Frederick Wiseman's 1980 documentary, Model, is one such film.

Wiseman — who tends to study American institutions like the criminal justice system, or education, or public housing, and whose films were recently made available, and affordable, on DVD for home viewing — turned his attention to the modeling industry as it was on the cusp of great change. The agency he follows, Zoli, doesn't even exist anymore; today's powerhouses, like IMG, hadn't been founded. Oscar de la Renta, whose show is featured in the final scenes of the film, wasn't exactly an up-and-coming name at that point, but the backstage preparations, and the proceedings on the runway itself, not to mention the other editorial and presentation jobs featured in the film, seem marked by a kind of enthusiastic near-amateurism that the industry has by now almost completely shed. At Oscar, there are dressers and models dancing as they put on the garments, and the girls do their own makeup — unheard of today. One of them is a young Jerry Hall.

There's also plenty of things that don't change. The nervous girls lining up at agencies with test photos, grasping for the brass ring of representation, for instance. One Zoli booker says that, of the people he sees at open calls, maybe 5% will be offered the chance to work as models, and that in six months' time, as good as half of them will have dropped out for lack of client interest. Wiseman's camera follows young women at open calls, working models at castings and on the sets of editorials, runway shows, and catalogues, and, like all of his other documentaries, never does he intercede with any voice-over narration or staged interviews with the key players — it's as if the whole thing unfolds before your eyes as it happened in real life. Of course, that's an artistic choice, since the whole film is obviously the highly edited creation of an author, but the natural-seeming meandering narrative form has the added element of mimicking the way your career, and your life, goes when you're a working model — never sure of its direction, prone to sudden changes of scene and strange new situations that become clearer only as they are directly experienced.

In this clip, a model a director keeps calling "Apples" (although her name is, I think, Apollonia) poses for a clip at the end of a pantyhose ad. The finished segment is all of three seconds long and is supposed to show a leg kicking up through the still frame, against a white studio background, only it's as though the leg stops in mid-kick at eight different positions, fanning out like a peacock's tail, and of course clad in eight kinds of tights. This simple idea that would now be done with some simple computer post-production tools entails a full day in the studio and unknown hours of video splicing afterwards; the model, who seems to be Eastern European, works like a trooper as the client rep and the director argue over how fishnet will read on camera, and how the lighting should look. The sound guy, the assistant director, the dressers are all on set — there are easily a half-dozen people working long hours to get this tiny blip of an ad-part just right. This scene is one of the best representations I've ever seen of the curious distillation that is the essence of this line of work, the weird collapse of countless hours and untold labor into a few photos in some magazine, or a quick, jaunty, television spot. At the end of this clip, the director finds some reason to start giving a little speech about "the proscenium of the the 30-second commercial" and the split-second discipline it demands of its performers and directors; he's kind of right, but also kind of being an ass, and you can tell the girl is just thinking, Let me change now, so we can get this take over with.

Some things truly never change.

Related: Frederick Wiseman Homepage [Zipporah Films]
Model [Zipporah Films]

Maureen Orth's excellent Vanity Fair piece from September, 1996, just went online as part of that magazine's ongoing desultory digitization of its archives. It's a fascinating, sad story of an abused woman's life and eventual suicide, and of the ways in which the fashion industry does and does not change.

Wallis Franken was a Westchester County girl whose once-wealthy family of retailers was, by the time she reached high school, barely holding onto their home. Modeling, which she began doing when Eileen Ford signed her at 16, seemed like an easy way to financial security, travel, and independence. And, for a while, it more or less was: after her father died when she was 19, and her mother finally did lose the house, Wallis supported her and kept her in a spacious apartment. Although her look had worked well enough in New York, in Paris, her Louise Brooks bob and angular, androgynous body ignited something in the clients' imagination. This was the 70s, the era of cocaine and disco and sexual exploration, and Wallis seemed to embody the zeitgeist. She became a vegetarian, she married a Scientologist racecar driver, she partied with Anjelica Huston, she was snapped in her street clothes for Women's Wear Daily.

But most of all, she accustomed herself to the unfortunate kind of lassitude that often goes with having a job whose main requirement is to have a pulse and be agreeable. Franken learned to let her agencies, or her husband, handle her affairs, to be engaging, solicitous, and on time, and to never worry about the future because the present is its own bewildering curlicue of moments. As her friend and fellow top model Tracey Weed puts it to Orth,

Our bond was that we were survivors together, pampered and catered to but worked like horses...Wallis was a master of fitting in. We didn’t learn any of the things that people who grew up more normally learned, like who you are, what you want, what is good for you and what is bad. Everybody smooches up to you so you’ll perform that day.… We did not learn how to shoulder responsibility for our behavior and our choices...The message is that glamour is not what people make it out to be. It’s a sick world where awful things go on. Think of a young girl not yet 20 showing up and being talked about as if she could not hear — spoken of as an object, criticized physically. This sort of orientation robs you of yourself."

In modeling, you may sometimes have too much unstructured time, but always very little actual time to yourself — because at any moment a call might come and you might have to be across town or on your way to the airport in 20 minutes. There's no point thinking about the future, because your career unfolds bite by bite, casting by casting, job by job, and time telescopes down to a few more or less solidly scheduled days, and the week of dimly limned job options beyond. Anything at all could happen, or it could not, and what's next year when you don't even know about next week? Such is the curious logic of fashion's perpetual liminal stage, its cocoon, and for a model of Franken's status — her showlist in 1978 was longer than anyone's, she was a veritable Karlie Kloss of her age — it could be a comfortable enough cocoon indeed. And exhilerating: as the French nightclub owner and DJ Guy Cuevas reminisces, “Ah, those says were the oldies-but-goodies times. One night a new club was opening in the north of France — we all went on a private railcar, and Wallis wore this feather, and we were screaming, laughing.… Then came the punk, then came the sad.” And, interjects Orth, there was cocaine: "Yes," agrees Cuevas. "It made for too lax a culture."

There were even worse times. The racecar driver, for instance, had the bright idea of packing off to Morocco when Franken was seven months pregnant with their third child:

She and Philippe and the two little girls drove a specially converted Land Rover into the desert of Morocco and ended up living for three months in a primitive Berber village. The adventure provided Philippe with an opportunity to shoot stunning pictures and write articles about the daring young couple living off the land. Wallis went right along, and, for the centerpiece of one glowing article, described what she later told friends was the horrendous birth of their third daughter, Fatima, as Philippe snapped pictures. 'One of the women clasped me round the bosom, another kicked me into a squatting position, and it all happened very fast, very easily. Then someone pushed a long braid of her hair down my throat. The idea was to produce dry contractions, like retching, to force out the placenta, and it worked. Next they stepped all over me — massage, you see, and very effective, I’m sure, except that a few days before, I’d fallen out of the car and injured my ankle. That was the first thing they trod on. Agony.'

Fatima died of sudden infant death syndrome back in Paris, aged 3 months.

When she met Claude Montana, her habit of intense, destructive, dependency on unsuitable men was long set. Montana was a flamboyantly gay designer whose star was in the ascendant, largely because he took elements of the late-70s gay subculture, like leather and studs and exaggerated, broad-shouldered silhouettes, and applied them with impeccable tailoring to a woman's body in a way that was then unheard of. His creativity and charisma attracted Franken, and her iconic status — plus the fact that with her short hair and boyish figure she embodied the exact sort of gender plasticity his work explored — drew his eye. They had a close, tempestuous friendship that friends say was marked by periods of physical abuse; over the 18 years they knew each other as friends, Franken retired from modeling and found herself occasionally destitute, while Montana's stature continued to rise through the 1980s. In 1992, however, after two critically well-received but commercially disastrous years at Lanvin, Montana was fired.

It's perhaps not a stretch to say that the two friends finally married in 1993 in the middle of Paris couture week at least partly because that was when all the fashion press was there to see it. It might have paid off, too, when Franken's old friend Stephen Meisel wanted to book her for a 1994 Donna Karan campaign, but Montana refused to let her fly back to New York for the shoot. His control of her was extraordinary, during their long relationship and, especially, after they were married. Once he beat her so badly she was hospitalized. Her friends knew: "I feel that no matter what Claude did, whether his hands were on her or not, the lifestyle he gave her, the way he abused her mentally, emotionally, physically, pushed her over the edge,” says Weed. Her family knew, too: “I have no doubt that he was a contributing factor to my sister’s demise, perhaps a major contributing factor,” says Randy Franken.

'We all have the same idea,' echoes painter Vincent Scali, Wallis’s witness at her marriage to Montana. 'Everybody knew that his part in her death was enormous.' How did Montana contribute? 'By treating her like shit, saying, "You’re no one, you’re nobody, you’re a weight on my life." … He knew Wallis was weak.… We did everything in our power to keep her away from him, and she went back. She was a masochist.'

They all knew, and nobody directly intervened.

Although the police were made aware of the history of abuse, Franken’s death was ruled a suicide, a finding that satisfied her surviving family, because, among other details, the window sill she jumped from was nearly six feet from the floor — it would be hard to imagine the short Montana pushing a tall woman out of it without leaving any sign of a struggle.

There was no music of hymns at her funeral in Paris, and the priest delivered a stern lecture on the evils of drug abuse and the perils of the fashion industry he derided as shallow. Montana did not speak to any other mourners, not even to Franken’s daughters and grandchildren. He has never spoken to the press about his wife's death, even to this day.

Depersonalization and isolation can be the result of a life spent working with an ever-changing cast of characters, in strange corners of the globe. (I think I had about 10 or 11 addresses, as in where I received mail, last year. Counting places I just dropped my suitcases into for a day or two to do a job it might rise to 15, 20. And I’m a relatively underworked model.) I feel like I know what Tracey Weed is talking about when she says modeling does not generally teach what is good for you, what any human being needs to learn: I feel like I’m always meeting girls who maybe should be in school, but who are therefore smart enough to realize they exist in an economic system more willing to monetize their looks than their brains. Modeling is what you know. It’s not easy, but it’s easy enough. It’s easier. It’s familiar, and there are promoters and parties and nice clothes, there are good drugs, and exotic travels. The industry, with its everextending futureless present, can have a certain way of corroding initiative and drive. Everyone has their hobbies, and some (drawing comics, writing on the Internet) are maybe healthier than others (cocaine, musicians) but the longer you stay in the funhouse-mirror world, the less even those things seem like the real you. Sometimes it’s as if every moderately successful girl I meet, to the extent that she thinks of a future at all, thinks in vague terms of becoming a stylist, or working at a store, or marrying someone wealthy. Or putting out an album. Or designing clothing line. Sometimes I catch myself thinking of writing a book in those same, bone idle terms. I think we all know, deep down, that just like Cuevas said, first comes the fun, and then the sad. Nobody leaves this easy industry too easily.

So Wallis Franken, who was beautiful and damaged, killed herself in May of 1996, and you should read about her, because her story is interesting and important. It’s about the agony of aging in an industry that only tolerates youth — now truer than ever — it’s about family and friends who stood by as she deliberately sought out the destructive attentions of a series of men. It’s about isolation and poverty and drugs. But the main thing is, you should read it so you can know Wallis Franken’s name. Because I didn’t, until Maureen Orth’s 13-year-old story popped up in an RSS feed, although I did recognize her pictures. And it’s crucial, I think, in situations like this and in life in general, to at least try to look beyond the image to the woman herself.

Death By Design [Vanity Fair]

Earlier:
Ruslana Korshunova, No Longer Anonymous

It’s show season, and I’m in this uncharacteristically elevated mood because I never find show season to be a grind so much as a whirl. Show season is the fashion Super Bowl, and I’m not ashamed to say I live for the game. It's when you discover new reserves of endurance and the depth of your own capacity for fun. You will work two shows and do “looks” — basically, fit modeling for a designer culling his clothes into a collection — for five hours and then you will meet your Australian friend for dinner at 11 p.m., and you will go to at least two fashion after parties (which will be lame), and you will find yourself in a romantic clinch with a Dutch minor-league soccer player at the Beatrice at 2 a.m. before retiring, with the Australian friend, to some tiny bar willing to serve you margaritas until you are both so blotto that when it’s time to find a cab you can’t even tell if you’ve ended up in the East Village or the West, all the streets are looking mighty crooked and none of them seem to go where you think they ought. And you will make it into the makeup artist’s chair at exactly 8:30 a.m. the next day; how any of this happens, exactly, is a mystery, but a glorious one. And life continues in this mode of serendipity-driven Stakhanovite excess for as many show weeks as you do. Your feet ache from your eleventy-seven castings and your head aches from the sponsored cocktails lame afterparty #14 was serving and you’ve achieved a new level of oneness with your cell phone, so often does your booker call with so many conflicting appointments and addresses, and the constant yawing up-and-down fortunes of options, confirmations, and cancellations makes it a high-stakes way to live.

But the adrenaline rush of doing a show, of walking out in front of the barking photographers and the hot lights and participating in the enactment of a designer’s personal creative vision for the world, it’s kind of strangely beautiful. In fact, it’s a blast. And if it weren’t so hard to get to that spot at the end of the runway, I don’t think I’d enjoy being there half as much.

Of course it irks that there are clients from two seasons ago who still owe me trade. It’s one thing, I was grumbling backstage to the Russian who exited just before me, to get paid in clothes; it’s another to not get paid in clothes. She rolled her eyes and told me about the time she twisted an ankle in a designer’s 8” heels backstage, and got hustled out of the lineup without any remuneration at all. Of course getting your hair teased and sprayed and having extensions glued in for full candyfloss effect sucks. Getting a communal bottle of spray conditioner and a couple combs to undo the whole rats nest backstage afterwards sucks; deciding to skip the squabble for the spray bottle and go home on the F with your ’do still gravity-defiant possibly sucks more. Having some asshole on the street feel entitled to yell “Eat a sandwich!” at you and the Australian sucks. Keeping your sneakers practically dry right up until you fall into an ankle deep puddle mere steps outside Bryant Park sucks. Scalp burns and common makeup brushes and strangers calling you “Bitch” and stripping down to a nude thong backstage in front of gawking assistants and event photographers all sucks. Exhaustion sucks and having your most secretly hoped-for options collapse sucks.

But there’s still a kind of magic in fashion week. Maybe it’s just the alcohol, or the fact that it’s one of the few times any model can ever pretty much count on working, but it’s probably the two times of year I love most. I think it’s the sense of possibility in the air. There’s something touching about fashion — about seeing women frantically sewing satin bias tape onto tulle in a workroom that adjoins the showroom where you’re being fitted, about watching a collection coalesce and a designer’s ideas clarify and condense before your eyes. Even the way that in the 21st century, we still show clothes twice a year, six months ahead of season, Forever 21 rip-off artists be damned, in lavishly produced statement events whose purpose is mainly to be fabulous and impressive, is kind of touching. On the best days of my job, I feel like I play a part in bringing something of beauty into the world. And when a little bit of luck comes my way and I can do even slightly better than cover my expenses, that feeling of aesthetic satisfaction is enough.

So, please, excuse me for not writing as much as I wish I could right now, I have been fantastically busy. New York is almost over, and like the rest of the fashion class, I’m flying across an ocean in a couple days. Wish me luck.

*Hate her because you have to Google her literary puns!

The Gallstone Of Rouen
By Tatiana

I would be dropping by today with a jaunty rumination on my work life — I shot a fascinating catalog this week, let me tell you — but I'm afraid I've had something on my mind that has so angered me and colonized my thoughts that I've found myself motivated to rant at length to strangers in bars and to thrash out incendiary e-mails at times when a sensible person would be sleeping. I am afraid this current rage prevents me from mustering the wherewithal to make irreverent fashion commentaries or impugn the good reputation of any of the variety of hardworking artisans I encounter at work.

My problem has a name. A man's name.

My dating life as a model is one of the topics I'm least inclined to broach, but that people seem to take the most interest in. While ordinarily I wouldn't write about my personal life in public, I'm anonymous, I'm prepared to camouflage the identities of the wicked, and fundamentally I think tackling the common assumption that — how was it put recently? "Girls who look like Jessica Alba typically do not get jilted" is worth the airing of dirty laundry.

It is, I regret to inform you all, absolutely no easier to convince a guy to treat you with love and decency and even basic respect when you're 5'10" and have decent facial symmetry. This month has proven to be a horror of horrors.

There was the hipster who tolerated my hand on his knee in three different bars before going outside to make a phone call and inexplicably greeting a woman with a kiss on the mouth. "Uh, that's my girlfriend. Sort of," he explained. There was the funny guy from the party who, as soon as he had my e-mail, started sending irritatingly entitled missives with subject lines like "So: When are you coming to see me, Tatiana?" There was the dashing Serb who walked with me on the shores of a lake, and took my hand while he explained how 9/11 was an inside job. There was the writer in his mid-thirties who, all of five minutes after meeting me at a nightclub, held me close and whispered in my ear, "I wanna put a baby inside you."

Assholes, jerks, and weirdos like these are the reason my father forwards me headlines like Study: 1 in 4 adults in NYC have herpes
with the winning reminder "Let's be careful out there, Tati!"

But above all, there was the guy I'm going to call The Guy. The Guy is the cause of 99% of this indignation; I can't figure out if I'm primarily hurt that he managed to anger me so, or angry that he managed to hurt me so, but I've been some non-shelf-stable combination of the above for over a week now.

The Guy and I had been carrying on a torrid epistolary relationship for the past few months while I traveled to various of the world cities where fashion is practiced. E-mails were sent. Handwritten letters with carefully selected philately were exchanged. Cells buzzed with txt msgs five and ten times a day. Phone bills were obscene; our conversations no less so. [Torrid" is one way of putting it. "Florid" might work better. But you know, context. -Moe]

It was a mistake, I now realize, to ever wager so much on the character of a boy I'd not slept with. And who was 20.

When he and I both turned up in Paris — partly to see each other, partly to work, partly to travel — we promptly remedied that first error. We visited the Musée D'orsay, we took in a concert, we sat in many charming cafés, we went to Sacré Coeur and Sainte-Chapelle and Shakespeare and Co. and then got tipsy with local students on the banks of the Seine. We stayed up all night talking, just like we had done earlier in the summer, when an ocean separated us. And it was wonderful.

It lasted two days before, after a distracted performance at a dinner I'd cooked, he said he was thinking of getting out of town. Just going somewhere; it was summer, he was footloose, he didn't want to be "bogged down" with me and spend more time in Paris when there was the whole of France out there to explore. In fact, maybe he would borrow my laptop and look up some train schedules right now, while I did the dishes? In fact, maybe he would grab his bag and go to the train station and catch that 11:20 departure for a cool-sounding little town in Normandy. Maybe I could meet him at the weekend in Rouen?

I went with him to the station while he assured me that nothing was wrong.

In Rouen, The Guy was half an hour late to meet me at the station — which to my mind, speaks to a certain disinterest, a certain conflict, perhaps even a certain period of talking-oneself-into actually going through with the meeting. He was petulant, spacey, bored-seeming; his every gesture seemed intended to communicate the fact that I was the worst company imaginable. When The Guy wasn't grabbing my hand as we walked down the cobblestone streets, he was telling me that holding hands made him feel like too much of a couple. The second afternoon, he borrowed my cell phone to call the architecture student he'd hooked up with the night before my arrival.

At dinner that night, he remarked, for probably the fifth time, that traveling alone was "really fun." After an opera, he said I had "relationship tentacles" that were reaching out to ensnare him — an old saw about my supposed transference of affections directly from the last guy I dated, a man The Guy never even met. The evening I left for Paris, I had to ask him to walk me to the station; he stood on the platform, tolerated a kiss, commented that the beer I'd had with lunch was still on my breath, and headed back into the melee with a cheerful "See ya!"

Shy and never at my best in person, I did my usual thing and sent him an irate e-mail. "Narcissistic," I wrote. And "Relationship tentacles?!" And "Neurotic. Unable to concentrate. Flighty. Refused to fuck me." Baudelaire had his Spleen of Paris, I was thoroughly in the mode of the Gall of Rouen.

I received back a missive that included a charming anecdote about how he used to fight with his mother a lot when he was a boy. And the line "I have issues with women." And the line "Maybe I'm gay? I should probably investigate that some day."

And then: total radio silence. The Guy who'd sent me dozens of texts a day, e-mails several times weekly, phone calls on the days he didn't e-mail, letters every few weeks, for two months just slunk off into the French countryside. I wish I could say it hadn't so disappointed me, but when the most promising romantic connection you've had in months — seriously, 99% of the guys I meet present a comparable level of interest to the conspiracy-theorist Serb and the writer-creep and the entitled-funnyman and the it's-complicated hipster, which is to say, zero interest at all — is with an extremely intelligent, worldly, funny, hot, good-in-bed dude you can take to the opera who then just up and hightails it, it hurts.

Before he left Paris again for good, I wheedled five hours and a handful of explanations from him. The man who insisted I re-read The Blind Watchmaker the night we met suddenly found me "too intellectual." My favorite author was someone he, personally, found "pessimistic and dry," and it spoke volumes about my personality that I attached a "talismanic authority" to the author's works and persona. ("So," mused a friend, "if you liked Ann Rice, you'd be too much of a bloodsucker?") I have the wrong color hair and I'm an atheist lacking in appreciation for life's mysteries.

Then he borrowed 20 Euro to get a bus to the airport and walked out of my life.

I hate men.

I've been reading some Ann Carson lately, and I came across a quote that made me shudder:

"There is something profoundly uneventful about a man-made lake, like the self-knowledge of a radical skeptic."

As you might have guessed, I am radically skeptical. I consider it one of my finer traits: my mind wants to poke holes, to slaughter cows, to draw back green velvet curtains, and I suppose I find it ultimately satisfying when the inevitable disappointment clicks into place. I felt exhilarated at 13 when I determined the religion whose ritual and canon had given me such solace as a child (so many rules! so many complicated rules with so much at stake! It was like a puzzle challenge, staying holy), rested on the false premise that there was a God and a heaven to aspire to. I felt glad to have engineered my own sucker-punch. Woolly thinking seems to me a failure of imagination, a failure of brains — a failure to do our greatest evolved traits the service of proper use, and I try to root out my own whenever I notice it.

It was actually only on reading that Carson line that I realized it is possible that my woolliest trait of all — my inexhaustible ability for false consciousness, for convincing myself that what I want is actually perfectly expressed in what he wants, my apparent mania for replying in kind when I'm told that I'm loved — is not only annoyingly ineradicable, but, just perhaps, persistent precisely because of my avowed skepticism. After all, a skeptic is always asking, are you sure? The essence of my problem is that I never am. It's tempting to think that maybe he is.

Which I guess is a roundabout way of saying that being reasonably smart and self-possessed and even having had the matter of one's beauty put to a (sort-of) "objective" test and given a Pass! is no guarantee that assholes won't come calling, and that one won't spend far too much time entertaining them and their deep, unsearchable issues.

I'm reduced to do-as-I-say: Next time someone irksomely seeks out your affection and shies away from your arousal, next time someone uses your phone to call another girl, next time someone who seems perfect on paper acts indifferent in person, don't wait for him to have the presence of mind to figure out that the romance is doomed. Just run the other way. Fast. And to the lucky folks who are not just coming out the other side of an asshole entanglement? Next time someone more recently burned corners you at a bar with a half-hour story of slights ("He said sleeping with me was like sleeping with a relative!"), grin and bear it. And then maybe buy us a drink and do a quick visual check to — yes, absolutely — confirm the absence of any relationship tentacles. That would make us feel much better.

Last night I worked, unpaid, for six hours so that a fashion designer could continue dressing socialites and selling out her sunglass and perfume licenses and decorating her SoHo apartment with Picassos. I did it notionally for pictures on Style.com ("Think of your pictures on Style.com!" a minder hissed whenever we models began to look slightly wilted in the third hour of standing, immobile, in shoes invariably two sizes too small or two too big.) But actually, if you want to be technical, I did it for two slices of melon and a lipstick and a dress. And I did it because I knew if I hadn't, my agency would've been disappointed — "She's a little difficult," I could already hear my cokeblown oaf of a booker whispering in a client's ear, "how about Dasha or Angelika instead, mmh?" — and because I would've been replaced for the show in less than an instant if I had quibbled with the remuneration offered.

Six hours.

Style.com didn't even get my good side.

We had come from Brazil and Canada, from the Ukraine and the Bronx. From Croatia, Australia, and Korea. We had come to work a presentation — to spend three hours in hair and makeup, and three hours entertaining those individuals wealthy and well-connected enough to make the guest list. We wore a resort collection. Although resort collections are timed for mid-winter release, they are brief, pretty, summery garments — the idea being that you pack them to take on your January cruise. This is my "career" in a nutshell: I work for free to sell overpriced clothes to the women for whom an invitation to a fashion show and a Picasso and a January cruise are among life's givens.

There were a dozen of us and we were hungry, for backstage there had been a fruit tray and a pallet of Poland Spring bottled water. (I watched while a girl from Russia ate all the grapes.) On the months when I make more money writing this column than I do selling the rights to my own image, I've been known to wrap leftover food in napkins and take it home with me from the inevitable pastry trays and sandwich plates of the catered world I move in; last night's pickings were so poor ("I can't believe this shit! A two-inch nubbin of brie and some tangerines," squalled the girl from one of the places they use the word "nubbin.") It wouldn't have been worth the trouble, even had there been leftovers, which there were not. During the show, the Russian had to be helped from the stage when she feared she would faint.

The guests sipped champagne and munched on caviar-and-smoked-salmon canapés.

"Beautiful," a woman in a cocktail dress murmured between bites. Her suited companion asked if he should buy the blue one in her size. Event photographers' flashbulbs popped whenever a new boldface name made an entrance. We stood, living statues, not even allowed to converse as the press took our pictures.

Each of the models was decked with enough gold and diamonds that I could've lived comfortably off the proceeds of my bracelets for years. The girl next to me wore a pavé necklace as thick as a garden snake. I counted eight security guards — who kept an eye on us not because the owners were worried unduly about a model making off with the goods (finding the culprit would hardly be difficult) but because, as the guard who accompanied me outside to the fire escape for a pre-show cigarette explained, there was a slight risk of the event itself being robbed, or of one of us being kidnapped.

The eight security guards were being paid. The twelve models were not.

In the end, when the guests finally began to leave, and we were led down from the stage on our throbbing feet, there were no more canapés, and nor were there the promised glasses of champagne. The Russian, though pale, had been revived, and the jewels were returned to their safe without incident. I put on my street clothes and turned up my iPod and made myself smile at the designer as I left. Outside, a guest who hadn't been quick enough for a gift bag grabbed my arm and asked if I wouldn't mind giving her mine. I declined. "But what's in it, what's in there?" she persisted, pawing at the heavy embossed paper sack. I couldn't find the words to reply, so I mutely pointed at my mouth. "Oh." She shrugged and released the bag. "Lipstick? Fine. You keep it then."

I suppose The Great Gatsby or some other book about young people from modest backgrounds who consort for a time with an extremely rarefied crowd — I actually have friends who, entirely good-naturedly, invite me to their birthday parties in Gstaad and seem not to grasp why I always must send my regrets — could've told me that the Learjet echelon have their own special world and that there is a fundamental, limiting opacity to their understanding of and interest in what goes on outside of it, but then again no lesson quite sticks like one you learn for yourself.

I went home and called a friend in another country and angrily vented the story — Picasso! Diamonds! Sunglasses and perfume licenses! A fruit plate with a nubbin of brie! — and, when we hung up, I cried. As you read this, I'll be at another "job" with no paycheck, and as for tomorrow and its castings, nobody knows what they portend.

Bring On Hotties From Overseas [NY Daily News]