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TV star who says 30GG breasts have 'ruined her life' claims she once got detention for hugging her own brother
Ashley James has revealed how her naturally large chest has affected every stage of her life - from being punished at school for hugging her brother to being told to “sex up” her image on TV.
The former Made in Chelsea and Celebrity Big Brother star, now a presenter on This Morning, opened up about her long battle with body image, saying she has spent more than two decades trying to navigate society’s conflicting expectations of women with curves.
At just 14, the Northumberland-born star won a scholarship to boarding school, where she suddenly developed a 30GG chest. What followed, she said, was years of unwanted attention, judgment, and shame - all because of her body.
Growing up under scrutiny
Ashley explained that she grew up in a working-class family - her mum a hairdresser and her dad a farmer-turned-truck driver - and that her father wanted her to have an independent future. But when she joined Mowden Hall boarding school, things quickly became uncomfortable.
Speaking on the It Can’t Just Be Me podcast, she said: “I think it started when I was 14. I was the first intake of girls, 37 of us versus 500 boys. And it was also the year that I got boobs and I was suddenly a 30GG, but I was also a child in every sense. I wasn’t sexual.”
She continued: “There was like whispers that people fancy me. It was just really gross, sexualised – I remember boys would run up to me being like ‘Are you shaven?’ It was just really sexual and graphic.”
Ashley said even teachers treated her differently. “Adults, including teachers, would almost treat me like I was this kind of sex-mad person. I got detention for hugging my brother because they were like ‘Well, will people in town know it’s your brother? What are they going to think?’”
She was repeatedly told to “cover up if you want to be taken seriously,” and said she began believing that femininity and credibility couldn’t coexist. “I’d say that I spent my early teens and into my twenties probably also being a bit misogynistic because I had been taught ‘if you want to be taken seriously you don’t dress certain ways, and you don’t wear make-up and you don’t do all of these overtly feminine things.’”
Pressured to ‘sex up’ her career
After finishing school, Ashley studied at university and later worked at BBC Radio Cumbria before moving into modelling and managing a branch of Itsu. But her career took a sharp turn after joining Made in Chelsea.
“When I got an agent in the Made in Chelsea days, it was suddenly like ‘Sex sells, you need to dress more sexy’,” she recalled. “So I was suddenly thrust the other way where I was being told my success depended on me sexing it up.”
She added: “The point that I left one agent was when they were really pushing me to have a famous boyfriend. They were like ‘If you want to be famous, you need a famous boyfriend’. I was like ‘I don’t want to be famous, I just want to be successful’.”
Ashley’s romantic life became a public fascination, with rumours linking her to comedian Matt Richardson and Britain’s Got Talent judge David Walliams. But she later found lasting happiness with Tommy Andrews, a former university friend. The pair now share two children, Alfie, four, and Ada, 22 months.
Finding confidence and calling out double standards
Even motherhood didn’t shield Ashley from judgment. She said people criticised her for breastfeeding, echoing the same scrutiny she faced as a teen. “Now I don’t give a f***. I’m absolutely sick to death of feeling like I have to present myself in a way that makes society not judge me.”
“When I was breastfeeding it was this constant narrative of ‘Stop attention-seeking, put it away’. These are the same comments that I had as a 14-year-old girl.”
Ashley continued: “I didn’t pay for them, I didn’t want them, I don’t even particularly like them – and at the time I didn’t particularly like breastfeeding but my son wouldn’t take a bottle. At no point in my life, whether I was 14 or now at 37, do I want people to look at my boobs.”
Now, she’s using her platform to call out the pressure placed on women to conform. “I feel so sad, the amount of women who contact me saying ‘I would love to wear that but I end up wearing clothes that I don’t like because I don’t want people to look at my boobs’.”
“It’s like ‘isn’t that so sad that as women, and as grown women, people feel like they can’t wear certain things because they don’t want people to assume that their morality or their sexuality is based on their body type. It’s so mad.’”