The 41-year-old plus size model shared a photograph of herself wearing a green bikini while aboard a yacht in Italy in a Facebook post on 21 August. After receiving backlash, Holliday appeared to respond by sharing another photograph from the yacht, making it clear she would not be pressured into hiding her body.
'Another photo of me on a yacht in Italy just because my haters loved it so much,' she wrote in the caption. 'Feeling blessed'.
Holliday then addressed the reaction in the comments, thanking those who had supported her while taking aim at those who had criticised her appearance.
'For the ones showing me love: thank you!' she wrote. 'To everyone else: I hope you find the love within in yourself that you clearly need.'
The defiant response is in keeping with Holliday's long standing stance against scrutiny of women's bodies, particularly the pressure placed on plus size women to conform to conventional beauty standards.
Tess Holliday Refuses To Let Critics Dictate Her Life
The model continued to address the criticism the following day, sharing a more personal message on Facebook on 22 August.
'People have always made my body the most interesting thing about me. I never have,' Holliday wrote.
She went on to explain that her focus is on living her life, loving herself, raising her children, working, laughing and creating rather than allowing strangers to dictate how she should feel about her appearance.
'I'm too busy living my life, loving myself, raising my kids, working, laughing, creating, and actually being happy,' she wrote.
Holliday added that people should spend less time obsessing over her body and more time focusing on their own lives.
The comments came just a day after her bikini photograph, giving the controversy a more personal dimension. Rather than simply defending a single photograph, Holliday made it clear that she does not want her body to be the defining feature of her identity.
She is mum to sons Rylee, 20, and Bowie, 10, and has spent much of her career challenging the way women are judged by their appearance.
Model Has Long Challenged Beauty Standards
Holliday began her modelling career in 2010 and has since become a prominent voice in the body positivity movement. She made her New York Fashion Week debut in 2019 with swimwear brand Chromat and co-authored the book Take Up Space, Y'all.
She has also campaigned against narrow beauty standards through the #EffYourBeautyStandards movement, which she launched to encourage women to reject restrictive expectations around their bodies.
Her views on the subject have remained consistent. In a 2018 interview with Self, Holliday explained that she had previously felt compelled to tell people she was healthy in response to criticism about her size.
'In the beginning I used to say, "I'm healthy, my cholesterol's fine, I don't have high blood pressure, I don't have diabetes",' she said.
She later argued that having to prove her health reinforced the idea that people in bigger bodies owe others an explanation.
'The reality is I don't owe you s--t, and I don't have to prove that I'm healthy or not, because it is nobody's business,' she said.
Now, following the reaction to her yacht photograph, Holliday appears just as unwilling to justify her appearance.
Instead, she is continuing to share photographs on her own terms, turning criticism into another opportunity to make her position clear: her body is hers, and she does not need permission to be seen in a bikini.
