Martha Hunt Career Timeline: From Runway Debut to Fashion Icon

Martha Hunt's career is one of the more durable post-2015 Angels-cohort trajectories. The Wilson, North Carolina mall-scouting discovery in 2003, the Marilyn-and-IMG Models route through New York, the 2013 Victoria's Secret debut, the 2015 Angel signing, and the scoliosis-advocacy work that has run alongside all of it have together produced a working career less about flash than about steady commercial work and a substantive parallel public project.

This is a working brief on the timeline.

Wilson, North Carolina and the Marilyn scouting

Hunt grew up in Wilson, North Carolina, the eastern North Carolina tobacco-belt town about an hour east of Raleigh. She attended Greenfield Community School through her early teenage years and then Beddingfield High School. The 2003 discovery at fourteen happened at the Carolina Premium Outlets in Smithfield, where a Marilyn Agency scout approached her during a weekend shopping trip and routed her into the Marilyn New York development track.

The 2007 high-school graduation and the subsequent permanent move to New York brought her into the full-time working circuit. The 2008 IMG Models signing consolidated the international representation. The 2008 to 2013 stretch ran through the New York and European editorial calendars: the Issey Miyake Spring 2010 show as the Paris Fashion Week debut at twenty, the recurring Vogue, Allure, and Harper's Bazaar editorial work, and the 2011 SI Swimsuit Rookie of the Year placement.

The 2012 work through Carolina Herrera, Anna Sui, Marc Jacobs, and the broader New York Fashion Week calendar set up the Victoria's Secret evaluation. The November 2013 Victoria's Secret Fashion Show debut at twenty-four was the formal Angels-track entry.

The 2015 Angel signing

The April 2015 Angels-cohort expansion brought Hunt, Romee Strijd, Taylor Hill, Stella Maxwell, Sara Sampaio, Lais Ribeiro, Kate Grigorieva, Jac Jagaciak, Jasmine Tookes, and Elsa Hosk formally into the senior Angels lineup. It was the largest single Angel-cohort expansion in the brand's history. The signing followed the senior-Angels departure cycle that had moved Doutzen Kroes, Miranda Kerr, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and Erin Heatherton out of the active roster.

Hunt's positioning inside the cohort was the senior-runway-elegance role. The 2015, 2016, and 2017 Victoria's Secret Fashion Shows in New York, Paris, and Shanghai consolidated the senior-Angel runway register. The 2017 Shanghai show was her final Angel runway appearance before the brand cancelled the 2019 show and paused the franchise. For the broader Angels framework, our Victoria's Secret models and the new supermodel standard covers the brand's casting evolution since the 2018 reset.

The brand portfolio and the runway calendar

The brand-portfolio work across the working career has run through three tiers. The American contemporary tier (Free People, Express across 2013 to 2017, Anthropologie, Tory Burch, Equipment) has carried the recurring campaign income. The luxury tier (Balmain under Olivier Rousteing, Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, Chanel) has run the high-fashion editorial register. The post-2018 contemporary tier (Skims, the continuing Free People work) has carried the post-Angels brand cycle.

The runway portfolio across the 2010 to 2018 working years ran through the New York calendar (Issey Miyake, Marc Jacobs, Anna Sui, Carolina Herrera, Diane Von Furstenberg, Marchesa, Tory Burch, Tommy Hilfiger), the Paris calendar (Chanel under Karl Lagerfeld, Balmain), and the Milan calendar (Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Moschino under Jeremy Scott).

The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit relationship has run across multiple cycles. Hunt was the 2011 Rookie, returned in 2014 and 2015, and was a feature model on the 2017 Fiji shoot. The SI Swimsuit work has continued to position her inside the American swimwear and lifestyle brand circuit alongside Kate Upton, Hailey Clauson, and the rest of that period's SI roster.

The scoliosis diagnosis and the Curvy Girls advocacy

The most substantive parallel public work Hunt has carried has been the scoliosis advocacy. She was diagnosed with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis in 2002 at thirteen, at Wilson Medical Center. The Boston Brace bracing protocol she ran across her teenage years (the standard adolescent bracing protocol runs 18 to 23 hours per day across the 12 to 18 months of active spinal-curvature stabilisation) is the clinical anchor of her public discussion of the condition.

The Curvy Girls Scoliosis Support partnership Hunt formalised in 2014 has been the organisational anchor. Curvy Girls was founded in 2006 by Leah Stoltz on Long Island as a peer-support network for adolescent girls in bracing-and-treatment cycles. Hunt has been one of its most visible public ambassadors since 2014, and the recurring Scoliosis Awareness Month campaigns each June, the National Scoliosis Foundation programming, and the Mighty Health and Mighty Media interview circuit have carried the work across the years.

The 2014 ESPN The Body Issue feature, in which Hunt posed nude alongside the visible spinal-curvature evidence and discussed the adolescent treatment cycle openly, became one of the most-discussed scoliosis-awareness public moments of the past two decades. The scoliosis-advocacy work has continued across the post-2018 reset and the parallel wellness-and-content stretch.

The Taylor Swift squad years

The Taylor Swift squad era across 2014 to 2017 brought Hunt into the broader cultural circle alongside Karlie Kloss, Gigi Hadid, Cara Delevingne, and Lily Aldridge. The Hunt-and-Swift friendship had begun through the IMG Models and Tribeca social circle in 2013 and ran through the 1989 album cycle (Swift's October 2014 release), the 2015 to 2016 1989 World Tour (Hunt appeared at multiple tour stops), and the May 2015 "Bad Blood" music video, in which she played Homeslice alongside the rest of the squad cast: Selena Gomez, Karlie Kloss, Hailee Steinfeld, Cara Delevingne, and the broader video lineup.

The squad-era visibility produced the most concentrated cultural-press cycle of Hunt's career and consolidated the public-facing profile that the brand-portfolio work has continued to draw on since.

The 2022 marriage and the 2024 maternity arc

Hunt married Jason McDonald, the cinematographer and creative director she had been in a relationship with since 2018, at the Casa Monica Resort in St. Augustine, Florida, in September 2022. The Angels cohort and the IMG Models roster attended. Her household has been based in Los Angeles across the early married years.

The July 2024 birth of daughter Emerald McDonald brought the parallel maternity-and-postnatal arc. The maternity period has been integrated into the continuing brand-collaboration work rather than displacing it: the Free People, Tory Burch, Anthropologie, and Skims campaign cycles have continued across the 2024 to 2025 period, and the Curvy Girls programming and the SI Swimsuit cohort work have continued to overlay the calendar.

What the timeline adds up to

Three points are worth pulling out of the full career.

The 2015 Angels cohort Hunt belonged to was the largest single Angel-cohort expansion in the brand's history. The careers of the ten models inside that signing have run on very different trajectories since the 2018 cancellation, and Hunt's position inside the cohort has been the steady commercial-and-advocacy track rather than the flashier business-launch or social-media track that several of the other 2015 Angels have built.

The scoliosis advocacy is the single most substantive piece of non-fashion public work inside the Angels cohort. The Curvy Girls partnership has now run for over a decade. The ESPN Body Issue feature, the Scoliosis Awareness Month programming, and the continuing public discussion of adolescent bracing protocols have produced a public-engagement record that the campaign-window press lines from other cohort members have not matched in substance.

The 2024 to 2025 post-maternity return has been disciplined. The brand-collaboration cycles have continued. The advocacy work has continued. The SI Swimsuit relationship has continued. The careful triangulation of those three lanes is the structural reason the career has remained durable across the post-Angels years.

For the parallel cohort coverage, our Romee Strijd signature runway era profile covers the Dutch-Angel content-business trajectory, our Taylor Hill Victoria's Secret legacy profile covers the younger-Angel track, and our Victoria's Secret models and the new supermodel standard covers the wider Angels-cohort picture.

A few quick answers

Hunt's most substantive achievement is the formal 2015 Angel signing inside the brand's largest single cohort expansion, alongside the 2014 ESPN Body Issue scoliosis-awareness feature and the decade-long Curvy Girls Scoliosis Support partnership. She started her career after the 2003 Carolina Premium Outlets scouting at fourteen, with the Marilyn Agency early track and the 2008 IMG Models signing consolidating the New York and international representation. Her continuing advocacy runs primarily through the Curvy Girls partnership, alongside the National Scoliosis Foundation work, the annual Scoliosis Awareness Month campaigns in June, and the Mighty Health and Mighty Media interview cycle.

The shorter version of any of this is that Hunt's career has been a deliberately structured trajectory that combines the Wilson-to-New-York development track, the 2015 Angel-cohort positioning, the scoliosis-advocacy work that has run continuously for over a decade, and the post-2018 wellness-and-content stretch. For the entry tier of the same industry, our how to become a model industry insider guide covers the career-foundation work.