She plans to use her platform one day as an international model to draw attention to her other love: animals and people. She gave the commencement speech at her graduation. She reveled in looking at the beautiful, empowering women in Vogue magazine, and sewing and designing clothing she used from fabrics found around the house.ĭuring middle school and her years at Providence High School in Burbank, she kept her eye on the ball because she knew education was important.Īs a student at UCLA, her undergrad major was in biology with a minor in evolutionary medicine. It started as young as when she around 5 years old. Hartoonian’s path to making her modeling career dream come true has been unusual. While thin, she’s strong, fit and muscular.” She’s 10 to12 inches shorter than most runway models. “Most of these models are still quite young, very tall and exceedingly thin,” Micallef said. Micallef said high fashion and runway modeling is one area where there hasn’t been much evolution. Brands want and often need to tap into an influencers ability to reach and inspire an audience that can be as big as a cable television stations viewership.” “Those audiences often don’t share the more narrow view of the fashion elite about what is beautiful. “Social media influencers command a lot of sway with their audiences,” she said. Micallef said social media has helped changed the core idea around who a model might be and the attributes associated with that. For this reason, it’s challenging for a petite to walk in a major fashion show.Ī designer would have to believe in the talent enough to alter their pieces pretty significantly to fit a smaller person,” Micallef said. (Courtesy, Sayda Hartoonian - also known as Sayda Word).ĭesigners typically create samples for their runway shows, and these are built in a fairly standard sample size based on a traditional model’s form, she said.

That’s also her at left pictured on the billboard. Sayda Hartoonian, of North Hollywood, will be walking the runway Friday at London’s Fashion Week.

She’s definitely creating her own path in an industry that is built around tall models, Micallef added. “In terms strictly of height, Sayda would be among the shortest if not the shortest model to walk in LFW.” “Sayda will likely stand the tallest in terms of her pride in being there and her power as a human,” Micallef said. London Fashion Week is the “Super Bowl” of the fashion industry and Hartoonian being there is akin to Tom Brady winning another Super Bowl ring, according to Amanda Micallef, co-founder and president of Arsenic, a community of models, artists and creators who use social media to control their own destiny rather than intermediaries such as studios, record labels and modeling agencies. Hartoonian will be wearing clothes by Taiwan designer Johan Ku and worn by actress Shailene Woodley and singer/songwriter Carrie Underwood. It will take one person to pave the way and I want to be that one person to pave the way for petites.”

“That’s why this is so amazing and so powerful,” Hartoonian said. She believes many people in various industries are set in their ways, but she said a determined individual can use social media to get past stereotypical thinking. “Now I have close to 100,000 followers on Instagram and my videos are averaging from one million to 44 million viewers. Streaming got me more of a worldwide audience and gave me a strong enough presence to open up doors that would not have been able to be opened prior.” “As soon as they realized I was 5’ 3,” they immediately turned me away for my height without fail,” Hartoonian said. By using social media, like Instagram and LiveAF, a life streaming video application, Hartoonian built a following and a fan base.īefore that it was one rejection after another.

Criminal model runway walk