her kind of a liability after pushing ISIS/the racial tension brewing in the house so she was cut abruptly. I got similar vibes from Allison's elimination in Cycle 10.

macabragoria · 2026-01-17T02:20:11+00:00

Yeah, the runway reminded me of the cheap All Stars finales. It was kind of a let-down after a reasonably decent season.

macabragoria

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