This kind of peek at a girl-on-the-verge reminds me of nothing so much as novelist Jennifer Egan's wonderful 1996 New York Times Magazine cover story about the first European season of a certain 16-year-old from Omaha who went by James. James got shingles on her back from the stress.

So because of this strange moment, we get to see Cato — who walked in 37 shows in four cities, and, yes, that is her in the brand new D&G cruise campaign—thinking out loud about her future in the business at a time when she is still sometimes uneasy at having to think of herself in the third person. And we get to see her parents expressing their reservations about her choices. Her mother calls her burgeoning career "bittersweet" since Cato's rarely home in the Netherlands these days. Her father seems disappointed that she is delaying university, saying, sternly, "You've gotta finish an education."

On this week's episode, Cato is moved from the development board — the home of the young, the inexperienced, the rising stars who could go either way — to the main women's board, which is for those who have more or less arrived. Cato's reaction, in the full clip, when her agents sit her down for the news is unruffled: "I was thinking that at any moment it could happen," she says, evenly. She's not stupid; anyone with an inkling how this industry works would know it's time for a girl like Cato to graduate, though not in the way her dad would wish.

'Model.Live' must be taking off on a Cato-ish trajectory for IMG and Vogue. What was originally conceived as a one-off series with a 12-episode arc has somehow stretched the 4-week ready-to-wear season into 14 weekly episodes, with the last set to go live next Friday. I had been wondering if the success would lead IMG to develop the idea further — for instance, if there would be any follow-up with Madeline, Austria, and Cato when the Fall/Winter 09 shows roll around. But this episode ends with the revelation that there will be a second season. Maybe sometime soon Cato will take Caroline Trentini and Catherine McNeil's places over at Express.com. She was all over competitor H&M's online home earlier this fall.

Earlier: Vogue's 'Model.Live': "I Feel Like My Confidence, More And More. This Is My Place."
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Shows Don't Even Pay. At All. Zero. Zip."
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Don't Change, Just Improve"
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Everybody's So Sorry, And They Love Me, But Everybody Wants Cato."
Vogue's Model.Live: "Maybe The Clients Call You, Maybe They Don't. It's Just Like A Guy."
Vogue's Model.Live: Crap Instructions From A Casting Agent
Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark
Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins
Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent
Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind
Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom
Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 13 [Vogue.tv]

The ready-to-wear fashion season takes four weeks. Model.Live was slated to air for eight. This episode is the tenth — and it closes with a reminder to tune in next week, which makes me wonder just how long the show about the shows plans to linger, and whether something that might have been a good idea in a short format has now overstayed its welcome.

It's not really a question of finding the series' length disproportionate to its drama, since it's been clear from the start that wringing drama out of the fashion grind is not IMG's goal. (That might "embarrass" someone.)

Failing understandably to find in the calendar blip of a single show season a ready-made narrative with any surprising arc, and choosing not to overlay a fake narrative (except to occasionally and half-heartedly rig the proceedings for sponsorship reasons), it's tough to engage with the material. Model.Live is animated mainly by a strong sense of what it's not: every shot seems to telegraph a sense of sober reflection and purpose that would be fine if it weren't wholly incongruous with the frothiness of fashion in general, and the draining whirligig activity of shows in particular. Merely not giving in to the temptations of overshare-y cast commentary and hokey Hills-style narrative manipulations isn't enough to justify a series if its content isn't fresh and interesting on its own. Model.Live has about it more than a whiff of genre hauteur, like a Pulitzer winner writing pulp, and that unwillingness to actually dirty the knuckles is crippling.

Earlier:
Vogue's 'Model.Live': "Everybody's So Sorry, And They Love Me, But Everybody Wants Cato."
Vogue's Model.Live: "Maybe The Clients Call You, Maybe They Don't. It's Just Like A Guy."
Vogue's Model.Live: Crap Instructions From A Casting Agent
Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark
Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins
Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent
Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind
Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom
Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 10 [Vogue.tv]

Madeline, you'll remember, struck out with the casting agents in Milan, and earlier failed to even reach British soil after misunderstanding her visa requirements. She sets out confidently in Paris, a city whose client base she knows from several previous stints working there, but although plenty of casting agents and designers act interested in her, greet her warmly, and try their clothes on her, she gets to the offices of IMG Paris to find that nobody's actually planning on booking her for any shows. Not even Fatima Lopes, a designer she's walked for before, who makes our girl try on seven different outfits at the casting.

It is entirely true what Madeline says: not being booked by a given client, or any clients, always says more about them than it does about you. Clients' preferences change from season to season, and are always so subjective that they sometimes seem capriciously random. But knowing this doesn't always make it easier to be constantly hearing, "We love you, you're perfect, you're just not right for us right now." There's nothing you can change in that situation: you just suffer from some apparent innate wrongness that no amount of pavement-pounding can fix. You go from being on top of the world — Vivienne Westwood loved me! — to crashing down — neither she nor Issey Miyake books Mad — and it all happens without any discernable reason or logic.

Speaking of pavement-pounding, we get another rare glimpse of my favorite real model-reality Actual True Thing this episode: public transportation usage. Austria, demoted from her London car service privileges, rides the 1 train, alone — how and why she's ditched her cloying mother agent, Sokrates McKinney, and her wannabe-model mom, is unexplained. She is given 12 castings, aims to reach a more reasonable 8, but finds herself struggling to see just five casting agents at the end of one day.

The agency's conclusion is that, shucks, the girl may just be too young to profit from these "opportunities." Cato even weighs in, opining that modeling is a pretty intense full-time job, and that she herself wouldn't have been capable of doing it at 16. (Which is funny-but-not because a. Cato was doing it at 16 — she just had parents who kept her from over-committing to the biz at that early stage and b. Austria, as I simply cannot forget, was said in at least one print venue in her native Dominican Republic to be not even close to age 16 earlier this year).

I've been advocating a little fashion time-out for Austria since, well, this series began. The girl is beautiful, but she needs, and deserves, a chance to grow up a little before she makes the hundreds of thousands that I still think will be her eventual due selling makeup and overpriced handbags. She can get to all that after, you know, finishing high school. Or at least after actually turning 16.

Paris fashion week is in reality almost over, but strangely, Model.Live will return next week to show us Paris Part II, and, presumably, How It All Ends. I know I'll be on the edge of my seat. And probably rubbing my feet and plotting ways to meet Madeline and buy her a well-deserved beer.

Earlier:
Vogue's Model.Live: "Maybe The Clients Call You, Maybe They Don't. It's Just Like A Guy."
Vogue's Model.Live: Crap Instructions From A Casting Agent
Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark
Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins
Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent
Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind
Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom
Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 9 [Vogue.tv]

It is hard to break into the show circuit. Designers are so given to rotating their regular crop of supes among themselves that they will make audiences wait for the top girls to rush over from the previous show rather than settle for a newbie. The big catwalks are awash with the Catherine McNeils and Lily Donaldsons of this world, meaning that thousands of hopefuls — who have already run the gauntlet of getting agency representation, building their books up to competitive standard, and developing a runway body by any means necessary — are competing for just a couple of spots in the shows people notice. Most new (Austria) and newish (Madeline) models need to get lucky to even book one of the tiny, overlooked shows that crowd the penumbra of the main fashion week calendars.

And then there's Cato Van Ee. I really want to like Cato. She seems intelligent. She has cool parents — parents who wisely got their daughter to finish high school despite the interruption of covers for L'Officiel and Dutch Elle and, oh yeah, that Prada/Miu Miu show exclusive. Maybe I've just been having a blah time with the clients since leaving my beloved New York, or maybe it's just the general fatigue of so many time zones and jets and trams and buses and tiny models apartments. Maybe I am an incorrigible grump. But I recognize a sort of Patrician smugness in Cato's face when she collapses in gales of ohmaigawds when her booker tells her the news that, yes, she has booked Prada for a second season, and that makes me want to kick her in the shins.

Especially when she does her "Wooo! Prada + Cato, best team ever!" hand jive in the back seat of her private car.

Things aren't going so well for Madeline and Austria. Austria looks sullen and exhausted at her castings — something which I can confirm was not simply due to editing. In person, Austria looks so much like a little girl, albeit a tall one, it's anybody's guess why IMG is pushing the child whose age was given as 14 in February so hard right now — with a few more years education and maturity, she could be, well, a humbler but no less successful Cato. Madeline glows and her body is phenomenal, but Milan just isn't much of a market for unknown girls with short hair.

So Madeline and Austria cut out for Paris castings early, while Cato walks Prada, Just Cavalli, Dolce And Gabbana, Allessandro Dell'Acqua, and probably 23 other well-regarded shows in her unperspiring, non-acneic spare time.

Bitch.

Next week: the light at the end of the tunnel... Paris.

Earlier: Vogue's Model.Live: Crap Instructions From A Casting Agent
Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark
Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins
Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent
Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind
Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom
Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 8

Madeline — whose hipsterish, short-haired look struck me as likely to suit the client imagination better in London than perhaps any other stop on the fashion circuit, fails to get her work visa papers stamped in advance of her trip. So British immigration puts our favorite Hoosier on a plane back to New York. Her booker looks at her like she's an idiot for forgetting the notarization of her visa — and it is a rookie error. But doesn't Madeline also pay IMG to keep her up to speed on such details of duck order? It strikes me as almost as much their fuck-up as her own, since I'm guessing, like every model I know, that Madeline relies on her agencies for all her immigration arrangements. Her booker should have been reminding her about the visa stamp daily. He should have put that shit on the girl's chart. If there's even a chance it was your bad or incomplete advice that put her in that position, it's passive aggressive in the extreme to go all philosophical-shrug on a girl who's still too young to drink and who, having just done a trans-Atlantic round trip and missed her chance to even be in the London shows, is no doubt feeling entirely bad enough. Weaksauce, IMG.


But London proves difficult even for those who make it off the plane. Austria and Socrates McKinney, her Santo Domingo mother agent, have a hard time navigating their way to castings — even with a driver. (Now wise to the trap of agency debt, I can barely look at a driver without seeing dollar signs spinning like on a slot machine. That luxury must be costing the poor teen a fortune — far more than she could make back in a month of shows. And he's not even getting her to her castings.)


In one scene, Socrates makes Austria take over his call with IMG London and write down her own new casting information because, he says as she wearily takes the ball point, writing gives him headaches. Oh, mother agents! They all work so hard for their lifelong, exclusive, worldwide, multi-agency kickbacks.


Cato reconnects with the man who is possibly the world's most influential casting director, Russell Marsh, who determines the lineups for clients that include Prada and Miu Miu. (Cato got last season's much-sought show exclusives for those.) (Marsh was accused earlier this year of accepting bribes from both IMG and the agency Women to cast their girls in Prada: strangely enough, Model.Live doesn't mention this particular scuttlebutt.) Marsh likes Cato, London likes Cato, Cato walks ten shows.


Austria does three. Including one where a harried fast-talking show director insists on calling all the models by their runway order numbers — as in, Number 3, Number 4, get over here now — because "It's just the easiest way." Austria's sad, perfectly still face in the chair as the makeup and hair artists tug and turn her this way and that speaks volumes. She looks magisterial on the runway, though, so I can't help but suspect the girl is enjoying herself a little bit. At least that's what I hope.


Previously:

Vogue's Model.Live Sets New Online Series Record For Time Taken To Jump The Shark

Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins

Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent

Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind

Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom

Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 7

Model.Live on Bebo

Austria is heading to London with her mother agent, the amazingly named and arguably patronizing Socrates McKnney, instead of her visa-less mother — a ritual of teenaged (non-Western) model abandonment that seems to cheer her bookers at IMG, since the maybe-15-year-old seems to "allow" her mom to be "a comfort zone" and it might be good for the tyke to stand on her own two feet. Madeline books (a respectable but not earth-shattering) seven shows and tries to contemplate the bright side in a meeting with her agents. Cato is last glimpsed, in a fake-reality fake-cliffhanger that might as well be lifted from that wonky first season of The Hills, supposedly trying to hail a cab to take her to the airport for her flight to London. Apparently the entire documentary film team with her can't offer her transport, and nor can the many yellow cabs that pass behind her on the adjacent street. Her single biggest piece of luggage? A large paper bag from a certain mall store show sponsor.


Previously:

Vogue's Model.Live: The New York Fashion week Hustle Begins

Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent

Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind

Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom

Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 6

Model.Live on Bebo

I've been there. (Literally: I did my thing at most of the castings in this episode.) But then, I did it on public transportation. And until someone is reduced to eating breakfast food from a box at 11:30 p.m. I won't feel that my modeling experience has been faithfully rendered.


On a different note, I have to wonder if this series has found, or will find, a significant audience. I think it's fascinating — but that's because this is my job, I'm naturally sensitive to how it's portrayed in other media, and I would watch almost anything modeling-related just out of pure curiosity. (Most models are this way: basically every English-speaking girl I know has a secret ANTM addiction, which we generally process by talking, together, about how ridiculous and tragic the series is. It's much the way I imagine architects are with Ayn Rand.) But if the greatest intrigue this vastly more realistic show can serve up is "Will Madeline find her lost book?" (and even then, it seemingly drops the question for lack of interest), then perhaps the reality is that my job just isn't necessarily interesting to watch. In fact it's almost as repetitive to see the same string of introductions, abortive small-talk, Polaroid posing, and demonstration walking on my laptop as it is to live through. It occurs to me that the process of getting a modeling gig just isn't that dynamic, that it doesn't scream "online reality-documentary with unprecedented sponsorship backing deals and $31,000/minute production values!" Can Model.Live continue just by fanning the flames of native teen girl model worship? (Sample from Cato's Bebo page comments: "I want to be a model when i am older, how do you get your thighs so thin?") I suppose we'll find out.


Because, possibly to its credit, Model.Live is certainly not doing anything much to trick out the storyline. The models themselves seem fairly vanilla; in the full episode, Cato shares her castings philosophy ("You might think it goes good, but it goes bad, or you think it goes bad but it goes good, you never know") and Austria passive-aggressively quizzes her about real estate. (Austria: "You have your own apartment? You buy one?" Cato: "No, renting." Pause. "It's not...that...expensive." Austria: "Oh." Glance with raised eyebrow. "Okay.") It's the kind of subtle/banal moment I'd sooner expect from a David Mamet play than an online series brought to me by Express.com.


Speaking of which, in the middle of this episode, for no reason I can discern, Madeline and Austria go to an Express store. (Shop for fast fashion, why, that's just what I would do in the middle of a 20-appointment day!) There is a montage where they each try on a lot of outfits. Because at castings, as in life, you only get one chance to make a first impression.


I would say something pithy here about how Model.Live's first impression on me is fading, but...that probably doesn't make sense, and I'm beat. Excuse me, I believe I need to go subject my hair to some flat-ironing and assorted sprayings and gunkings. I have appointments to keep.


Previously:

Vogue's Model.Live: Models Are Strange, When You're An Agent

Vogue's Model.Live: Castings Can Really Be A Grind

Vogue's Model.Live: Don't Get Famous, And Other Gems Of Parental Wisdom

Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live Episode 5

Model.Live on Bebo

Sound quality isn't the best in this video. Also: I made an error in my last post about "Model.Live." I was confused, and wrote that the series documented the Fall/Winter 08/09 show season, ie the season that happened back in Spring. Incorrect! The show unfurls in medias res, covering the show season that kicks off in New York on September 5th. Sorry for my mistake.

Earlier: Points For Effort: Vogue Reality Series About Modeling Is Surprisingly Realistic, A Little Boring

Related: Model.Live

The most well-known model featured is 19-year-old Cato Van Ee of the Netherlands, who is the veteran of a Prada/Miu Miu double exclusive (an "exclusive" is industryspeak for when a major house puts a new model on lockdown for its show alone, and a high-profile exclusive reliably precedes a major blow-up: see Kloss, Karlie, who was exclusive for Gucci and Calvin Klein the season before she walked 64 shows in three cities). 20-year-old Arizona native Madeline Kragh has spent a year working mainly in Sydney and Athens, but her New York presence is apparently nil when the series kicks off. Austria Alcántara, a shy-seeming 16-year-old Dominican and an alleged high school senior — whose age, curiously enough, was reported as 14 this February — rounds out the cast.

The first episode introduces the three…characters? Subjects? Everyone at Vogue is insisting on maintaining a distinction between ‘reality show’ and ‘documentary’, which I personally find kind of precious. Especially given the sky-high production values and manipulative piano tinkling that bookends every scene.

The main action happens when the girls’ representatives at the agency IMG meet for a strategy session more than a month ahead of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week — an agency-as-benevolent-parental-surrogate set piece that would probably irritate me more (the managers talk about the girls in all kinds of borderline condescending ways, as if they were pets) if it weren’t so very dull. Meanwhile, the well spoken and composed Cato talks with some regret about seeing all her high school friends go on to university while she pursues a career that may well prove all-too-ephemeral. Austria is clearly being set up as the quiet girl fashion will deliver from her shell.

But my favorite — and the girl who seems most likely to bring a little levity to the self-serious production — is Barbizon survivor Madeline. She has an affective sort of goofiness about her on camera, and her gawky nervousness lends the proceedings authenticity. Also, she puts her foot in her mouth in the most charming way possible. “When I was in university, I was going to school,” she muses at one point, before averring, “I became my own person, my own model...I don’t want to be like another model."

Since the show season documented is this past Spring’s, information about what happens to the girls’ careers over the four fashion weeks is readily available online — a disconnect the Internet series, for all its tie-ins with Bebo.com and sponsor Express.com, strangely refuses to acknowledge. (I won’t give any spoilers, but it looks like someone has visa issues, and Austria’s age may stand in the way of a highly desirable gig. Who knew, in this age of 12-year-olds walking for Marc by Marc Jacobs, that there was such a thing as a model who is too young!)

Model.Live seems harmless enough, and possibly even realistic, if a little sanitized and unnecessarily heavy-handed (the point about modeling often being lonely and isolating is made with voice-over from a manager talking about the “independence” the career demands while B roll of Cato looking lonely on a street corner and wafting down a river in some kind of gondola plays. Really). Ditch the sad piano theme and it could even be fun to watch; in any case it’s nice to see something about the industry that doesn’t have the primetime television stain of ANTM antics.

Related: Model.Live [Vogue.tv]