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.

Where exactly McKinney locates Austria's "curves" I'm not sure. And it always rubs me the wrong way when I hear an agent talking about how "strange" a model is. Seeing as our bodies pay their bills, and as Austria in particular has a killer runway figure, a face that could launch a thousand campaigns, and a smile that could sell a ton of CoverGirl, it seems disingenuous and a touch gift-horseish for an agent who stands to make a significant cut of that future wealth to go on about what a simply wonderful genetic freak Austria is, with "the height" and "the hair" and that inexplicable "something in the eyes."


Seeing models as "strange" is just so utterly convenient to the narrative that sees us as carefree fashion sprites who spring, fully-formed at 5'11" and 34"-24"-34" (or smaller!), from unremarkable surroundings, eager and unquestioning and destined to do the industry's bidding. It's a narrative that renders invisible the constant struggle that staying in this industry really is — at least for 99% of models (it's a struggle I personally find rewarding — or as Sen Dog put it so eloquently, it's a fun job, but it's still a job). It's the narrative that motivates people like the accountant at my Barcelona agency to jokingly tell me that she finds it odd that my kind, after coming and "enjoying my beautiful city's sunshine, our men, our cuisine, and taking beautiful pictures," actually expect some kind of monetary compensation for our troubles and occasionally inquire as to how that all is going. (I know, the gall, right?) It's the narrative that simultaneously disqualifies what we do from being "work" and implies we're unfit for anything else. Since we're so "strange" and all.


Austria, who as I pointed out earlier was reported to be 14 this February, celebrates a "Sweet 16"-cum-going away party in the full show, which, like all of the "Model.Live" webisodes, you can watch at Vogue.tv. With effective management, Austria could be a big star without entirely losing her teenage years in a blur of makeup brushes, stolen naps on airport lounge seats, and constant low-grade peckishness. Having one's mother by one's side at her age is generally a good thing; having one's mother by one's side to say things like "I always wanted her to be a model because I wanted to be one myself," gives me slight pause.


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

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

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


Related:

Model.Live [Vogue.tv]

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

Related: Model.Live Episode 3

Doing 20 editorial looks, solo, against a grey studio backdrop, with nary a prop in sight and no organizing principle to the clothes other than “Fall silhouettes!” probably approaches my idea of hell. You're not playing a character, you don't have an evocative setting, and there isn't even a particular mood or feel the editorial is intended to convey — it's just you and your basic posing repertoire, alone in a brightly lit box. No wonder Anna Rachford of Woodstock, IL, is sporting basically the same position and expression in three of the above shots; there’s no story here. What unites this spread other than the fact that it's fall, and, yes, this might necessitate the donning of coats and knitwear? We see this editorial every season. It's the fashion equivalent of those insipid freshmen-oriented survey classes where the reading list is such a ragbag (you know, Middlemarch and Fielding and Frankenstein and Borges for good measure) that you wonder just what in hell the professor was thinking. Probably that delivering lectures that attained their mature form in 1973 is a hoot when you have tenure. And probably that an appreciation for literature is an admirable social grace suitable for the weekend delectation of young ladies' minds. I'm not much given to puffery in my novels and I like it even less in my fashion.



Oh, no, tights! Once I did a fall lookbook for an Asian client and we had to shoot two dozen some outfits in one day — and every single get-up came with a different pair of brightly colored tights. And, because the client’s line was designed with its shorter-legged market in mind, the tights went up only about as far as my knees, and what with the quick changing and the many layers, I was already sweating from every pore since of course it was July, and I sensed even at the time that this epic struggle of Model v. Unyielding Spandex, times 24, was, even if I prevailed (and, you'll be glad to know, I did live to model another day!), going to become the stuff of panicked flashbacks. At one point there was an assistant stylist poised at each thigh, firmly yanking at the waistband of a pair of aubergine wool-blend tights while I sort of jumped up and down in place and the photographer's assistant tried to look like he wasn't peeping. Tights, oh God. You weren't there, man!



I have no idea what Anna’s doing in that green psychedelic drum majorette getup, either. Sending imaginary semaphore for “Send Help Trapped In Photoshoot”? Directing the landings of nearby aircraft? Unseen shadow puppets? Let's chalk it up to studio daze and move on.



Eva Poloniová says that the hardest thing about modeling is “Wearing beautiful clothes without being able to keep them.” Funny you should say so, Eva, given you’ve shimmied into a $3,040 Prada dress — and I’m guessing your paycheck for the edit was $100 or so for the day. Before agency commission, natch! Keep trawling those sample sales, darling. You never know.



This next story is all about female fashion icons who wore pants: for some reason, someone decided Meg Ryan belonged on the list with Marlene Dietrich and Diane Keaton, and, also for some reason, someone determined that a blonde Russian was qualified to impersonate every “iconic” woman who wore pants, ever. Nevermind; I kind of can’t dislike the girl. Valerie Avdeyeva said her most memorable experience was posing on an Argentine glacier — cool! (There’s nothing that drives me deeper into apoplexy than a model who gets to go to Morocco or Iceland or Papua New Guinea for an editorial who comes back and shrugs, “It was okay, I guess. The food was, like, really weird.”) And Valerie parried back a stupid question about which celebrity she’d most like to meet with a cheery reference to the author of Franny and Zooey! Plus she said she couldn’t function without her iPod and her eyelash curler — that’s a practicality/frivolity ratio I can get behind. Even if she doesn’t give me any Jane Birkin in this picture, it's not her fault Birkin was an incorrigible brunette.



Seriously?



Whoa. She eats candy bars. Valerie is officially new favorite model material!



Oh God. Janis Joplin sings a song called “Rose” — so we have to represent the (brunette!) hippie idol (in $1395 pants and a $2055 blouse!) swaying beatifically and staring at a prop rose? Weak.

Is it just me or does Raquel Zimmerman's makeup look caked on? I think Raquel has noticed. I think this makes Raquel unhappy.

Editors love this shot. Where the model allows food to approach her mouth area, but displays no other sign of an appetite. Such beautiful restraint, Ms. Z!

Whereas in every other picture, Raquel could be that lovely secretary your Mom had in the 1980s, frizzy perm, ill-fitting rayon turtlenecks and all, in this one shot she's suddenly vamping it up in evening wear and wanting to show us her tits. Strange. And have you noticed her rainbow of manicures? Budget 20 minutes in the chair for every hue (in addition to this page's basic red, I count gold, nude, hot pink, and dead skin taupe.)


This isn’t an editorial, it’s just an illustration for Allure’s helpful beauty story about how everyone could probably do with a peel, and you should totally forget that whole off-putting Samantha-on-SATC thing. But I’d like to say, having posed for illustrations like this, that standing stock still with goop on your face is never fun. The cream is drying uncomfortably on your skin, it always takes forever for the assistants to light it, and getting the shot depends on such an infinite range of minutae — move the brush 1/8” to the left, now down, no, back over a tad, okay now open your mouth, no, less open, somebody fix her eyebrow now, okay the hair thing I said, yeah, it's in the way again — that it can be downright maddening. Which is ironic, because this shot is always for a beauty story, and beauty stories are supposed to be about zen and centredness and the feminine transcendent! But what really sucks is the images are so servicey and decontextualized that they are worthless for your modeling portfolio. Also: Now I’m pretty sure I “need” a peel. Thanks for nothing, Allure.


The essence of successful modeling can sometimes be the model’s ability to melt so completely into one picture that you don’t recognize her in the next. It took me a minute to even see that it was Inguna Butane here; this is a good start.


And here's her masterstroke. Without resorting to goofy expressions or gimmicks, purely by playing the angles of her face, Inguna so transforms within this series that at first I thought the edit had two models. Seriously. Look back real quick. Are you even sure it's the same person? Latvians. So spooky.


Julia Stegner is bravely standing in 5" heels on the edge of a cliff in Maine. For fashion. As the photographer said in his contributor's note, "We were lucky the wind cooperated." Lucky, indeed! Now that’s dedication to the craft.

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

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

Related: Model.Live

Tatiana, our favorite anonymous fashion model, has got her long-fingered, well-manicured hands on the not-so-svelte September issues of our "favorite" ladymags. One day after digging into that horrendous Philip Nobel piece, Tatiana trains her eye on the fashion editorials in the newest issue of Elle...and gets annoyed by the expensive shit and overplayed poses.

Reading a September ladymag is sort of like picking up a Russian novel. Fall's perennial Biggest Issues Ever each weigh more than a laptop, and boast a recurring cast of characters whose minute shifts in fortune are as fascinating to the interested observer as any copy of Dead Souls. But with the added bonus of the inevitable Photoshop disasters! Join me, your intrepid Anonymous Model, after the jump as I critique the fashion spreads and campaigns immortalized in the 636 fascinating pages of the latest Elle magazine.

Elle adds six (6!) whole stories to the fashion discourse this season. Seven (7!) if you count the spread where the posing comes courtesy of a French singer I've never heard of who tends to lose her neck in photos — which I, as a model who objects to the idea that any old spackled-up five-foot-nothing permabronzed celebutard who thinks symmetrical features parlay into magnetism can do what I do, do not.

Eleven pages purport to illustrate ten archetypal New! Fall! Trends! — wanna be a Rocker? You will need this thing called a leather jacket — and nine images explore the supposed manifest accord between the "architectural" mood of the coming season and the pyramids at Giza. (No, really.) Hana Soupukova jumps around in ten pages spliced in directly from September, 1988, and then there's an eight-look fellatio of Giorgio Armani. Involving silver Hammer pants and slippers. Stephanie Seymour lends her magnificent schnoz to the shilling of denim and a $970 belt, and the obligatory accessories shoot is carried off with such aplomb by the sublimely beautiful Alison Nix that I actually don't think I've got any snark to spread on that account.

The my-wrist-is-double-jointed inverted-akimbo pose is foundational to any model's repertoire. Also helpful is the "Huh?" skittery-eyed face. You don't know if she's angry or about to burst into tears!

The broken-doll lean. Very Daryl Hannah in Blade Runner. Things to keep in mind: The red eyeshadow-black-eyeliner and silver lipstick combo on Mia Rosing probably took a half an hour to apply. And Moesha Lewis's eyelids appear to be covered in pulverized Reynolds Wrap. Given the drastic hair and makeup changes in this edit, I have a feeling this was one of those interminable 12-hour stir-crazy studio days where your face feels scraped down to its pores by the fifth trip to the stylist's chair. Upon which point you realize that it's already lunch, and you're only on Look Four, and you had just better buck up and take deep breaths and sip water through a straw because things are going to get worse before they get better.

Mia! We just saw you prove you could turn your arms around in their sockets. No need to belabor the point; I understand those long hours in a white box can be a little addling, but repeating poses within the same editorial just makes us models look dumb. And memory-impaired.

All right, by the third repetition, I'm starting to get the sense that the angry-hands-on-hips-shoulder-thrust move was something the photographer asked you to do. I'm sorry fashion is so boring. (Also: Holy crap those false lashes must've sucked to take off but if your booker knows what's what at least this pic will be in your book. Which will totally almost make up for the fact that you probably got a hundred bucks plus lunch for your day's labors!)

May the makeup artist who did this never work again.

No, I do not understand this crotch gusset, either. Or why a string of busted Christmas tree globes makes a suitable necklace.

And so we come to the Armani spread. To attempt to justify this effervescent froth of advertiser-pandering, the editorial is interrupted by a one-page essay by Amanda Marshall ("We all know Armani world...It's sleek and tonal, functional and dramatic, languid and glamorously noir...") that partly explains Armani's role in making Milan the fashion capitol it is today. Which curiously doesn't explain why this story was shot...in Venice!

Also unexplained is why, when the most striking item pictured on this page is the pair of weird and heavy-looking lens-less eyeglasses Victoria Wallace is wearing, they are the only item not listed in the credits. Filigree'd butterfly eyewear of indeterminable provenance is so hot this season.

Seriously, making our girl pose in front of the Centro Salute Mentale is just unkind. Especially after that supremely unkind red-eyed, spread-legged, flash-washed shot in the purple dress.

And now we come to my new favorite model, Alison Nix! It's hard to make accessories look cool without being cheesy, trite, or fake. I bet her forearm was covered in nasty red pinchmarks from all the bangles and watches that must have weighed a ton. But you'd never know it to look at those clear blue eyes! They say, Buy this ridiculously small plaid purse! And she's so heartstoppingly lovely, I, who ought to be inured to every machination of fashion marketing, almost want that purse. That purse that costs more than my rent. (On second thoughts, fuck you and your need-manufacturing, Alison!)

All is forgiven. Wow. Just wow. The stylist totally cheated that watch around to an unholy-unnatural angle for the benefit of the shot, but you pull it off in that "What? I always wear my watch at a convenient angle for passing photographers" nonchalant supermodelish way. Along with horizontal striped tights, a bag that looks like it grew barnacles, and a frankly ridiculous turquoise and orange pheasant feather hat. Which collection of absurd elements would look stupid on most people — and most models! — but somehow, upon seeing this image, all I want to do is stare at it long enough for it to imprint on my retinas. You are a vision, Ms. Nix. And a helluva magazine closer.

Earlier: September Glamour Actually Makes Fashion Fun — And Freckled
Elle Writer's Ex: "It's A Strange Luxury To See Someone Else's Version Of Your Life

*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.

It occurs to me that frequently in these columns, there is a moment where, finally alone and generally late into the night of a long day, I find myself reduced to tears by some list of knocks and slights. Perhaps this only means I need a new device; I don’t think of myself as such a sad sack figure as all that. But this week, actually the night after my spirit-crushing turn as a volunteer clotheshorse for a designer who most definitely could have afforded to pay me, my sadness metastasized not into tears, but into a rage-inflected political platform that just might transform my industry.

Well, OK, first I cried. Then I thought: models should unionize to work for better conditions and rates of pay.

It’s a common misconception that modeling is easy, safe and highly lucrative — the reality is that the girls with the million-dollar campaigns are so rare I wouldn’t believe they actually existed if I didn’t see them at night clubs during fashion week. Most models I know are lucky if they are working at all; between agency commissions (70% in Paris, 50% in Milan, 20% in New York), travel expenses, and rent in the various pricey cities in which we are required to live, your eventual wages come so garnished I’ve known plenty of models who can’t always afford food. Even the girls who are lucky enough to work every day are doing well if they break even, and can sneak off to Germany or Los Angeles or Hong Kong and make a quick buck shooting catalog jobs every once in a while.

And safe? Once I was staying with a girl from Seattle in a shitty one-bedroom (total number of models: six! Minimum in rent our agency would’ve made from the shitty one-bedroom that month, assuming a consistent model population: $5400!). We were both on option for the same editorial (daily rate: $150 and lunch). She got the job.

She returned home nine hours later, hair and body painted silver. The magazine was doing a “green” issue; this eco-conscious theme was enacted in, variously, shots in which the poor Seattle girl had a tulip plant placed in her mouth, shots in which she had to lie on top of a scratchy 8 ft. hedgerow while the photographer shot from a crane, and shots in which she closed her eyes and shards of broken glass were applied to her face. They put dirt in her mouth and glass on her eyelids and painted her silver from head to toe. My roommate showered twice and vomited once that night.

Models have incredibly short-lived careers, and our collective youth, third-world origins, and the instability of the market we work in makes our bargaining positions, individually, weak. For every 15-year-old wunderkind who stalks 40 runways a season and books $100,000 perfume campaigns for college money, there are at least a hundred girls who turn 25 with a few grand in bank at best, realize their careers are over, and that they never graduated high school.

It’s also no wonder given how close many models are to insolvency that there are areas where modeling shades into prostitution; modeling sort of prepares you — trains you, even — to see your income in your own body. And also to hang around with plenty of creepy, older, rich dudes. A + B can = C. The BBC did an exposé in 2000 that caught Milanese businessmen on hidden camera trying to buy sex from models as young as 13 in night clubs, and uncovered evidence of agency bookers acting as procurers and drug dealers. In the furor that ensued, Gérard Marie and Xavier Moreau, two top executives at the Elite agency, lost their jobs. The industry promised a clean-up. There was talk of “standards,” of girls younger than 17 being accompanied by chaperones at all times, of blacklisting clients who used or promoted drugs.

Gérard Marie — who was filmed soliciting a reporter who he thought was a model for sex — is currently back at the helm of Elite Paris. I do not know if the man who explained his desire to sleep with underaged models thusly: “We are men, we have our needs” has reformed. I do know that such episodes of revolving-door contrition and forgiveness fill me with disgust, and that one of the biggest tasks of any models’ union would be to keep its membership safe.

A union would also offer, obviously, the benefits of collective bargaining. The overwhelming counterweight of the fashion business class’s wealth give models an unacceptably weak negotiating position. A union could help insure models’ best long-term interests are served by their jobs — a union could argue for retirement benefits, and, in the USA, health insurance coverage. A union could mandate that sufficient time be given for models under 16 to attend school, without setting back their careers. A union could also serve as a voice for models’ interests in the ongoing debate over what is perhaps our biggest immediate health issue — the slightly-underweight physique we are required to maintain. A union could protest and shame under- and non-paying clients, a union could mandate that appropriate food be available at every job, and a union could ensure that conditions on the job site always meet safety standards, so nobody has to pose covered in broken glass or eat dirt ever again.

The obvious counterpoint to modeling is, of course, acting. The Screen Actors’ Guild does an admirable job of representing the interests of a workforce that is dispersed over a vast geography, and which enjoys short-term contract-based employment, when it gets employment at all. It’s ironic that one of the reasons commercial modeling — catalogs, television ads and their ilk — is so rewarding when compared with high-fashion modeling — magazine editorials, runway, etc — is because of SAG’s vigilance; commercial castings in Los Angeles are not infrequently stated union jobs. And even the ones that are non-union are pretty highly paid. I have friends who are only able to work full-time in Paris because they have commercials still airing in the U.S., and receive the appropriate checks quarterly.

Individually, we are weak, and wealthy white men manage to make an awful lot of cash off our bodies and labor. Collectively, we could hold the industry we work in to a higher standard, and perhaps even change the nature of fashion itself. I imagine the union would have an awful lot to say, for instance, about those clients who put “NO ETHNICS” on their casting notices, and those agencies who fail to notice, or care, that certain of their charges have eating disorders.

Of course there are plenty of reasons to doubt any of this will come to pass. The economy is especially dreadful right now; any moves to unionize would be viewed as a threat by the class that controls the fashion capital. Besides, every year there’s a new raft of 14-year-olds from countries with economies far shittier than ours, and these 14-year-olds are all six feet tall and very, very hungry. And, through no fault of their own, they exercise a huge deflationary force on the modeling labor market. But it occurred to me, as I was working that presentation for that designer who amuses herself by collecting Picasso, that the reason she was paying the security guards at the event and not me was because the security guards have a union. And I don’t.

I want to at least try my best to change that.

E-mail Tatiana at Tatiana.Anymodel@gmail.com

Earlier: Welcome To America, Models! Tatiana Can't Wait For The Extra Competition. It Was Almost Getting Too Easy.

Related:

Model Bosses Quit After BBC Exposé [BBC]
Girls Interrupted [NY Mag]

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]

Related: Fashion Blackout [BET]

Earlier: On The Runways Of Milan, Color Just Wasn't Considered Chic

The idea that modeling makes you feel good about your looks in the first place is flat out wrong. Models are constantly told that they're too fat, too thin, too pale, too dark, etc. If you need all of that external verification to love yourself, you're going to be shit out of luck, eventually. Teens especially need to learn to feel good about their looks from the inside, not from the adoring eyes of possibly-predatory strangers. Also? Teens need to have more substantial dreams than becoming lifelong mannequins! Even The Hills twats are better role models than your average model.

Which is not to say that I won't watch at least one episode of She's Got The Look. I picture 15 washed up Dina Lohan-types snarking on each other over cellulite and fighting for granola bars. Who wouldn't want to witness that?

She's Got The Look [TV Land]

Earlier: And The Plus-Size Girl Takes The Cake

"Your Skin Is Sooooo Dehydrated!" (And 9 Other Reasons I Hate Makeup Artists)

• Whitney was the first "plus sized" contestant to win America's Next Top Model!
  
• Alexandra Michaels — a teen model who was sent home from Paris because she gained five pounds — spoke out against eating disorders in the modeling industry.
  
• Speaking of dressing up: Jezebel correspondent Emily Gould crashed a Stevie Nicks festival. There were wigs! And gays! And glitter!
  
• More good news for gays: it is now legal for them to get married in California.
  
• In other California legal news, Lori Drew got indicted.
  
• Even California girls should not wear this tacky crap from Urban Outfitters.
  
• Brats from My Super Sweet Sixteen get deported!

Today's Modelslips is entirely spurred by one commenter's question. See how questions are important? E-mail yours to: Tatiana.Anymodel@gmail.com

From Dosido:
You seem to be extremely well-adjusted and body-positive. Has working as a model ever caused you to doubt yourself to the point that you've considered engaging (or have engaged) in the sort of self-destructive behaviors that so many models fall victim to? Things like smoking to kill appetite, drugs (same reasons, I suppose), or anorexia/bulimia?

—-—

Other commentators as of late have pointed to a time in recent memory when, they say, a US size 6-8 woman was standard on the runway; other writers have said that there was a time when models took up space. I don't remember this time. Models have always seemed to me universally skinny, small-breasted and towering, with their big eyes, sharp cheekbones, and protruding hipbones.

As an adolescent, I had no trouble recognizing my body type in theirs. My measurements were 32-24-34 — perfect for scaring my doctor, sending my BMI farther into the chart's nether regions with every inch I grew, and, at least theoretically, the kind of editorial and runway work that requires one to fit into the one-off, uniformly sized sample clothes designers make for their collections' first outings. I had years of periods that came as if I were on Seasonale (I wasn't) and the friend who was my secret crush probably never realized how badly he hurt my feelings when he gave me the nickname that would stick to me through high school — Death. I ate whatever I wanted in whatever quantities I wanted, and didn't even play an all-year sport. For a time, I happened to be as thin as is currently considered ideal in one Western industry.

Until, one day, sometime in college, I wasn't.

When a New York agency expressed interest in representing me, on the proviso that I trim my 26-inch waist and 37-inch hips to some more reasonable approximation of a waif, I went home by way of the library and checked out the first diet book I'd ever looked at. Three months of eating probably not enough and doing lots of yoga and weight training (which didn't help me lose weight, except insofar as muscle gain speeds metabolism, but which did give me quick results that kept me from dropping the whole exercise regime in frustration) earned me a 23-inch waist and 35-inch hips. The same agency expressed reservations about my hip measurement, but I went to fashion week and made decent bookings anyway. This was enough to merit my going on to Paris.

At the other end of a transatlantic flight, I was dropped off at an office to sign a contract in a language I don't read. Then I was introduced to a man who grabbed me by my hips and made loud exclamations in a language I don't speak. Two of the bookers giggled from across the room.

"Your 'eeps, Tatiana," he sneered, exhaling cigarette smoke. "Zey are not ze 'eeps of uh mo-duhl."

He then banned me from show castings. I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing.

I went to the apartment where I was to stay, I lugged my suitcase up six flights of stairs when it wouldn't fit in the tiny elevator, and I crawled under the covers of my living room cot and cried.

The next morning, when, jetlagged, I awoke at 5 a.m., I started looking up calorie counts for the foods I most often consume. I trawled the web for low-calorie, low-fat, high-fiber, high-protein, generally nutritious food. I found diets that should have horrified me alluring. I wondered whether I should consume 1400 calories a day or if I could knock it down to 1200 without provoking ketosis. Not going to castings meant I had a lot of free time, and no chance of getting any work meant I had the excuse of poverty to explain the paucity of my diet.

I exercised on the hard tile floor of the kitchen. With four room-mates filling the living room as well as the ostensible bedroom, it was the only room in the tiny apartment where there was any privacy. It did occur to me, as I did my daily 20 minutes of yoga, my daily two sets each of 20 sit-ups, my lunges with 20 pound weights, my squats, bicep curls, and tricep extensions, that trying to get my measurements within the parameters that were so comfortable when I was 14, was slightly sick. What kind of industry would demand an adult woman forever maintain the dimensions of girlhood? I often thought about this as I counted my push-ups.

I keep a document I created during this period on my desktop. It's titled "1 cup of oatmeal with brown sugar.doc" — my preferred breakfast, even though it is one that doesn't exist in France, was the first food item I thought to analyze — and it contains about 12 pages, single-spaced, of recipes, calorie counts, diet tips ("Drinking COLD water burns extra cals bc your body must use energy to bring the water up to body temp") and other esoterica of a not-quite-right mind. I lasted about two weeks in this phase — long enough to knock a half-inch off my hips and quell the objections of the smoker and get grudgingly sent to a few castings — and I never had body dysmorphia or any of the other diagnostic criteria of a true eating disorder. But I keep 1 cup of oatmeal with brown sugar.doc on my desktop to remind me how easy it is in this industry to slip into disordered eating. You have so little else to do besides watch your weight, and so many opportunities for self-denial.

That was over a year ago, and I mostly remember it as my little Paris freak-out; my reaction to a new and strange and isolating industry and one mean man. I eat more or less what I want now, and I've found that my bookings have grown as a function of my book, and bear little relationship to my measurements, whether actual or those stated on my cards. But there is a tiny way in which I feel the subjective experience of modeling dovetails with the subjective experience of an eating disorder sufferer — at least one area of theoretical accord that underlies the two.

The experience of being a model is largely one of reducing the body to symbol. When you see a model, you don't think "woman": you think "body" and its component parts. "Lips" are here symbolic of "Yves Saint Laurent perfume." "Face" means "David Yurman jewelry." "Legs" on this page represent "Dolce and Gabbana ready-to-wear."

A version of this happens live. Walking the runway is an experience like being in a diving bell: you can see the world around you, but your usual connection with it has been artificially suppressed. You must stare straight ahead, part your lips slightly, and not make eye contact. You have to look through the people who are staring at you and barking commands at you from the photographers' pit. You have to occasionally scan where those people might plausibly be, but never see them. You are, needless to say, mute, but also physically unresponsive to your surroundings. And you expect no response from them.

In 1993, during a Vivienne Westwood show in Paris, Naomi Campbell fell on the runway. The only impressive thing about this, or any other runway fall I'm aware of (save one: Karen Elson's tumble at Zac Posen this February), is that nobody — neither the other models nor the front-row audience members who sit within inches of them — ever goes to help the stricken model, even when they have tumbled from 8" platform shoes such as those Campbell was wearing, shoes that can break, and have broken, the wearer's ankles. Because a fall is not supposed to happen, the production can never acknowledge a fall when one occurs.

Reducing the body to symbol is of course what the anorexic or the bulimia sufferer does. (Or the serious athlete, for that matter.) We remake our bodies as monuments: to hungers overcome, to perceived strengths, to a gendered, formal ideal we've sized up or down to. Bodies no longer communicate want or need: we subject them to our desires, and take pleasure in their submission.

I certainly enjoyed every inch I ever lost.

I also very much enjoy walking on the runway.

But there is one way in which this industry has taught me to take less of an obsessive interest in how I measure up, appearance-wise. The feedback you receive as a model is breathtaking in its contradictions, vehemence, and beside-the-point meanderings. My shoulders, too broad for one client, will be criticized for their narrowness by another. I have been told I have too many freckles, and also too few. I've been too pale, too tan, too old, too young, too brown, too red, too blonde. I'm too tall or too short. My feet are too big or not big enough. At first, this was unsettling, and kind of withering, but it soon became white noise — when a casting agent shares advice with me ("Tie your hair back for castings!" "Walk more smoothly!" "Work out so you have some arm muscle!") I thank him or her politely and do precisely nothing — because I know the next will want to see unfettered hair, a cocky swagger of a walk, and arms that aren't as "bulky" with muscle as mine. It all cancels out, and I'm left with the conclusion that the client will cast whomever they will cast and they'll know it as soon as the right model walks in the door and nothing in my power will change that. The best I can do is show up.

It's a strangely liberating conclusion to have drawn from fashion.

Don't get us wrong, our anonymous model Tatiana has had a busy couple weeks. (Europe! Magazine photo shoots! The private satisfaction of being anonymously "famous" on the internet!) But in a business where nothing is real (except hunger pangs) she sometimes finds herself pondering the age-old question, how IS it that some of these girls get so fucking famous? Exhibit A: Karlie Kloss (left). The young Texan is suddenly the Most Famous Person In Modeling. And in fashion, if you're not talking about how great she is, you're drunkenly wondering aloud to your friends what the fuck is so great about her. This and other pressing Modelslips questions, answered by Jezebel's most symmetrically-featured contributor, after the jump.

The crush of castings and shows taking place in my temporary European home has obliterated my sense of narrative/grip on objective reality. To be recovered post-fashion week, when I can think again? I've had a full head of makeup applied and wiped off four times in the last 24 hours, entire bottles of Elnett have been applied to and then brushed out of my locks, and even my favorite heels have given my gnarled hooves blisters that tingle as I type. But — even though I come to you without a coherent anecdote to relay, I still had your handy questions to occupy my mind. What do professional models think of Miss Tyra and her cyclic night-time T.V. series? How do you get the most from a client who's paying in clothes? Sweatshops: do they weigh on anyone's conscience in fashion-land? And what's up with those agencies and their wacky commissions? That's what I'm here for!

From "squeakel":
Anyway, Tatiana, since you brought up the subject of established models, maybe you can answer something I've wondered for ages. What's so different about the girls who become successful? Why do these particular girls get so much buzz? I've seen so many workaday models who seem just as beautiful and compelling as the more famous ones.

If I knew that, I'd found an agency and get rich! I do know that it involves buzz, and often a crucial meeting with one casting director. Douglas Perrett, for example. Or Russell Marsh. Katie Grand, a stylist, has done a lot for Rachel Clark's career.

Sometimes, people just sort of fill a niche that seems to be lacking. Exhibit Karlie Kloss, the undisputed model of the moment. She is 15. She used to model for Macy's inserts. That is supposed to be a no-no. Ha!

She's American.

She's the anti-Agyness.

And yet, she is Agyness.

I met a photographer for Dazed and Confused during New York Fashion Week who told me that I was "too pretty" to work shows. (There are definitely girls who only surface during show season, nab every booking, and then disappear while the rest of us slog off to catalog jobs and magazine edits. Given how poorly paid shows are I have no idea how they eat; but it's true that they tend to be the weirder-looking models.) Whatever; I took it as a compliment.

From "ericablue":
I am completely fascinated by "paid in trade". Do you get to choose what you want? Do you keep what you are wearing? What if it is hideous?

Payment in trade can happen many ways, always at the designer's discretion. You might get a simple gift card, or an invitation to the showroom (which means you might have access to samples and next season's line). Other times someone will hand you a Mystery Bag as you leave, and you inside will find a t-shirt and a jar of face cream. Once I received a set of temporary acrylic nails, and self-adhesive nail diamantes.

Incidentally: I know one of the girls who dyed their hair blue for Marc Jacobs two seasons ago. She got a handbag. Jacobs has yet to book her for any subsequent show.

From "PhillyLass":
So, for those shows that pay cash money, what happens to the clothes? They can't sell them, can they? So, who gets to snag them?

It's one of the persistent mysteries of fashion. Some houses keep runway samples because they are the only extant iterations of their nascent lines, and they will become production prototypes. Some keep them to send to magazines for editorials. Some keep them just because — in which case you might be able to bat your eyelids and flatter and beg for a gorgeous pair of shoes or a dress you know you'd totally rock. I tend to have good luck with shoes. When they're a designer's own, and not some random borrowed/sponsored pair, you can often get some person with a headset to say "Just take them..."

I think, very occasionally, samples survive being weeded-out by grabby models, editors, and design team underlings long enough to get rounded up and sold in actual sample sales.

From "hammerimissu":
What a waste. Why are you in this industry if you admit its vacant and abuses human life via sweat shops and people who pay up the twat for "knockoff of something old" clothes.

I understand that this was more of a rhetorical gesture than a question, but it's still a sentiment I think about. Often.

The thing is, I don't believe fashion is "vacant", or at least that it's not always and necessarily so. I've met makeup artists with law degrees, refugee-from-academia stylists, and editors with genuine booksmarts. Miuccia Prada is a political science Ph.D.; I defy anyone to call her an intellectual slouch. There is creative talent housed in the rarefied echelons of high fashion — whether it's embodied by the sample sewer who apprenticed for seven years to get her padstitching up to couture standards, the designer who dreams about Proust and ancient Greece and the use of lustre in Islamic pottery, or the critical mind who parses these labors for the public. I refuse to be told that caring about fashion is for stupid women. In fact, I think that the main reason fashion is not always considered intellectually respectable is because it's largely run by, and concerns, women. Modeling is one of the few areas where women out-earn men: if I'm stupid for participating in it, I'd be far dumber to turn it down.

Not every label is run by competent, interesting, sharp-minded people. And there are plenty of commercially successful lines where the folks in charge are utterly craven. But I do meet people in this industry who have more stamps on their passports than a squad of diplomatic attachés, and who can talk about art or ancient Egypt or Italian cooking (in several fluent languages!) as well as they can hemlines.

I don't have an answer to the sweat shops. The raises-all-boats theory is crap; the economics of an industry that plucks some girls from third-world countries out of poverty and into something like fame, at the same time as it indirectly employs hundreds of thousands of other third-world girls at starvation wages, are difficult for me to weigh in on. The apparel industry has long been marked by inequality, and even a kind of systematized woman-on-woman economic violence: Victorian mill girls and garment workers also worked in underpaid and dangerous conditions to make finery for fabulously wealthy women. For all I know, so did the women who made the Roman senators' wives their purple-edged stolas.

When you buy an overpriced designer dress, at least you know that in addition to paying for the brand's imputed "value", and its marketing, and all the rest of that crap, you're also paying for centuries-old Italian silk mills to stay in business, and for retirement benefits for sewers who live middle-class lives in France. When you buy a knockoff or a chain-store cheapie, you're probably just propping up Chinese sweatshops (unless it was made in Cambodia, in which case: buy mall offerings early and often!). Not that I can manage to avoid chain stores on my earnings.

From "pisces":
How do girls break into the industry?

You meet an agency scout who takes an interest. Other tried-and-true methods include sending Polaroids to an agency, or attending an open call. Whatever you do, do not go on America's Next Top Model. Avoid modeling scams like Barbizon, John Robert Powers, and John Casablancas. And don't pay for professional "portfolio" pictures when you don't have an agency.

From "NotEvenSlightly":
Have you watched America's Next Top Model, and if so, does any of the advice and training they give have anything to do with being a working model? I prefer to think that Tyra is just crazed with power, obvs, but would like to hear your take on it.

Well, the funny thing about all the "woe is ANTM it's nothing like real modeling" bullshit is that the whole premise of the show just apes the industry practice of sending newly signed models on what're called test shoots — imitation editorials where you and the photographer get to keep the resulting images for your respective books. Of course, most test shoots involve zero-to-minimal hair and makeup, clothes from the stylist's closet (or things she's purchased to return at the shoot's end), plain studio backgrounds and/or simple outdoor settings. Not the prosthetic-nosed, race-switching, body-painted, couture-dress-wearing, Photoshopped, elaborately wigged, bizarro images ANTM challenges — God bless Ken Mok! — bring into this world. Never once have I had to walk on a rotating catwalk, or pose on a treadmill as if I were running from the fashion ghoul as embodied by Miss Jay, or make myself look like a crime victim, without "actually just look[ing] dead." But it's a fun bit of escapism.

From "dingosmom1":
Do the models have to pay all their airfare and rent, trainfare? If not, do their agents negotiate it for them? I read that agency fees in Paris are 70%, it seems you'd be paying to model if you also had to pay living expenses. It also seems the agency should earn their keep somehow!

Yes, we pay all our own expenses. And agencies have zero incentive to make your travel or living costs any cheaper than necessary: each day you stay in a given market doesn't cost them anything, but there's a chance you might work, and if you do, they'll get a cut. Agencies are also known to shamelessly overcharge on rent for the models' apartments they own (think five models sharing a 1BRM, spending $30-$40/night each), as well as for deducting mysteriously large sums for things like "photocopying" and messenger fees. That plus the fact that my last magazine editorial, which was shot for a Hearst-owned title you've probably read, paid me the stunning daily rate of 124.17 Euros (before agency commission!) means I eat a lot of pasta-and-pesto. I'm in debt to my agencies in two out of three European markets right now; I'm in the black in L.A. and New York City. It's an uneasy feeling.

Models need a friggin' union. Or Carmen Kass!

From "imnotsureibelievethis":
i guess my main question is: why are you anonymous? I'm a bit of a skeptic; mainly because of my own experiences in this vapid business, full of "girls" who go to casting after casting without a thought passing through. [...] I guess my main question is: where were the Tatiana's when I was working? It would have been a much less lonely job.

I'm anonymous because I fear professional repercussions. How would it benefit me to crow about having attended university, however briefly, or having read a given book or seen a movie? There are some people who just don't want to hear that from a model, and unfortunately they bear on my career. So I generally tell people I started modeling out of high school — it's simpler — and if I run into one of those assholes who likes to drop oh-so-obscure literary references around the unlettered models, I'll try and parry them back just to see the look on his face (it's nearly always a he).

Agencies and clients tend to like models young and pliant. I wouldn't book jobs because of this column, so I'm going to do my best to keep my identity a secret.

While thinness is often associated with malnutrition, many thin (even anorexic) people are properly nourished—and even obese people can be malnourished. Not only is the health screening impractical, but in America, such measures might be illegal. An employer can't fire someone from a job or discriminate against that person because he or she has a disease.

Anorexia is a complex psychological disorder; young women can no more "catch" anorexia from seeing thin models than they can "catch" depression from watching an actress cry in a film. Furthermore, if thin models somehow caused anorexia, why is the disease so rare? Hundreds of millions of American girls and women see thin actresses and models every day in the media, yet fewer than one percent of them develop anorexia. Decades of research suggest that the disorder is primarily genetic, not environmental.

Designers, modeling agencies and politicians are among those who will be invited to the event. In November, a contest called the "Top Model of Colour" competition will kick off in the UK. Sola Oyebade, managing director of Mahogany, the model agency behind the contest, says,"There are so many good quality black and mixed race-models that would be great, but the agencies and the clients are not willing to take a gamble. Non-white people make up about 30 per cent of the population of London but we don't even make up 1 per cent of the models."

Clearly something's gotta give, but is a summit really going to be the catalyst? It's not just that the racism is pervasive — no one seems to be ashamed!

Maya Schulz, managing director at Acclaim models, an agency that specializes in choosing models from an ethnically diverse range of backgrounds, said: "I always find it more difficult putting black faces out there. The racism you come across is not underlying, it's blatant. People will say things like 'Don't send any more black models', and one designer even said black people didn't suit his clothes. And we're not talking about small designers here; it's all the big ones. The colour debate is far more important than the size-zero debate, but it's hardly had any coverage."

Modelling Agencies Blamed For Racist Culture [The Independent]