My voice for a change.

My name is Ilaria Capponi and my story is the story of many girls who have lost themselves in order to pursue their dreams. My dream was to become a top model, but what dream can destroy self-respect?
The one that enchants, persuades and leads one to fall in love with the dangerous relationship between extreme thinness and success, and which reduces one's value as a woman, a professional and a human being, to being measured by a silly dressmaker's ribbon.

I started as a model at the age of 13, 1.80 m height and 53 kg weight. For 17 years I lived between fashion runways and shootings, chasing the obsession of extreme thinness, convinced that it was the only way to success. Since day one, I have been accompanied by the weight of inadequacy, of never being thin enough, and never being enough for me at all.

Yet before I became a model, I was an athlete, a First Division basketball player, and I knew how important it was to respect one's body, to nourish it. But while in sport strength and balance are essential values to be able to perform, in fashion I learned to wear myself out, to reduce my body to an inadequate size.
The price? My own health.

In 2018, something has been broken. I opened my eyes on a system that instead of inspiring, too often sentences. I said no more; no more to an industry that rewards self-destruction; no more to a canon that drains out people identity; no more to a culture that just measures and judges us by wrong criteria. Denouncing all this caused me to get fired, but it gave me back my life. Since then I have turned my experience into a mission. I created ‘Lo Sport che Salva la Vita’ (Sport that Saves Life), a project with the Italian Basketball Federation aimed at teaching young people to distinguish reality from distorted media propaganda.

I founded the #lessfilters_morebeauty movement, which has given courage to thousands of people to show themselves without filters, both online and in real life. But changes are always met with resistance. In 2024 I was the victim of body shaming on live TV.

It was very difficult, but it gave me even more strength because it was nothing but a demonstration of what I denounced and the need for a radical change in our culture. The ‘Camomilla Award’ to Women for Women Against Violence came as an important milestone, but for me it represents above all a responsibility of continuing to give a voice to those who still cannot be heard. Today I am involved in communication, I go on stages such as TEDx, on television and at conferences, and I carry on my fight with every word, every choice.
Let communication be the basis for a restart, not a weapon that destroys; a tool that will save people. Do not be afraid to be yourselves. The world needs authenticity, courageous voices that break wrong trends.
And we, through our voice, have the power, the duty, and the right, to change things. Because the world needs us, and we can change the world's story with responsible communication.