2023 SI Swimsuit Rookie Lauren Chan Pens Vogue Essay on Coming-Out Process

The model will make her debut in the SI Swimsuit Issue in May.

Lauren Chan.Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images

SI Swimsuit’s newest model, Lauren Chan, is a fashion industry veteran. She’s worked as a fashion writer for Vogue and Interview, in addition to being a fashion features editor at Glamour. The Canadian model and 2023 rookie makes her debut in the SI Swimsuit Issue next month.

Chan, who used her SI Swimsuit rookie announcement as an opportunity to publicly come out as gay, penned a powerful essay for Vogue on her personal evolution.

“Looking deeply at my relationship with fashion—as a consumer, a clothing brand founder, and a model—helped me realize that my identity had always been steeped in queerness,” Chan wrote, noting that she often felt uncomfortable in overly feminine fashion.

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She added that, instead, “modest, structured, menswear-inspired pieces” were her comfort items. As her confidence grew and she began to better understand her identity, Chan noted that these days, “I find myself wearing things to signal that I am part of the queer community.”

The model credits therapy, peers and LGBTQ+ content creators with helping to better understand herself. She noted that her SI Swimsuit debut comes at the perfect time, when she’s now “as comfortable in my skin as I am in a string bikini.”

“Being in the pages of SI is something that the old, closeted version of me would have panicked at the thought of,” she wrote. “But I drew confidence from the fact that SI Swimsuit has celebrated talent like Ashley Graham, Leyna Bloom and Maye Musk.”

Meet Lauren Chan—read the 2023 SI Swimsuit rookie’s full feature profile here.

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