• It's too early for this heartbreak. Pixie (Pixie!) Geldof got the March Italian Vogue cover. Have Franca Sozzani and Steven Meisel lost their minds? The cover line is "So young, so cool." So barf. [Telegraph]

• Maria Sharapova for Cole Haan is now a reality. The new campaign looks pretty good, and for fall, Sharapova herself will create a line of shoes and bags for the brand. Assuming, that is, that we've started buying celebrity fashion lines again by fall. [Sassybella]
• Alexander Wang has designed a limited-edition run of condoms called Proper Attire. They're for sale in Thompson hotels, and all the proceeds will go to Planned Parenthood. Wang, whose fall/winter show is, appropriately, on Valentine's Day, said of the collaboration: "I used a spare design that felt sexy, modern and empowering; after all, women should always come first!" Yes. [The Cut]
• Prada, meanwhile is concentrating on objects that are intimate in a different way: The next edition of its LG phone launched last week. "You carry it with you and it tells something about you," said Prada's director of licensing. I'd go through the specs, but if you're buying a Prada phone, you probably don't care about any technical point of difference so much as you do about it being a Prada phone. [Business Week]
• The Paris show schedule was just released. At Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesquière is changing his venue, and there's no mention of the troubles at Nina Ricci — Olivier Theyskens is on the calendar. (Allegedly, creative director Theyskens is to be replaced at Nina Ricci before the end of his contract by Marc Jacobs' second-in-command at Louis Vuitton, Peter Copping.) [WWD]
• Manish Arora, a London-based, Indian-born designer who showed last season in Paris (you remember — it was the show both Madeline and Austria booked in Paris) has a Q&A where he discusses his use of color, the influence of his homeland on his designs, and his upcoming projects. Which include a deal with Swatch. [Style.com]
• And Fashionista has a sit-down with Elise Overland. Her fall collection is all about food — sushi, to be exact. "It's very sexual, almost macabre," says Overland, "the way they show all the sushi and how the fish is all cut up, up close. If you look at like it like a small human, kind of." That was not a pleasant image this early in the morning, but, carry on I suppose. [Fashionista]
• New York talked to Jason Wu at his little soiree the other night. Unsurprisingly, still riding the post-inaugural boost, he was upbeat. "You know, you have to give someone a legitimate reason to purchase something," he said, of the current economic climate. "And that can only help the market." [The Cut]
• Which fits right in with Women's Wear Daily's view that young designers should find the brave new economy "invigorating." [WWD]
• The WaPo's Robin Givhan is more sobering. Read her thoughtful and considered expectations for fall/winter 09. "The conversation is focused on survival," Givhan writes. "There's palpable anxiety about the economy and how the fashion industry — the part dominated by razzle-dazzle dresses, hand-stitched embroidery and Italian cashmere — will weather the storm. And there's confusion over what sort of tone the industry should strike as it muddles through the worst of it. Magazine editors are running through their list of synonyms for budget and bargain while trying to maintain the fairy dust of glamour and élan. Big retailers have been discounting everything but the light fixtures." [Washington Post]
• L'Oreal has stopped shipping supplies of its cosmetics — including brands like Lancôme — to a leading Russian retailer. The store L'Etoile has been late on its payments due to the credit crunch. [WSJ]
• A tipster tells Racked.com that Gucci has disbanded its in-house architecture firm, which would normally be responsible for store interiors, and set designs at shows. So, that could be true. Or not. [Racked]
• More news on the potential bankruptcy of the IT Holdings SpA division that owns luxury labels Gianfranco Ferre and Malo, and ready-to-wear licenses from Versace Sport and Just Cavalli, among others. The group hit trouble because of the credit squeeze and falling demand for luxury products (duh), which cause it to run out of money to operate those licenses. The company says it hopes to restructure and come out of bankruptcy. [WSJ]
• A pressure group called the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics tested 33 well-known brand-name lipsticks over a year ago to find that 61% had lead levels of 0.01 - 0.65 parts per million, and a third had lead levels that exceeded the FDA's safe lead limit for candy. Twelve months on, the FDA still has not released the results of their own, independent lead tests. Lead is a neurotoxin and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to it. [UPI]
• The 18 million items L.L. Bean ships annually will now go via UPS. FedEx lost its contract with the brand after 12 years as their exclusive shipping agent. [The Street]
• JC Penney is advertising its most "fashion-forward" lines this spring, instead of its basics. Which lines might those be? Kimora Lee Simmons' and Charlotte Ronson's, for example. [WSJ]
• There's a cool-sounding exhibit called "Vreelandesque" up in Rome about Diana Vreeland's connection to Italian fashion. The co-curator says of the magazine spreads from the 40s to the 60s, "What you see nowadays on fashion magazines implicitly references these photo shoots, this is why 'Vreelandesque' should also be conceived as a reflection on yesterday and today's fashion, as the past is of fundamental importance to rethink what is fashionable nowadays." [Dazed Digital]
• Mandy Moore's new album was kind of a co-creation with Coach. She had company president and creative director Reed Krakoff style her cover shoot, and she played a private concert in Tokyo to open a new store there. Moore just closed her fashion line, Mblem, but says "I love the fashion world. I'm fascinated by it. I'm humbled by it." [WWD]

Modeling is just like Madeline says. (And, to their credit, what Vogue and IMG allow her to say so clearly and directly.) Agencies deduct so many expenses — rent, any advances you've taken, messenger fees, laser copies of the images in your portfolio, composite card printings, airfares, et cetera — that your wages arrive so garnished you could mistake them for canapés. (I remember the first time I spent a whole summer in one market. It was my big break, with a big agency, in a big city — and I worked solidly, doing mainly editorials, and look books for designers who'd keep me for 10 hours and then say, "Now you get to pick out....A dress!" I was dismayed to find that by the end of the season, despite working regularly, I owed my agency $1000. For what amounted to photocopying.)

You sink into debt so deeply that your only hope of earning it back is to stay in the game. But then when the nice money job, the $5,000-a-day catalog or the campaign for the South American mall brand you've never heard of, does come through, you don't see a penny because you technically spent it three months prior, when you had to pay your $325 weekly rent to stay in the agency-owned apartment and buy your $25 MetroCard and eat and reprint your cards to the tune of $500 — and all you'd booked back then was a lousy editorial that paid $100. Less your agency's customary 20%.

But, eventually, the campaigns and the catalogs come a little thicker, and occasionally your ledger even nudges into the black, because it turns out that during all those poorly paid editorials and look books, you were learning how to model. You were learning how to pose, how to give the client what he wants, how to ease the tension between the panicky fashion editor and the self-conscious photographer when it's only Look 7 and the light is going, how to make clothes look good in two dimensions, how to take cues from the makeup and styling and setting and form yourself into a kind of character. Madeline says in this episode, "I think I'm a really good model, and I can give any photographer what they want." That's a sentiment I can relate to; and while nobody pretends modeling is the most important job in the world, I do believe everyone has the right to take pride in their work. The hard part remains getting the opportunity to demonstrate one's skill. But if it were easy, I'd probably enjoy it less. I suspect Madeline might feel the same.

Earlier:
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 11 [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

What's interesting about this show is that it does appear to be offering a pretty accurate account of what it's like to be a model. (Whether being "interesting" in the abstract makes for "interesting" watching is, of course, a separate question.) I feel like I've gone to that casting where the client representatives thumb through my book and murmur opaquely to themselves a thousand times; I feel like I've had that conversation with my booker where he tells me some version of the "This casting will be great, you're perfect for the job, they'll love you," line at least a million times. You run around all day, making a dozen or more appointments in a city you never quite spend long enough in to fully familiarize yourself with, getting lost and punching the wrong buzzers, and when you finally get to whatever empty studio space or warren of cubicles or production company you've been sent to, you contend with the eerie quiet of a client mentally comparing you to the 50 other girls with your hair and eye color he's seen that day.


And Madeline's boyfriend, James, brings up the one thing nobody ever talks about when they talk about modeling: agency debt. Certainly no one ever warned me that, while agencies will advance your rent, travel, and living expenses for your first trip to their city, unless you blow up, and quickly, that debt will be an albatross around your neck for months and even years to come. You can owe an agency thousands of dollars for the cost of the test photos they set up for you to shoot, the rent at the models apartment they own, the cost of the flight from Podunkville they selected and booked — and, meanwhile, if you're very, very lucky, you might book three editorials that month and earn $400 for your efforts. Your agency is a big company, and you are a small and undercapitalized model, and sometimes it seems no matter what you book or how modestly you live, the debt grows. For, you see, every day that goes by that you don't quit and go home and beg for your old retail job back is a day that you go to a casting for a $4,000 catalog job that could set you free; you never seem to actually book these jobs, however, and what's more, every day that you go to their castings is also a day you spend more money on food, more money on rent, and more money on that very pricey unlimited-ride metro pass, thereby geometrically increasing your debt; and, of course, decreasing the likelihood of your ability to ever pay down said debt selling sweaters at the mall. So you go to your castings, because if you didn't have at least a chance of nabbing that catalog and wiping your ledger clean in ten blissful hours next Tuesday, you might just sink into a depression so deep you wouldn't rise for months.


My first months in this job, alone in a new city, trudging to casting after casting and sometimes going weeks without a single booking, I often couldn't sleep for thinking of that crushing negative sum of Euros I was amassing, the sink hole into which all my earnings would fall for the next six months. Instead of sleeping, I thought of odometers spinning. I thought of calendar pages blowing by in the wind. I thought of every imaginable visual cliché for the anxieties of passing time. I thought of the big numbers that were my rent and the small numbers that were my daily rates, and I thought of how the clients' checks took months to clear anyway, and sometimes I thought simply that I'd gone and made the biggest mistake of my life.


I remember those days (and nights) well. So it's nice to hear some real talk. Even if, for actual verisimilitude, Madeline would have to go to 10 castings, get the silent client treatment at nine of them before meeting and being Polaroided a dozen times by one effusive and seemingly smitten photographer (who, we find out later, instead books a "name" model), and do it all on public transportation. But at least the show preserves the hard center of the experience of going into a room of strangers and trying to convince them of your essential uniqueness and perfect embodiment of their particular requirements when they've spent all day looking at girls who walk and dress and look more or less like you do.

After castings, I feel like I'm always telling my booker, "It went well, I think!" in a purpose-filled voice; I only hope when I say it, I sound a little more convinced of the sentence's truth than Madeline does in that clip.

She books the sunglasses job in the end. May it be a good luck charm for you as you face the New York Fashion Week melee, Madeline.

Earlier: 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 3

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]