Lauren Chan knew that announcing she was gay would come with consequences. So instead of owning her queerness when it made itself known to her in 2022, she considered waiting for a better time to reckon with it.
“I remember thinking to myself, maybe I can be gay in another life,” she said.
Falling in love with Hayley Kosan hastened her embrace of her L.G.B.T.Q. identity; her career as a model made her want to amplify it.
Ms. Chan and Ms. Kosan met in August 2019 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on the set of a commercial for the fashion company Rent the Runway. Ms. Chan was the model, Ms. Kosan the director. Each liked the other’s energy.
“Something I clocked right away is how she’s really funny and fun and a bright light on set,” Ms. Kosan said. But romantically, “there was no vibe,” she said.
That may have been because neither was looking to elicit one. Both were married at the time. But the professional breeziness each brought out in the other that day led to a loose promise to keep up with each other’s work via social media. For three years, that plan held. Ms. Kosan has yet to fully metabolize the turn their relationship took after that.
“I was thrown,” she said. “I’m still in shock that we’re together.”
Ms. Chan, 35, is the daughter of George and Lee Ann Chan. They raised her and a younger brother in Brantford, Canada. Her childhood passion was basketball. When a ruptured appendix sidelined her in high school, she turned toward a different passion: fashion.
After college at Western University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in sociology, she moved to Williamsburg. Modeling was not the goal. Working for a glossy magazine was.
“I wanted to be a fashion editor,” she said. “At that time, if you were young and wanted to work in fashion, you’d take any avenue of opportunity.” For her, that was plus-size modeling. In 2013, the Ford Models agency signed her.
But magazines were still her calling. In 2015, Ms. Chan became an associate fashion writer at Glamour, where she took on a plus-size beat and was later promoted to fashion news editor. She left that job in 2018 to start a luxury clothing line, Henning, for women size 12 and up. Stress over keeping that business afloat when Covid hit a year later led, inadvertently, to the discovery she was gay.
“Covid essentially shutting the world down forced us to spend time with ourselves,” Ms. Chan said. “I leaned heavily into talk therapy. And it was in that space, in that state of isolation, that I slowly realized I was queer.”
Ms. Kosan, 36, was raised by Kevin and Denise Kosan in Phoenix with an older sister. She came out while a student at Arizona State University, where she received a bachelor’s degree in film and media production.
In her early 20s, she moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a job she took in 2014 as a digital producer at Comedy Central, where she worked on “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore,” which helped her transition to more cinematic work.
“I was able to cut my teeth there with a lot of talented people,” she said. But “I wanted to try fashion.” That led her in 2018 to a job as a cinematographer and editor at Rent the Runway.
When she met Ms. Chan in 2019, Henning was in its infancy. By the time Ms. Chan sold the company to Universal Standard four years later, both marriages had ended in divorce, Ms. Kosan’s in 2023 and Ms. Chan’s in 2022. In therapy, Ms. Chan had learned how to register her desire.
“I did not know how to do that before,” she said. But “one of the times Hayley had commented on my work on Instagram, I felt that little jump in my tummy, a bit of attraction in my chest.”
If the jump in her stomach was butterflies, by December 2022, she was convinced they were worth chasing. That month, Ms. Kosan had reacted to an Instagram story Ms. Chan had posted about a Phoenix Suns basketball game with a fire emoji.
Ms. Chan gathered her courage before responding. “I was very much dipping my toe in,” she said. “I was thinking, OK, it’s now or never. It’s time to take the next step.”
That step was asking Ms. Kosan out. She didn’t make it clear, though, that their meet-up that December at No Bar, a queer space within the Standard Hotel in the East Village, would be a date.
“I thought I was going to be her fun lesbian friend,” Ms. Kosan said. After the fire emoji, she had shown a straight friend the flurry of texts she and Ms. Chan exchanged. “I had to ask, ‘Is she flirting with me?’”
At No Bar, Ms. Chan sent clearer signals. Both remember her putting her hand on Ms. Kosan’s lower back under purple mood lighting.
“Then I thought, ‘Oh, OK,’” Ms. Kosan said. When they left the bar, Ms. Kosan asked if she could hold Ms. Chan’s hand. The date until then had been everything Ms. Chan wanted it to be.
“On a spiritual level, on a personality level, we were so aligned,” Ms. Chan said. But anxiety overcame her when Ms. Kosan took her hand on the streets of New York City. “I had so much internalized homophobia,” she said. “The feelings I had about the date came to a screeching halt. When she asked to hold my hand, I was immediately worried about how we would be perceived, immediately concerned that someone would yell something homophobic at us.”
Her professional background helped her swallow the anxiety. Being a bold name within a marginalized group — plus-size in the fashion industry — had taught her there’s value in vulnerability. “That’s how you connect with people who feel excluded,” she said. “That’s how you create some allies and make a difference. I wanted to do that with my L.G.B.T.Q. identity.”
The two held hands that night on a walk to the Odeon for French fries, then wandered through the side streets of TriBeCa, peering through gallery windows in a bid to keep the date from ending. They fell in love before their Ubers arrived to take them home — Ms. Kosan to the Bronx while sorting out a place to live post-divorce, Ms. Chan to her marital home in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Both can pinpoint the moment. Before Ms. Kosan kissed Ms. Chan good night, she channeled her inner Mr. Darcy.
“I smelled her hair,” she said. “It was something out of Jane Austen. I’m a romantic.” Ms. Chan felt herself swoon. “It was such an intimate thing to do,” she said. “I was a new person after that date.”
Because both their marriages had recently ended, neither wanted to risk becoming a couple too soon. But not because they second-guessed their feelings for each other.
“We both felt it could be a real and lasting relationship,” Ms. Chan said. “But there’s a lesbian trope called U-Hauling” — a stereotype of gay women, once partnered, moving in together quickly. “We had to have the conversation; we cannot U-Haul, even though we wanted to. We were a stereotype in that way.”
They held out for five months. In May 2023, Ms. Kosan moved into Ms. Chan’s place. It wasn’t too soon. Ms. Chan had come out publicly the month before in Sports Illustrated. In April 2023, she wrote an essay to accompany her first appearance in the magazine’s swimsuit issue.
“Atop the list of things I never thought I’d do, in escalating order: be in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, be gay and come out to the world in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit,” the essay started.
The online bullying started almost as soon as it was published.
“I had so many men writing on social media that essentially I don’t belong in the magazine,” Ms. Chan said. Ms. Kosan’s daily presence afforded frequent, reassuring reminders about the vapidity of the remarks. “We understood each other so well,” she said. “I really leaned on having Hayley here during that time.”
Ms. Kosan was by then already in the habit of regularly declaring her lifelong devotion to Ms. Chan. “I would sit across from her and say, ‘I’m going to marry you,’” she said.
The jump Ms. Chan felt in her stomach before their first date made a comeback when she’d say it. “It made me feel right, it made me feel full,” she said. “I felt like things were in the right place.”
Still, it came as a surprise when Ms. Kosan proposed on her birthday, Aug. 9, during a weekend getaway to Rhinebeck, N.Y., in 2024. Ms. Kosan had started a tradition: Every birthday, she made what she called “a funny and loving and silly” PowerPoint presentation for Ms. Chan. At the end of this one came a slide that read, “In conclusion: Will you marry me?”
On Aug. 5, Ms. Chan and Ms. Kosan were married by Madeline Plasencia, an officiant at the New York City Clerk’s Office. After, for sentimental reasons, they walked to the Odeon for lunch.
A passing stranger yelled an unprintable remark when they stopped to take a wedding photo along the way. “But instead of being fearful of the scrutiny like I was the first time we held hands,” Ms. Chan said. This time she proudly yelled back.
A second wedding celebration for 70 guests on Oct. 7 at No Bar did double duty as a high-fashion celebration of the L.G.B.T.Q. community. The couple was outfitted in LAPOINTE; Ms. Chan in a white silk wedding gown, Ms. Kosan in a black satin suit. Boosting the glamour factor were drag performances by their friends West Dakota, Cherry Veronica Jaymes, Citrine Cash and Alika Hall.
Toward the end of the three-hour party, the couple read handwritten vows.
“Our love is the stuff they talk about in movies,” Ms. Kosan said. But unlike in the movies, she added, “our story has no end.”
Ms. Chan said Ms. Kosan had shaped her new sense of self and her fresh worldview.
“You’ve taught me what it means to be in love,” she said.
On This Day
When Oct. 7, 2025
Where No Bar at the Standard Hotel, New York
Scents Memory Ms. Chan was wearing her signature scent, Maison Margiela’s “Autumn Vibes” mixed with the Maker’s “Lover” eau de parfum, the night Ms. Kosan smelled her hair. She wore the same combination to both weddings.
Comfortable in Her Own Skin Ms. Chan appeared in Sports Illustrated a third time in May after a second appearance in 2024. She became the magazine’s first lesbian cover model this year. For the issue, she wrote another essay, titled “For the Girls.” Coming out in the magazine in 2023 had been a transformative experience. “I don’t think I would have had the bravery to do it if I hadn’t been plus sized in the fashion industry,” she said.
Jackpot Since coming out, Ms. Chan has embraced the chance to talk publicly about her sexuality, including overcoming her own internalized homophobia. “I want to tell people the journey is not overnight,” she said. “The journey is long, but there’s gold at the end of the rainbow.”
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