The 8-page editorial, shot by Terry Richardson, is titled "One Size Fits All." Each model wore the same sample clothes, and they are purposefully styled the exact same way and posed very similarly.

While it's nice to have it demonstrated that "plus" models can in fact wear at least some editorial samples with ease — the prevalence of tiny samples, and a model's need to fit into them, is one of the commonly given reasons that straight-size models have grown thinner in the past decade — overall this shoot proceeds like a game of "Spot the difference." With real women in it.

V also pointed out, in its press release about this shoot, that Crystal Renn has "graced the cover of American Vogue." I know Renn has been in American Vogue at least twice — both times for the "Shape" issue, and both times shot by Steven Meisel — and in her memoir, Hungry, she recounts a story about her first editorial for Italian Vogue, which was supposed to include a cover shot. Only she couldn't fit the lace couture dress Meisel and the stylist wanted for the cover:

The dress was supposed to be skintight, so there wasn't even a zipper. It had to be wriggled into, then laced up the back with corset ties. The seamstresses, who were amazingly talented, cut up the teeny seams all along the sides of the dress, hoping they could sew me into it, but it just wasn't happening. A humiliating team effort ensued, with everyone on set trying to stuff me into that garment, but my boobs were hanging out, and it was clear no amount of magic would get the dress to close. The sylist said, "He can't shoot that on you."

Another girl got the cover.

I excused myself and went into the trailer on set. I held myself together until the door was closed, and then I burst into tears. I knew I might never get another chance at the cover of Italian Vogue. (Indeed, so far I haven't.) I dried my eyes and went back to the set.

— Hungry, by Crystal Renn with Marjorie Ingall, p. 165-166.

As far as we're aware, Renn's editorial career, though extremely successful, has not yet resulted in an American Vogue cover. (Or the cover of Vogue Italia she so richly deserves, after that debacle.) We contacted her booker to make sure, but haven't yet heard back and he confirms it: "She has not been on the cover of American Vogue YET!!!"

In this shoot, for purposes of accurate and informed side-by-side comparison, we presume, V provides readers with Renn's and Jablonski's respective measurements:

Jacquelyn: 5 ft, 9 in; 32"/24"/34"
Crystal: 5 ft, 9 in; 36"/31"/41"

Is this a competition?

As great a step that it is that plus-size models are increasingly garnering editorial attention beyond the usual "Love Your Body" special issues, it's a little bit disappointing that someone decided this one needed a straight-size model for a chaperone. And the way the entire shoot is structured to encourage the reader to compare Renn to Jablonski — as if that's what we women need, to decide the age-old battle between plus-size and straight-size models, once and for all! — just makes me want to barf. The point shouldn't be to focus on the differences between these women and decide who looks better. We all know Crystal Renn is a compelling model all on her own — and Jacquelyn Jablonski, though a relative newcomer, isn't half bad either. It's pitting them against each other that does them both a disservice. So why did V and Terry Richardson think it necessary?

V Magazine [Official Site]

Earlier:
The Pros And Cons Of V Magazine's Plus-Size Issue

The way Stone is talked about in this Vogue story — cover line "When Size 4 Is Too Big: A Curvy Model's Struggle To Fit In" — you'd almost think she was a plus-size model instead of a girl with the highly typical (for a straight-size model) measurements 33"-24"-35". Writes Rebecca Johnson:

'What they say is 'curvy,' but you know they mean fat," says Lara Stone, who is Dutch and so soft-spoken, you have to lean forward to hear what she's saying. However, she enunciates that word — fat — clearly and forcefully, as if it were caught at the back of her throat. The word hovers over the din of the hotel lobby where we are seated in downtown Manhattan, laced with irony and just a tinge of bitterness.

So that's 11 rather straightforward words from Stone, and 59 words from Vogue about what Stone said. (I guess when a word, having at last dislodged itself from the subject's throat, literally flies out of her mouth and floats in the air of a hotel lobby, it requires special treatment. Did she fling her arms in the air, too, Vogue? Because limb amputation sounds almost as painful as reading that sentence!) Anyway:

Worse than being called fat is a gaggle of stylists whispering in a corner after you've been trying on clothes for ten minutes. "That," she says, "is when I know I'm about to be canceled."

And even now that her position in fashion's firmament ought to be secure, given she has earned Karl Lagerfeld's favor, worked with the world's top photographers, and been on multiple covers of British, French, and American Vogue, she still encounters narrow-minded folks who make her feel like "the odd one out." "I was on a shoot just last week," Stone told Johnson, "and the stylist took out this tight corset dress and said, 'Here, put it on,' and I was like, 'Who are you kidding?' There was no way, so that was very rude of her. It's like, come on, she's a woman; whether you're buying jeans at the mall or wearing couture, you know what it's like for clothes not to fit. It's not an easy kind of rejection, because it's very personal. It's you, your body. You take it to heart."

What I guess a lot of people don't realize is that modeling is just manual labor with fancier clothes. The work is deeply bodily, and therefore the division between you and your work dissolves: everything you wear, how you present yourself, how you walk, every product you put on your face, every haircut, and, mostly, everything you put in your mouth, impacts your career. It is automatically a professional choice, not a personal one. There is no meaningful work/life balance, because your body is your work. Of course, women outside of the modeling industry have long been told that their bodies need to be their "work," too: that we all need to obsess over our arms and abs and thighs and do 30 squats on our lunch breaks and always take the stairs and use the Shake Weight and join gyms and buy athleticwear and Lose 12 lbs Before Sunday. It's just that for models, these imperatives are professional. Living is work. And that can kinda mess with your head.

Stone herself, being unable to budge from what must be her set point weight range with diet and exercise, began taking pills to lose inches. "But they made my heart race," she reports. So she started drinking. Nobody noticed, and her work didn't suffer, but soon she was waking up with the shakes. Stone did a month of rehab in January — the longest she'd spent in one place at a stretch in the two years since her career kicked into hyperdrive, she told British Vogue — and has not had a drink since.

What is elided in these kinds of stories that trumpet Lara Stone's "curves" and proclaim her to be a size 4 — because we all know clothing sizes are meaningful and consistent nation-wide standards, oh wait — is that Stone differs so barely, so incredibly tinily merely, so very little, from the accepted size standard for fashion models. She is slightly shorter, at 5'7", than most runway models, and her measurements are well within fashion's preferred range. While it's undeniable that she has a slightly different body shape than most models, her size is entirely typical of the industry. (Technically, her stated hip measurement, 35", is about 1" larger than the 34" it "should" be for her to model, but there are dozens of other models who have worked, and done the show circuit, with hips of Stone's size.) It's all well and good to call her the "curvy" model, and it is obvious from her runway work and every nude shoot she's ever done that Stone has breasts. When she slings one hip out, like for the photo accompanying this Vogue story, sure, she can indeed look kind of voluptuous. (When she doesn't, she doesn't: Would you call her the "curvy" one in this Givenchy campaign?) These stories never make clear that Stone veers from the accepted modeling standards only every so slightly, and that booking her for a shoot or a campaign is not some revolutionary act of body diversity. If anything, the fact that she is seen as a different kind of model for her size is the ultimate indictment of the fashion industry's standards. But Vogue would never make that point.

An item on Fashionista this morning points to two actual plus-size models, Crystal Renn and Amy Lemons, who are both busy working in Europe. Renn — whose struggle with anorexia and exercise bulimia is documented in her recently released memoir, Hungry — apparently went blonde for a shoot for Italian Vanity Fair, and Lemons, who also began her career as a straight-size model, is working for French Elle with the photographer Tesh. Her spread is apparently over 30 pages, and includes cover tries. Lara Stone is a fantastic model. I love a lot of her work. But seeing a plus-size model on the cover of a major fashion magazine, now that would be a real sign of change. Yes, plus-size models are still models, and the fashion industry still makes its money presenting women with images to aspire to that are, for most, unattainable and unrealistic. But if we can change the parameters of the beauty standard even just enough to accommodate tall, enviably proportioned young women who don't have 23" waists, then I'd still call that progress of a kind.

Fittingly, Fashionista asks: Italian Vanity Fair and French Elle are great, but where are the U.S. magazines? Aside from Glamour's admirable commitment to using plus-size models consistently in fashion spreads from issue to issue, and V's forthcoming January special issue, what is going at American Vogue, Elle, and Harper's Bazaar? Will we see a plus-size model in a fashion spread in an American magazine that isn't trudging through the clichés of its obligatory annual Love Your Shape issue? I have a feeling — call it blogger's intuition — that it might happen sooner than you think.

Hello, Gorgeous [Style.com]
The Tides Are Turning [Fashionista]

Earlier: Model Crystal Renn On Self-Acceptance, Size, & The Fashion Industry

The modeling industry went through a variety of dramatic changes during the last decade. It was in these years that two relatively economically underdeveloped regions — South America and the former Eastern Bloc — supplanted the West as the industry's main source of tall, skinny 16-year-olds. (And the skinny 16-year-olds became skinnier 14-year-olds.) Lots of stuff happened: models died. The industry hesitantly considered self-regulation. There was a recession that decimated the luxury sector.

Who were the faces that cropped up during these tumultuous years and stood out from the crowd? Think of the Brazilian bombshells who stomped into prominence on the runways of Versace in the late '90s and held sway over the industry for the first few years of the decade that is now coming to a close. Remember the post-9/11 mini-vogue for "intellectual"-looking Belgians? (Though some — An Oost — have been unfortunately largely forgotten, others — Hannelore Knuts — still work regularly.) The doll-like models of the mid-2000s (hello Gemma, hello Lily!) The Russians who gained prominence during the last years of the decade. Who will be remembered as the faces of the 2000s? Our money's on these ladies.

Gisele Bündchen

There's a strong case for calling Gisele the face of the decade. Although she technically rose to fame at the very end of the 1990s — she was Vogue/VH1 Model of the Year for 1999, and nabbed the November 1999, December 1999, and January 2000 covers of American Vogue in a rare hat-trick — Gisele has continued to dominate the entire fashion spectrum. Claudia Schiffer called her the only true modern supermodel. Gisele is a category-killer, pulling off high-fashion editorial work, commercial gigs, Victoria's Secret, and campaigns for Dior and Versace, with equal aplomb. (She is also one of the only contemporary models to have gained any kind of tabloid notoriety, which celebrity ironically makes her a more likely cover choice for fashion magazines, now that they don't put mere models on their covers.) Through every change in style, Gisele has remained on top. She goes by one name. She is the highest-earning model in the world. She has a line of sandals in her native Brazil. Her work ethic is highly praised, and an economist even made a Gisele Index to mathematically prove that companies that hire her make money. It outperformed the Dow! Other models should probably just give up now.

Crossover Stars Heidi Klum And Tyra Banks

Karl Lagerfeld may not know who Heidi Klum is, but millions of Americans do, thanks to Project Runway. Although Klum and Banks were both well-known models in the mid-to-late 1990s, thanks especially to their respective work for that august periodical, the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition, it was in the 2000s that their careers kicked into overdrive. In 2003, Tyra Banks debuted a little reality-television show called America's Next Top Model, and even if it was a little short on the reality, it certainly made great television. She parlayed it into her own talk show, a New York Times Magazine cover story, and continued to make occasional appearances in magazine editorials. Klum became the host and executive producer of Project Runway in 2004, and thus introduced the world to the magnificence that is Tim Gunn, and her own adenoidal catchphrase, Auf Weidersehen. Klum maintained her Victoria's Secret contract, and is currently the face of a rejuvenated Ann Taylor. Maybe these women recognized that modeling, qua modeling, was mostly a losing game in the oughts; maybe they knew their careers were dwindling into catalog obscurity anyway. Either way, they went and did their own thing, and are now more recognizable than ever.

Natalia Vodianova

After the Brazilians, came the Russians. And no Russian was more successful than Natalia Vodianova. A favorite of Calvin Klein, she walked every runway and cleaned up on the campaign circuit, starting in about 2004. With her spooky, wide-set eyes and thick hair, she could look alternately romantic and hard-edged. Unashamed of her impoverished background — she worked at a fruit stand before starting modeling in her early teens — she is an active philanthropist in her native Russia. Also she sometimes talks about how it's not a good idea to expect models to be so thin that they can develop disordered eating habits. We pretty much love her for that.

Gemma Ward

Gemma Ward had basically done it in fashion all by the time she was 19. After debuting as a runway exclusive for Prada, Ward saw covers, editorial work with Mario Testino (this shot comes from a Vogue Paris shoot with the photographer), Steven Meisel, and Patrick Demarchelier, and campaigns for brands like Burberry, Roberto Cavalli, and Dior all came her way. All told, she was on more than 30 different covers of Vogue around the world, including the debut issues of Vogue China and Vogue India. Her uniquely beautiful features commonly earned comparisons to those of a baby doll, and Ward originated the vogue for eery-looking, wide-eyed, pale girls, like Heather Marks and Vlada Roslyakova. Then, suddenly, in 2008, she took a break from modeling. She filled her time by taking a supporting role in the Australian film The Black Balloon, for which she was nominated for a Film Critics Circle of Australia Award in the category of Best Actress. She most recently popped into the news to quash — for a second time — rumors of her retirement; she says she'll return to modeling in 2010. Perhaps she can be a face of the next decade, too.

Liya Kebede

Liya Kebede burst onto the scene in 2002, when the then-largely-unknown was featured on the cover of Vogue Paris. And this Ethiopian model has continually been featured in editorials and campaigns during a decade that will probably go down in the fashion history books as one of the least diverse. (Kebede was the only black model before the fold on Vogue's supermodels cover from earlier this year.) She's been the face of brands from Estée Lauder to Tiffany's to Louis Vuitton (pictured), advocates for maternal health in the developing world, and has her own children's clothing line, which is entirely handmade in Ethiopia.

Daria Werbowy

With her cat eyes and multi-faceted nose, Polish-born, Canadian-bred Werbowy so captivated Steven Meisel that he put her on the cover of Vogue Italia twice in a row in 2003 (this is the first one). Plenty more work followed, including campaigns for Prada, Gucci, and Chanel, and a multi-year contract with Lancôme. She also is one of the bevy of supermodels who do ads for the jeweler David Yurman. Most recently, Werbowy motivated countless women to buy insanely colorful Matthew Williamson for H&M summer duds by merely glancing in Solve Sundsbo's direction.

Agyness Deyn

For a while in 2007, this girl's mug was inescapable. It seemed that Deyn — born Laura Hollins, some five years earlier than her agency had initially claimed — was in every editorial, on every billboard, and on every runway. With her highly recognizable haircut and signature mouth-agape look, she could radiate innocence or sex. Given she had oodles of style — or at least, a willingness to dress in really ridiculously 80s outfits in public — the obvious move would have been for her to transition from modeling into being a designer's long-term muse, a stylist, or to get a clothing line. Instead, she dabbled in music, did ads for Uniqlo, and dyed her hair black. Whether or not she makes a comeback, she's still got that 2000s look — po-mo anti-historical Salvation Army hipster — to a T. Her pictures will instantly conjure the period.

Coco Rocha

One of our all-time favorite model bloggers, the Canadian Rocha has been heavily featured in editorials and advertising for companies including Dior and Yves Saint Laurent since about 2006, and once did a jig on Jean-Paul Gaultier's runway. A favorite of Grace Coddington at American Vogue, she also dyed her hair red at the request of Steven Meisel himself. Rocha, who worked for several long years in secondary markets before making it big, is also one of the few models willing, like Natalia Vodianova, to talk about the industry's pressures regarding weight. (She herself has used diuretics to stay thin in the past.) Rocha practically has a patent on the open-mouthed, furrowed-brow, angry-cute expression we've seen so much of over the past few years.

Lakshmi Menon

When we first saw this woman's pictures, in 2008, we swooned. Menon worked in India for years to put herself through school while studying economics, and then hit the international circuit to do the occasional job for, well, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Alexander Wang, Stella McCartney, Givenchy, MaxMara, and H&M. At 27, practically elderly by the ridiculous standards of the industry, she became the face of Hermès and took pictures with an elephant. She even hammed it up for American Vogue, and all the while her unique look quietly worked its way into fashion's mainstream.

Lara Stone

A Bardot-ish blonde with gappy teeth, and features that can seem alternately androgynous and hyper-sexual, Lara Stone is a true model oddity. Cathy Horyn once compared her walk to Lurch's. We would love to disqualify her from this list for being in that God-awful blackface shoot, but the woman grabbed dozens of campaigns, a cover of British Vogue, two covers of Vogue Paris, and one group cover of American Vogue this year alone. Whether she's doing cannibal-zombie editorials or joking about pushing girls down the stairs, people seem to be fascinated.

Karlie Kloss

Karlie Kloss almost didn't make this list, because a lot of her work is very recent. After debuting as a runway exclusive for Calvin Klein and then Gucci in September of 2007, her breakout season was February of 2008, when the then-15-year-old walked for an astounding 66 designers in three cities. But editorial and campaign work, especially in the U.S., was a little bit slower in coming. No longer: Seems like someone up and became Anna Wintour's favorite. This year, Kloss racked up more international Vogue pages and covers than any other model, and she has been featured in some 23 editorials in American Vogue since first appearing in its pages this February. Add campaigns for Alexander McQueen and a Marc Jacobs perfume to the mix, and we can expect to see lots more of this 6' girl with the unusual eyebrows in the next decade.

Details of Kim's death are still emerging. This morning, Paris Match wrote that sources inside the police investigation say the model left a suicide note. Fellow gossip title Le Parisien stated that "multiple sources" are saying that Kim's father, a Samsung executive, does not believe his daughter killed herself. Kim's mother flew to Paris on Friday, and her father arrived in the city today. An autopsy is to be performed tomorrow — standard police procedure for violent deaths — and the pathologist's findings may be known as soon as the end of this week.

Friends of the young model are also speaking to the press. Several people told the Telegraph that Kim, in the words of reporter Kim Willshire, "had become fed up with modeling and its demands, considering her life was too frenetic and incompatible with forming the sort of long-term relationship she hankered for." Another anonymous friend said Kim would sometimes dodge her agency's calls in order to carve out some time for herself. One of Kim's former agents said, "She was an excellent model, but she used to say she had hard times off the job."

But the richest source of information on Daul Kim remains her blog. The temptation of recent posts that referenced feeling "mad depressed and overworked," a poem that reads in part, "i just know / the more i gain / the more lonely it is," and, most of all, the fact that her last post was titled "say hi to forever," has apparently been too much for major news sources to resist. These mostly quote selectively, ignoring the fact that Kim said she felt depressed and overworked in Seoul and was happy to be leaving for Paris, that Kim titled virtually all of her posts with "say hi to..." and that the post in question was just a YouTube clip of one of her favorite house DJ's tracks, and that in her poem, the lines about feeling lonely were followed directly by lines about falling in love. "but when people grow together," wrote Kim, "its something that is not easy but is nice / and that is something."

It's probably a good thing Kim died in Paris, not in New York, or else we'd have to contend with Geraldo Rivera's opinions of her verse, and television cameras filming the removal of her body, as we were treated to last year, when 20-year-old Kazakh model Ruslana Korshunova jumped to her death in the financial district.

It's understandable that reporters would look to a blog for insight into its author's mind when the author is no longer available for questioning, but it should be done in such a way that the excerpts accurately reflect the whole. Kim often wrote about being busy, yes, and sometimes seemed lonely — but she also wrote about loving Milan Kundera, Klaus Kinski, and Boy George, joked about how she would make a good wife one day, and posted pictures of her paintings. (She had a solo show in Seoul in 2007.) In one of her earliest posts to I Like To Fork Myself, she wrote mock-seriously about ending her life, and then immediately followed up: "KIDDING. I'm fine. Just tired." The overwhelming impression given in her blog wasn't that of a depressive lost soul crying out for help in post after tragically ignored post: it was of a smart young woman with an interesting life, managing bewildering array of responsibilities with a wickedly dark sense of humor. And some issues with insomnia. Not everything in her life should now be re-evaluated in light of her death. To try and turn it all into a series of "signs" diminishes the person that she was.

While it's natural that her next of kin would want to put a stop to quoting out of context, Kim's words have already been featured in articles published from here to Australia. The "I know I'm like a ghost" quote, the "mad depressed and overworked" quote, they're out there. They will be repeated from article to article, from broadsheet to broadsheet to tabloid to tabloid, until all context is erased. Ending access to Kim's blog, while it may tamp down interest in the short term, in essence only serves to deny interested parties a chance to glimpse the wider context of Kim's life. Or at least to see her life as she wished it to be understood. While of course, in the case of a 20-year-old's death, there are no parties more "interested" than her actual family, blogging was evidently important to Kim — she found time to write sometimes several times daily, even as she traveled to three or four countries in a week — and in my opinion, it would be a shame if the record of her life Kim chose to publish were to go permanently dark after her death.

I Like To Fork Myself [Official Site]
Daul Kim: Model 'Had Become Fed Up With Work' [Telegraph]
Daul Kim, La Jolie Fleur S'est Fanée [Paris Match]
Daul Kim S'est-Elle Vraiment Suicidée? [20Minutes.fr]
Enquête Relancée Après Le Suicide Du Mannequin Daul Kim [Le Parisien]
I Know I'm Like A Ghost: A Cry For Help Before Dying [Sydney Morning Herald]

Earlier: 5 Fashion Model Blogs That Are Actually Interesting

The course, being taught next spring by Professor Wendy Belcher, is offered through the Comparative Literature and African-American Studies departments. Its full title is "Model Memoirs: The Life Stories of International Fashion Models." And yes, there will be in-class visits:

Explores the life-writing of American, African, and Asian women in the fashion industry as a launching point for thinking about race, gender, and class. How do ethnicity and femininity intersect? How are authenticity and difference commodified? How do women construct identities through narrative and negotiate their relationships to their bodies, families, and nations? This course will include guest lectures by fashion editors and models; discussions of contemporary television programs, global fashion, and cultural studies; and student self-narratives about their relationships with cultural standards of beauty, whether vexed or not.

How much I would pay to be a fly on the wall the day the class asks Vogue's Candy Pratts Price how she commodifies authenticity and difference.

Far be it from windbag me to suggest that modeling is lacking in meat for young people's intellectual delectation. (Besides, it's my limited experience of these things that the professors behind the fluffiest-sounding courses team the material with theory from from only the most punishing and willfully obtuse of the French deconstructionists. Either that or my Advanced Topics In Popular Culture: "Breakin' II, Electric Boogaloo" course was just totally hard.) But I can't help but notice that Prof. Belcher hasn't yet fleshed out her reading list. It includes a mere three items: Alek Wek's memoir, Alek: From Sudanese Refugee to International Supermodel, Irina Pantaeva's Siberian Dream, and Jillian Shanebrook's Model: Life Behind the Makeup. Clearly this needs some work.

Given my (onetime) profession and my (eternal) predilection for reading, I have kind of a Thing for books written by models. Often, they're unintentionally hilarious — even before Naomi Campbell came out and admitted she had writer Caroline Upcher to thank for her novel Swan, did anyone actually believe she'd written it? Others can be strangely affecting: Susan Moncur's They Still Shoot Models My Age is awesomely written, if kind of insane. (Among other things, it taught me that notorious gaping asshole photographer David Bailey called his models "ratface.") Shoot is now out of print, but there's no reason the Comp Lit whippersnappers couldn't scour Amazon for second-hand copies. I'd put Crystal Renn's recently released memoir, Hungry — written with Marjorie Ingall — on the list, too. If Belcher is interested in models as women who are permitted, by virtue of their physical aspect, to move frictionlessly across cultures and classes, you could do worse than to consider the experience of a 14-year-old girl from small-town Mississippi thrust into the Manhattan fashion industry.

I have not read Cheryl Diamond's Model: A Memoir, but other sources have said it accurately portrays the realities of modeling. For something with pep and honesty and humor, assign Elyse Sewell's LiveJournal. And definitely make 'em read Waris Dirie's Desert Flower. If they can handle the genital mutilation.

If it were up to me, I'd have the students read all of the above, and then watch Sara Ziff and Ole Schell's documentary, Picture Me. And Frederick Wiseman's Model.

And then, we'd all eat cupcakes and never look at fashion magazines or catalogs or billboards or JC Penney's fliers the same way again.

Image via British Vogue

Princeton's Next Top Model (Class) [The Ink]
Course Details For Model Memoirs: The Life Stories of International Fashion Models [Princeton Registrar]

[New York, September 15. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 15: A model prepares backstage during Fashion Week Spring 2010 presented by Mercedes-Benz at Bryant Park on September 15, 2009 in New York City. (Photo by Michael Buckner/Getty Images for Mercedes-Benz)

It might not do to make too much of the fact that the Bryant Park shenanigans take place in large tents, but between the vinyl and the stage lights, there is something of a circus about the proceedings. Fashion week throws up strange combinations of people and places: You're as likely to see André Leon Talley taking a breather outside the Salon as you are to spot a young drunk editor throwing champagne over herself in the early afternoon. For a brief moment on Saturday at Band of Outsiders, Grace Coddington, tiny Jason Schwartzman, and the Cobra Snake were all browsing the same collection. No doubt each would have chosen something very different to wear from it.

As the show schedule rolls on through the tents, crowds too disorderly to be called "lines" form, hemmed in by stanchion posts, first to check in with the designer's public relations team, and then to wait in a new crowd, divided by seating assignment. Perversely, having a ticket — even having a ticket and a confirmed RSVP — is no guarantee of entry: I've been turned away from various shows so far, mostly for reasons said to be related to capacity. (But also for some that are not: On Friday, after waiting in line to check in for half an hour, a flack looked at me square in the eye and said, "I know who you are, and you are not on the list." I haven't felt so thoroughly told off since I was 8 years old and left my bunk area a mess at brownie camp.)

But not having a ticket also isn't a bar to entry: There are so many computer issues and intelligence meltdowns behind the average seating list that plenty of shows will just let you into the standing room section — or at least let you into the standing room waiting pen — if you look and sound convinced of your right to be there. That much at least mirrors the fashion world in the broader sense: Success is a special mix of confidence, entitlement, superficial appearance, and access to specialized knowledge. (Of course, these days most everything anyone who wanted to go to fashion week would need to know is available online. Democracy in action.)

This is my first year attending fashion week as a reporter, not a model, and I guess I'm not sure I understand - after you wait, and wait (and wait) behind one of the many stanchions and the many webbing ropes, after being questioned by the occasional security guard and verified by the PRs - what the point of a fashion show is. The tents are a deeply unreal space, a stage-lit environment where it never seems to be day or night, and everyone mobs the open bar after the 10 a.m. show. It feels deadening somehow, and sameish, to watch 15 or 20 models parading 20 or 30 looks in an identical venue to indistinguishable thundering electronic music before a rotating configuration of the same front-row cast, a Real Housewife here, an actor there. Given the energy and the activity that I know exists backstage, it's odd to see fashion as this white-background poker-faced hurry-up-and-wait thing. I never knew the audience saw it all that way.

On Sunday afternoon, I went to a show by a designer who is young and — though Australian — very talented: Toni Maticevski. I went with my friend Sophie Ward, who still models occasionally, and who was supposed to sit in Maticevski's front row as his friend. But because, like 90% of fashion shows, this one was starting late, and because the radiant energy from behind the scenes seemed to have us locked in like a tractor beam, she and I ended up sneaking backstage.


People were running up and down the stairs, against the grain of the taped arrows. Models where everywhere, getting their hair and makeup done and checking their Blackberries. Stylists were rushing around with voluminous dresses, tugging girls from station to station. There was a large catering tray and a strange man in a green shirt guarding it. Several times someone in a headset grabbed at Sophie's or my elbow, trying to corral us into the lineup. There were backstage photographers snapping rapaciously. Maticevski was surrounded, finessing, rearranging, overseeing. The sense of shared purpose was palpable, and deeply touching. Sophie and I sat down in the midst of it all, and let the scene wash over us. (Also we were trying to find a way to get at that catering tray.)

We hardly noticed when the music began. Two more-or-less-ex-models, distracted by sandwiches and our former lives: the show had started! We had to race around the back stairs, and watch the runway from the nosebleed seats.

Only three days to go and it was still the best show I've been to so far.

Earlier: I Am The Anonymous Model

According to Wikipedia, Joanna was in Playboy, then on a reality show about sports, where she gained notoriety for verbally ripping football player Terrell Owens a new asshole. Now she'll be on the upcoming season of Dancing with the Stars, a show I don't normally watch but whose increasing lack of "stars" makes it more and more enticing.

The image above is by Greg Kadel featuring models R'el Dade and Mélodie Dagault. Featured along with three other provocative photos on Models.com, the image instantly sparked an online reaction - and not just because Dade was initially misidentified as Jourdan Dunn.

Much of the debate focused around two assertions that are assumed to be mutually exclusive: (1) that the images were gorgeous and (2) that the posing and framing of the black model (with bare breasts in all shots), with the slave like position was racist.

Contrary to popular belief, these two ideas can exist at the same time.

For the purposes of this discussion, let's add a bit more context, both in terms of race and gender.

Approaching the image uninformed, one may simply see a striking image involving two beautiful women. And this is true, that is the image.

However, if one looks at some more of Kadel's work, we start to realize that this image, which on its own appears innovating, is actually a the next in a long line of work that focuses on two or more semi-nude girls. This shoot, called "Come As You Are," was done by Kadel last month, for Vogue Australia.

Jenna, our own formerly anonymous model, pointed me toward more of Kadel's work, explaining:

I personally find Kadel to be particularly derivative. His work is often extremely sexual, and full of nudity - which isn't in itself a problem, in fact it's common in fashion spreads - but Kadel always has his models get nude so he can depict them in a male-gaze kind of way. His work lacks that element of subversion, that subtext. And he often does girl-on-girl themed shoots. Not like Steven Klein or some other photographers, who return again and again to shooting several models at once because they're investigating themes of twinning or repetition - Kadel's schtick is much simpler. He'll just shoot two or three models together, under the pretense that they're hanging out, and getting naked. Which is such a cliché of women's sexuality in general.

Just last month he had a long story in Vogue Australia with Catherine McNeil and Abbey Lee, embodying that particular male fantasy. And it was such a rote Kadel editorial that the only reason it even caught my eye was because Vogue Australia Photoshopped out Abbey Lee's nipple piercings.

Other editorials by Kadel seem to follow the same lines of nudity, near nudity, and sexyface. So, adding a little additional context can change how we feel about what we see, and what an editorial represents.

Let's head back into why the images were perceived as racist.

First, it is important to understand that discussions of art are not immune from conversations about racial bias. Art is not created in a vacuum, and as artists are often inspired and motivated by current events and popular societal perceptions (even if they are playing a part in breaking with convention) it is an area ripe for discussion. As Mimi wrote, in response to a commenter who assumed she was ignorant of art history because she brought up the racist and classist implications in a Nylon photo shoot:

[T]he author of the comment called us stupid, too preoccupied with Gucci (as if) to know anything about art (which fashion, the author asserted firmly, was not). Furthermore, she scolded, we should "educate" ourselves so we might better recognize the "brilliance" of the NYLON editorial as an art historical reference to such canonical images like Edouard Manet's Olympia (1863) (Fig. 1) and not a comment on racial thinking or class inequities at all. [...]

[Y]es, the editorial certainly does reference a canonical theme in European art history, and no, this hardly excuses the editorial. If anything, it makes the editorial that much more a poignant example of the long duration of racisms and their entanglements with other vectors of power, including gender, sexuality, empire and labor. That is, what this comparison makes too obvious is that colonial and imperial histories of conquest and aesthetics continue to exert themselves in the present.

Precisely. Art can exert its influence on society, but society also exerts its influence on the artist. Thus, when we are discussing perceptions of fashion photographs, it is important to understand that an artist brings their viewpoint into their work. So if the artist is a misogynist, we receive rehash after rehash of dead or disembodied women. If the artist likes to objectify the female form, that enters into the work as well. And if the artist is influenced by racism - which includes everything from fetishization to omission - that is also reflected in the work.

As Jenna wrote last week, in her post about Caged Black Women, artist Jean-Paul Goude saw black women through a very specific lens, and that is how they manifested in his pictures:

The French artist Jean-Paul Goude shot that last image of Jones; the two were involved in a tempestuous and sometimes violent relationship. The objectification and exoticization of black women isn't incidental to Goude's art: it's the whole point. "Blacks are the premise of my work," the artist told People in 1979, "I have jungle fever."

In case anyone thought that was a joke, Jungle Fever was also the title of Goude's 1982 book. The shot of a caged Jones made the cover.

So it's no surprise that Goude shot Jones surrounded by raw meat, under a sign that reads "DO NOT FEED THE ANIMAL."

Over at Racialicious, I received a submission from a young Asian American model. (This is unpublished, as we are still working on the edits.) This model submitted a rant about trying to work when every other comment from photographers had something to do with the word geisha. She noted there was nothing in the shoot that would even indicate such a look, but her Asian face led people to automatically place her in a racialized context.

In addition the artist's own sensibilities and ideas, societies perception of minorities also strongly figures into how our images are presented. Since black women are often stereotyped as hard, ferocious, ghetto, or primitive, it is rare to see black women being shown in a way that highlights a soft beauty. Instead, we are often presented as color contrast, or other, more animalistic manner. After all, how many variations on this type of photo shoot have we seen black models participate in? Here's a shoot from the new Bazaar:

The blogger at Le Chic Batik shares in the boredom, saying:

I am so bored with the image of black models running free in Africa with animals, or even, black models as animals themselves. I am also bored with this picture of Africa as a densely unpopulous, primitive place with animals as its one valuable offering. I was surprised that this was shot by Jean-Paul Goude because I'm familiar with his super-modern and edgy photographs of Grace Jones, there is certainly no modernity here.

But it's about more than just boredom.

It's about the roles of black women in fashion being limited to animals, sex objects, and advertising, but banned from higher fashion and catwalks. It's about how we understand racism. There is both the blatant...

Bethann Hardison was so angered by the situation that she emailed Iman writing "Did you realize that over the last decade black models have been reduced to a category?" The two called a series of town-hall style meeting titled "Out of Fashion: The Absence of Color" held at the New York Public Library. Countless models told stories about being rejected for jobs, not because their particular "look" or walk was a problem, but solely based on the fact that they were black. Liya Kebede shared that she has had "experience with people who did not want to work with me because I was black..really, truly." In any other industry, that would be a racist remark, and you would be taken to court for it!" After those meetings the wheels started to turn and the issue garnered more attention.

...and the(ahem) subtle.

In the U.S., Cory Bautista, the director of the racially diverse New York Model Management, and judge alongside Tyson Beckford on the Bravo series 'Make Me a Supermodel', is reluctant to attribute the problem to racism.

'In an industry where homophobia is near nonexistent, I can't think there would be any bigotry towards African Americans,' he said. 'I think it has to be designers in their artistic vision seeing clothes on a certain skin type.'

We, as consumers, have a responsibility to looking at these images critically. Yes, to some, it will always be just fashion.

But in a context where we can easily pick out patterns that fashion editorials will fall into when featuring a model of color, and the relative lack of opportunities for nonwhite models to be seen in a variety of contexts and to challenge what contexts they are seen in makes finding lasting work and a varied portfolio difficult, we cannot pretend that these images are not contributing to the larger problem.

(Cover Image pulled from the Make Fetch Happen blog)

Numero's Sizzling September [Models.com]
Come As You Are | Abbey Lee Kershaw & Catherine McNeil For Vogue Australia's 50th Anniversary Issue [Fashion Gone Rouge]
Photography By Greg Kadel [Ben Trovato]
The Thin Line Between Art And Exploitation [Racialicious]
Background Color, Redux II [Threadbared]
Another Photo Shoot Places a Black Woman Among Animals [Sociological Images]
Model/Animal [Le Chic Batik]
Vogue Asks Is Fashion Racist? [Make Fetch Happen]
High Fashion Still a 'White Affair' [IPS]

Earlier:
Why Photograph a Black Woman in a Cage?

Jesus Te Ama. Geddit? Question: given the popularity of the name Jesus in many parts of Latin and South America, wouldn't its joke potential be pretty worn out by now? Apparently somebody expects these double-entendres to still sell tee shirts.

And in case you thought that was a fluke, have another pun! That's a cross necklace right there. I wonder why they just didn't paint on a bleeding sacred heart?


Jesus is an even less convincing shadow boxer than Amber Rose.


There's something creepy and objectifying about the topless blonde model whose face is nearly obscured by her hair in the one shot, and only used for parts in the other. Also, those pants are the least flattering garment to wrap around the lower half of a natural born female since the summer everyone was wearing those awful stretchy jersey culottes.


Pun! And in case you forgot why that mug is supposed to be funny, Jesus tattooed his name there just for you. I wonder which people regret more: tattooing their own names on themselves, or tattooing someone else's?


All images via Made in Brazil

This Is Just What Happens When Steven Klein Or Tom Munro Are Not In Charge [Made In Brazil]

To prime the pump:

St. Francis Of A Sissy wrote, "I have a question about your book. Who decides which shots are in there and which are not? You? Your representation?"

My bookers at the various agencies I worked with made those calls. I could sometimes lobby for a particular picture, but the agency, as the entity that was marketing me, had ultimate control over all aspects of my image, including what went in my book. Most agencies have an art department, responsible for keeping the website up-to-date with recent shots, and collating the various models' magazine appearances, test shoots, campaign shots, into their respective books. Whenever I had something new come out, my booker, plus someone from the art department, would have a confab and take out all the pictures from my book, decide which photos should stay, which should go, which needed to be re-ordered. When they were doing the re-ordering, they'd take into consideration everything from the pose or "look" of a given shot, to what aspect of my appearance it was highlighting — "That's a hair photo," they'd say, "we can't have two hair photos next to each other, it's redundant" — to things like a shot's cool/warm coloration. Of course, sometimes in this endeavor, some of the pictures I liked the best would get bumped, but that never particularly bothered me. They were just pictures.

Other questions? Post them below.

UPDATE: I'm having some technical issues with commenting, specifically, with comments I'm writing being eaten, presumably by little comment-hungry gremlins. I expect to be back ASAP. Apologies! And thank you for all the thoughtful questions.

UPDATE: Back now with a vengeance, ladies and germs.

These photos, the polaroids that got me on a plane to Paris, were only one beginning of many. There was also the beginning of department store and catalog work, circa age 8; the beginning when I graduated, in my teens, to appearing in campaigns and commercials for Asian brands who wanted to shoot in my country. Then I went to college, and met two agents while I was working on a story for the student newspaper, and the pictures they took were another beginning. But these snapshots will do for the story I am telling you now, because once they had been taken, a certain chain of events was set in motion that, to this day, seems ineluctable. Almost as soon as I had hit "Send" on the e-mail, I had a reply asking if my passport was up to date. The following morning, I left.

For the record, when the end came, it was pretty damn clear.


But since we're still talking about firsts here, this is the only picture I still have from my very first Paris test shoot. I was nervous, and I ruined half the shots because I did not then know how to avoid looking startled; I was all wide-open eyes and a faintly frowning mouth. A month or so later, I had a lookbook casting with the same photographer, and my book was still full of the startled pictures. "We shot some nice stuff together, didn't we," he lied, as he flipped through the pages, right past this one. He did not book me.


Another, more successful, Paris test shoot. This picture stayed in my book in every market in which I ever worked for the duration of my career; I remember taking it in the photographer's apartment, very rapidly, in true rough and ready test fashion, with no hair or makeup. The whole time, the photographer was chatting with a woman from my agency about whether the Czech model Denisa Dvorakova was going to be the next Daria Werbowy. "Je la trouve meme mieux que Daria, dans une certaine manière," said the woman from my agency, referring to Denisa. The photographer was unconvinced.

Photo: Elina Kechicheva


A New York test shoot. The photographer was buzzing because he had just received word that he would be doing a test with Karlie Kloss, the teenaged St. Louis supermodel. The next day I read in the paper that Karlie was switching to Next, the same agency I was with, and it all made sense.

The woman who worked at Elite Paris and was such a fan of Denisa pointed to this picture as an example of how my hips were fat. I liked it anyway.


This was a commercial shoot, and without it, my Paris agency debt would have climbed into the stratosphere. (As it is, it still kind of hit the roof.)

My nose doesn't actually look like that.

Photo: Stefania Paparelli

This rendering is not all that much more accurate. My nose was generally the first thing to get fixed in post-production.

For this shoot, I remember hurrying to meet the team on time at their hotel in the 1st Arrondissement, a tremendously grand building, and then waiting half an hour for anyone besides the fashion editor to turn up. Once we were all assembled, we ate lunch. I was afraid to order anything because I didn't know if I'd be asked to pay, and I couldn't afford it. That's how new I was.

Photo: Stefania Paparelli

This picture had some endurance in my book, too. It was from a lookbook shoot for the Los Angeles label Guy Baxter; unfortunately, I had just been dumped and the whole job went by in a fog of dread because I had to go back to San Francisco to deal with the tedious and depressing business of dividing up a household's worth of goods. The photographer was brilliant; when I went on a go-see at a stupid but hip magazine, and the casting director showed more interest in him than she did me, I totally talked him up. (But not too much, lest she think him somehow tainted for earning the approval of someone her magazine would under no circumstances feature.)

Photo: Daniel Bernauer

A shoot in Malibu for Greek Cosmopolitan. I remember the fashion editor's name was Iphigenia; since then, whenever I've had to sign my name somewhere I didn't want to — like at the compulsory visitor registry of the Scientologist-run museum of the horrors of psychology in Hollywood — I've called myself Iphigenia something-or-other.

You can see a heavy-duty stylist's clamp holding the dress on at my back.

Photo: Vassilis Karydis

This editorial, for a Spanish magazine I forget the name of, was a trio of firsts. My first trip to Miami. My first Brazilian wax. My first Cuban food. I read Didion's Miami and spent as long as I could in the hotel sauna, because it was actually pretty freezing outside. I loved that the photographer lit those palms with a pink gel.

Photo: Toni Torres

This picture was from an editorial about the runway hair and makeup of some of the designers showing at New Zealand Fashion Week. I happened to be picked for Zambesi; I've always liked Zambesi's clothes, so I dug that. Also I dug that they didn't fix my nose.

Photo: Russ Flatt

This Lord & Taylor catalog never made it anywhere near my book, since it was a commercial job. But it was fun to shoot, and it subsidized months of doing editorials for free. This gig also marked the one and only time I have ever had to wear glue-in hair extensions for a shoot, a scalp indignity to which most models are regularly subjected. When I was working, I was lucky in that my hair is naturally thick enough and had grown long enough that even outlandish styles could be achieved with only the material at hand. But that day, the client wanted to make my hair more red, so extensions it was. It took me nearly a week to get all the glue out. Whether my hair looks redder than normal here is a matter for debate.

This hair editorial for Lucky brought me to Mexico for four days this Spring. We were shooting split shifts, 5-10 a.m. and 3-7 p.m. for the light, and so during the day I, the other models, and the rest of the team either idled on the beach or walked around downtown Tulúm. The fashion editor found the most beautiful pair of handmade sandals and we were all jealous. (I think if you sent a Lucky team to Antarctica, they'd still find a store with really cute cardigans. That's just what they do.)

Photo: Michael Waring

This editorial, for an Australian magazine, got me more work than anything else I ever did. For some reason, this and shot and the two after it were like catnip for casting directors. People who'd seen me a dozen times already and passed me over for every job would suddenly hit this picture and look up at me in shock. Then they would call my booker and option me.

Photo: Liz Hamm

Sometimes, the options even came through. I should have written the photographer a thank-you note, or something.

Photo: Liz Hamm

This was another picture in which my hips were pointed out as a problem. It had been my favorite from that shoot.

Photo: Liz Hamm

This was the first thing I shot after getting off a plane for Sydney, and I was jet-lagged as all hell and dispirited about working, again, for free, but the team was inspiring, so I jumped around a fake stage for twelve hours until the fake smoke made me teary. The photographer bought me a flat white and a pastry to wake me up, and she nicknamed me "Lady Jenna."

Photo: Kylie Coutts

None of the images from this story ever made it into my book. I'm not sure why; this one was on the cover of some fashion magazine.

Photo: Kylie Coutts

You can't really see it, but I think I was wearing a necklace made of matchbox cars in this one. And that skirt was basically an embroidered parachute. The appeal of wearing in editorials only things you could put on to go buy milk at the bodega soon fades. I always loved above all fashion's capacity for transformation. Becoming an extraordinary version of myself for a day was often a lot of fun. If I could have made any kind of living doing it, I might have kept at it a little longer. But I had a good run, or at least I had the run my genes and my willingness to pound the pavement and not eat too much entitled me to. And now it's over.

Photo: Kylie Coutts

This picture from Italian Glamour always graced the last page of my book, even though it dates from that ancient Paris trip — peep those bangs — so I figured I'd end with it here. The photographer wore a variety of funny hats from off the accessories table to get me to grin; as you can see, his methods were effective.

Photo: Fabio Chizzola

See Some Shots From My Portfolio Here

The industry demanded a geographic flexibility that was initially very exciting. I had eleven addresses last year, and that's just for starters. I lived, notionally, for a time with a boy in San Francisco. There was the couch in the freezing Bushwick railroad, and the extended Stuyvesant Town housesit. A dissolute month on my then-editor's couch.

It became apparent to me early on that a lot about the fashion world does not, on its own terms, add up. Fashion has industrialized , and deeply fetishized, its production of newness, but every photographer I ever worked with would inevitably give, un-prompted, at some point during the shoot, his What-We-Lost-With-The-Death-Of-Film eulogy. Early adopters these people are not: the industry still follows an archaic schedule whereby clothes are presented six months ahead of season in shows that are "private," but for the whole of the Internet, which means that in many cases knock-offs beat the originals into stores. Nobody can say for certain whether or not this matters, given so many of the designers who protest the knock-offs the loudest revisit each others' and their own old ideas in an orderly season-to-season progression, like runners in an infinitely recursive relay race, with shoulderpads.

The money doesn't make sense: designers sell next season's clothes at those shows, then fill their orders using proceeds from the collection of two seasons ago that retailers are, finally, coughing up for. This structural financial constraint makes nimble reaction to any external world event almost impossible, which explains fashion's famed disconnect from things that might be called "external" "world" "events." I learned early that the higher a job's fashion quotient, the less money I would be offered. How, exactly, I was supposed to make a living as a model never became entirely clear; when I worked two months in Australia last year, after agency fees and the rent were deducted, nearly AU$5,000 worth of earnings became AU$690.90. Less than the cost of my airfare, certainly less than the cost of the food and subway passes I'd had to charge during the trip. I left Sydney in November. I didn't get my $690.90 — $413.70, after wire transfer fees and currency conversion — until this April. "At least," said the agency accountant, "you worked!"

I had to get used to living however, and wherever, I could. Like in a tiny Washington Heights studio. Milan was a single room in a long-stay hotel with a hot plate, a bar fridge, and two other models. I still don't know how much I paid for that; I was too afraid to ask my booker at Elite Milan.

Because the industry keeps even its marginal players endlessly occupied, but bored, there was always plenty of time to think. I often reflected on the fact that studies show that women, after looking at fashion magazines — full of pictures of girls very much like me, sometimes even pictures of me — feel bad about themselves. I also often wondered why it is, given this fact, that we buy the magazines again next month.

This is not to say that I didn't enjoy modeling. In point of fact, what kept me in the industry for so long was the constant contact with lovely women, smart women, talented women, hard-working women, inspiring women, women of the sort I wanted to grow up to be. (I met some nice men, too, but, in this industry, there are just fewer of them — fashion is a powerful global business that has the quirk of being thoroughly gendered.) In fact, fashion is the world's largest employer of women; it's an industry of women, by women, for women. I felt like I was always meeting the best of them: Foodie art directors who advised me on which East Village deli secretly sells the best $3 goat tacos East of the Mississippi. Prop stylists who went to RISD, emerged only with an ingrained loathing of the art world old boys' club, and decided to fuck it and paint hay bales odd colors and source antique books for editorial spreads. I remember walking 20 minutes from a train station to get to a photographer's apartment, and then talking for an hour about Tess Of The D'Urbervilles and Cindy Sherman, over tea, while she intermittently remembered to take my picture. (She drove me home, and we worked 12 hours together that weekend.) It took me a very long time to reconcile the apparent disconnect between the consistent wonderfulness of the many people I was working with, and the persistent awfulness of the position of abject and total disempowerment that I, like any non-super model, occupied — to realize that the problems of the modeling industry are not in fact personal, but structural.

And then there were the models. I knew, when I walked into my new agency, Elite Paris, in September of 2007, that I had found my tribe. They were the sweetest, dirtiest talking, weirdest, comic-book-loving, Internet nerding, most breathtakingly cynical, tallest, hard-drinkingest, Proust-readingest, silliest, one-day-I'm-going-to-fuck-all-this-and-be-a-lawyerest, funniest, toughest crowd I'd ever run with. They were all 16 and 20 and 23, and most were amenable to staying up late and talking about Lech Walesa and the problems of teaching post-WWII history in a country where 15 years ago neighbors turned each other in to the secret police for having an extra chicken. Or they would trash talk creepy clients while drinking white wine out of 7UP bottles in the street because none of us had the money for a bar tab and the apartment was too hot. That was good, too.

A bubbly Sydney stylist let me a bedroom for $280 a week and talked about enhancing her vital energy through Ayurvedic foods. A party photographer used to give me the keys to his house when he was in Mexico City or Shanghai making a living taking pictures of hipsters who wore the same cut of jeans as back in Silver Lake, but I think I knew, even then, he would not prove a lasting friend.

A dear friend of mine, a lapsed English major from Los Angeles who looks like Madonna, once pointed out that one of the dangers of modeling as a line of work is that you're forever passing through. In this job, you can go to a new city and be a new person, maybe — or at least nobody will be there to know the difference. Which means that you have to be the keeper of your own institutional memory, that hard-won self-knowledge such as you were able to eke at 14 or 16 or 18, or whenever you threw your lot in with a booker who liked what you'd always hated about your nose.

When we were talking about mutual acquaintances, my Madonna lookalike friend told me a story about a fellow model, a teenaged scenester I'd been hanging out with in Los Angeles and New York earlier that year. The girl rolled with a musician boyfriend who was fucking my friend when she was 16, and she had a momager who lived off her earnings, which included at that time $25,000 for a major global campaign. And, said my friend, the teenager had actually just entered rehab in Arizona because the whole time I had known her, she was shooting heroin. The story — with the stage mother, the influence of one of the many dudes who fuck 16-year-olds, the money jobs, the intravenous drug use — all seemed at the time like a giant neon sign flashing Get Out Of This Industry Now. I still can't believe I didn't even realize she was strung out. Perhaps that contains a depressing message about the kinds of connections this business fosters between people. Or about how I coarsened as a person during my time wandering this earth selling the rights to my image for a living. Or both. I don't know.

I never hated my job — I kind of loved it, actually, the diet and the pay and the persistent feeling that what I was doing was actually, you know, stupid, withal — but I began to grow scared that the longer I stayed in the industry, the more I enjoyed the deferment of real-life obligations it entailed. I went over a year without spending six weeks in one place. And it made me the kind of person who couldn't recognize when a teenager was injecting Class A narcotics. Possibly because, at the time, I was doing a shade too many substances myself.

Paris was a Pepto-Bismol womb of a room in an apartment where Diane Kruger stayed when she had my job. (The color gave me pregnancy nightmares.) I spent three nights in a models' apartment near Wilshire and La Brea with no electricity; my three roommates and I removed our eye makeup by candlelight.

Yes, there were parties, often very strange ones. (The fashion industry relies on an astounding number and variety of externalities to make the investments it demands appear, to its principals, worth it.) I decided to stop seeing a dude when he pleaded, in the doorway of a Carroll Gardens townhouse, "Don't leave, baby, I just scored cocaine." And a curly-haired Scientologist teen sitcom actor who carried a wad of hundreds secured with a rubber band lectured me in a night club about the additive contents of Red Bull. I remember once hanging out in Los Angeles with a born-again Ultimate Fighting champion and his Playmate girlfriend — "She shot her issue before she met me, you know," explained the champion — at the home of a Texan introduced to me as Anna Wintour's de facto stepson. The Texan worked — naturally — in the West Coast office of Men's Vogue, and he kept a loaded handgun in his kitchen drawer, next to the aluminum foil. I started talking to the Texan's fraternity brother, who moved to Los Angeles from New York at 25 because, he said, he felt one couldn't move to Los Angeles at 28 or 29. If it didn't work out and you had to go back East, it would be too late.

"Do you miss New York?" I asked the fraternity brother.

The man looked at me for a second. In the kitchen, the Texan removed the magazine from his pistol and handed it to another guest.

"New York is the best place in the world to be," he said.

At the time, I interpreted this as a straightforward endorsement of the city. New York is simply where you live if you have any choice in the matter! But I'm no longer so sure of the judgment.

Then I slept on a couch in a crumbling Spanish Colonial-Revival mansion off Franklin where they did not give me a key because the French doors did not lock.

New York was the place I kept returning to, at first excitedly, then grudgingly, then with relief, because at least I speak the language and the subway runs all night. (And I did try that goat taco place, and it is good.) Although I traveled widely as a child — I had lived in four countries before I turned 18, and visited numerous cities in Western Europe and Asia, sometimes for work and sometimes for fun — I didn't see New York until I was 22. And for that I will be forever grateful: this odd conglomeration of mostly working infrastructure and unimpeachable cultural security, this city where you never have to wonder if the movie will open or the band will play or the author will read, is a place I shall never take for granted.

When you model, your job mostly entails going to 5-10 different addresses every day, an astonishingly direct introduction to a city and its workings. In Milan this was achieved on that city's subway, which shows such unswerving aesthetic devotion to its primary color scheme that using it feels like actually being inside Massimo Vignelli's iconic map. In Paris, stunned by the cost of a carte orange, I often walked between castings. (I had a budget of €80 per week, funds my agency, when it doled out its weekly loan, insisted on calling my "pocket money.") In Los Angeles, I bummed rides from models with cars, borrowed a bicycle from the party photographer, and learned that the city does in fact have a subway system, and that you can take it to Pasadena and go to the Huntington Gardens on your day off. Everywhere, I walked and walked and walked. And charged groceries.

I'd love to say that traveling broadened my horizons, that all these places took on unique contours in my mind. That the Australian-accented Hasidic Jews I passed on the street in Bondi were somehow different than the ones I'd see rolling up the security gates on their bakeries as I stumbled home in Williamsburg at a quarter to five in the morning. Instead, after a time, everything reminded me of something else. And I hated this anhedonic change in my own perspective more than I hated any other change in me that the industry wrought. New York remained exceptional for a lot longer than anywhere else, but, eventually, I tried coke in the kitchen of the Beatrice Inn and then at a party I stayed long enough to hear a white magazine editor refer to a black magazine editor, not present, as "that fucking nigger," and slowly, the city lost its particular glamor.

There were hotels times infinity. I slept two weeks on the couch of my childhood best friend while it rained in spring in Auckland. My renewed New Zealand passport was posted to a Mt. Eden craftsman cottage. Sydney, pub manager, harbour view.

My bookings were actually steadier after the onset of this recession than before, but my interest in my modeling "career" was lessening markedly. My wonderful booker at Next in New York fell in love and moved to Paris at the beginning of this summer. I soon lost heart at the process of, at 23, finding a new agency; dashing all over to be interviewed, offering up my book as if it I still believed it comprised all of my achievements, felt almost shamefully stupid. I called my mother agent, a hardworking Christian from the Midwest who was fond of e-mailing abstract but heartfelt encouragements ("God is a rewarder!"), and told him to tell the new agencies no. (Only one even tried to change my mind.)

My last job — "Oh, if only we could be shooting film," exclaimed the photographer, as he put in his memory card — was for a bridal magazine, and I wore, among other things, a dress that cost $29,000 and was largely constructed of ostrich feathers. Before the job, the photographer had found an old personal blog I used to write, under the name I'll now be writing with for Jezebel. He wanted to know why I'd given up on that blog; I was good and kind of funny, he said. I told him I'd gotten bored, which was more or less true.

At the very end of the shoot, as the assistants were striking the set, undoing everything they'd jerry-rigged so convincingly the day before, as the stylists were packing up the couture gowns and the art director was looking at potential layouts with her boss, and as I was putting on my jacket and heading for the door, the photographer called out to me, "Jenna! Please just keep writing."

My name is Jenna Sauers.

I smiled, and told him that I would.


It was a lot of fun being your secret not-so-super model. But I'm ready to take off the disguise, so I thought I'd share some pictures Nikola Tamindzic took of me.


The first thing that I did when I quit was something which I was not otherwise permitted to do: cut my hair. I imagined this summer as an endless stretch of sunny, boyish-mopped, non-sticky-necked, carefree recreation. I imagined, in short, swimming. Then it rained for a month, but such is life.


One advantage of no longer modeling? I can throw out about half of my beauty products, most of which, as all women know, never worked anyway.


Not being on a permanent diet also has a lot to recommend it.

Often when I was modeling, I felt like I couldn't really express myself; after all, the point of a fashion model isn't that she necessarily have anything to say. That changes now.


Like I said before: A lot to recommend it.
Update:
A Short Trip Through My Portfolio, With Sequins
Earlier:
Modeling And The Tragedy Of Karen Mulder
"Investing" In Your Closet Not Recommended By Actual Investment Experts
Fashion Week: The Party's Not Over Yet
Suicide And Abuse In Fashion's Top Echelon
Elle Writer's Ex: "It's A Strange Luxury To See Someone Else's Version of Your Life"
Welcome To America, Models! Tatiana Can't Wait For The Extra Competition. It Was Almost Getting Too Easy
Whenever I Feel Like Starving Myself, I Just Look At "1 Cup Of Oatmeal With Brown Sugar.doc"
And, where it all began: "You Know, Models Are In, Like, The Five Percent Of People Who Look Like Models"

This dimness, I suspect, is strategic. I've seen this before; actresses sometimes evade answering questions by obfuscating them in colorful fogs of positive nonsense. It is understandable: actual information limits the ability to be all things to all people, so vagaries protect the brand.

The question, of course, is why Agyness Deyn — born Laura Hollins — is so appealing. Why is she so popular? Vogue has called her "the world's next supermodel," and she's landed campaigns for Armani, Mulberry, Reebok, Hugo Boss and Burberry. (In 2008, Glamour magazine named her among seven people "Who Will Change Your Style.") Why do people feel that a punky, lanky, androgynous, platinum blonde new wave model says "2009"?

Wilson posits that it has to do with zeitgeist, and war:

Models with an androgynous look often arise at times when culture is loosening its corset after a socially conservative era. During times of war, cultural trends tend to resurrect traditional gender roles, and obviously "sexy" females emerge in fashion and media imagery - e.g., breast enhancements and hair extensions.

When war fever cools, hot new looks become less sex cue-dependant, and "unconventional" models - Twiggy, Erin O'Connor, Kristen McMenamy, Ève Salvail (Jean Paul Gaultier's skinhead muse) - are free to rise. Ms. Deyn's look captures a collective desire to return to the "Girls Just Want to Have Fun," pogo-punk unisex spirit of the irreverent and permissive early 1980s, when girls could wear combat boots and boys could wear eyeliner, and everyone could wear magenta.

Honestly? I don't know if I'm buying any of this, though clearly the 80s have made a strong comeback in fashion, and Agyness has a retro look. But I think the fact that she has a "look" is actually part of what makes her noteworthy. Unlike some other models, who are ever-changing chameleons, when you see Agyness — and that shock of platinum hair — you always know it's her. The modeling world has been rife with a safe, bland sameness (Vogue can't even match their faces to their names), and against that backdrop, Agyness stands out. She's different. So never mind her legions of Japanese fans, her singing and DJing — isn't part of her appeal just that she is recognizable?

Of the Moment, and Thinking Ahead [NY Times]
Earlier: Agyness Deyn & Boyfrynd Frolyc In Vogue
Gender Bender: Agyness Deyn Mans Up For French Vogue

It's also funny to see Haines pulling the same squinty, open-mouthed angry face that is such a large part of his daughter's repertoire of poses. I guess it's not really a surprise that such mannerisms might be as transmissible within families as a sense of rhythm or a sense of humor, but it's still wonderful to see these two geeking out together.

The Coco Pop And I [OhSoCoco]