Britain's Missing Top Model, which premiered in the UK in the summer of 2008, began airing on BBC America last night. All of the 8 contestants are white. All of the 8 contestants are thin. All of the 8 contestants are conventionally pretty. Each one of them says, at some point in the first episode, that they think they're attractive. These are not women with confidence issues. (Debbie, who lost most of her arm in a bus crash, has posed for Playboy.) The judges make some good points — one says, being disabled is part of the world, "Why shouldn't it be part of fashion?" But while watching these women — all pleasing to the human eye — I thought, well, it's not much of a stretch to find beautiful people beautiful. Wouldn't an eye-opening show feature women with cleft palates or port-wine stains — visible differences which tend to make people uncomfortable?

Then again, maybe the fact that they're all pretty is the point? These are not your "average" disabled people, just as models are not "average" people. The contestants want a shot in an industry in which aesthetics is everything, so, naturally, they're going to be aesthetically pleasing. Maybe the point is: "I'm pretty, I just happen to have one arm, but don't let that stop you from hiring me to model designer shoes." The problem is, that doesn't make for very dramatic television.

Take Debbie, for instance. when asked if she'd show off her disability, she was totally fine with it. So her photo shoot was pretty boring.

And Sophie, who survived a what she describes as a "violent" car accident and is paralyzed, also had a boring (gorgeous, but anti-climatic) photo shoot.

At the critique, the judges said one nice thing and one critical thing about every model's picture, which Jenny from Seattle found frustrating. "Don't patronize me," she spat.

The judges couldn't even agree on what the show is really about. Two deaf women are in the final 8, but the judges wondered: Shouldn't the winner be visibly disabled? Or isn't that part of the point: Not all disabilities are visible? In the argument, the disabled judged fought for a girl with a visible disability, but was outvoted by the other able-bodied judges, and the contestant the disabled judge liked was sent home, and the judges had to watch her limp out the door. Why not listen to the one disabled judge? Dumb.

Frankly, the show would be more successful, more interesting if it followed one disabled model and her trials and triumphs in trying to get work — as well as how she was encountered in the fashion industry. Because watching the judges niggle and nit-pick over eight beautiful women is tiresome.

In July 2008 a reader spotted a Nordstrom catalog featuring a model in a wheelchair. I'd much rather watch a series about how this came to be and follow as someone, Michael-Moore style, asks execs why we haven't seen other catalogs/ad campaigns do the same. Maybe the world is "missing" a "top" model to tell that story.

Earlier: On BBC Show, Disabled Models Learn Same Lessons As Any Other Models

The reality series originally aired last year summer in the UK (if you want to know who the winner was, click here). As Alessandra Stanley writes for The New York Times, though it supposedly is "designed to raise the profile and confidence of disabled women," it actually "makes a spectacle of their hunger for acceptance."

Though many of the contestants have visible physical disabilities — one is in a wheelchair, one is missing an arm — one young lady, Kellie, is deaf. Apparently that's a boon for a model. Stanley writes:

If anything, the absence of communication may even be an asset in the modeling world. Mr. Phang says to a photographer, "It's kind of nice working with deaf girls because there's not those sort of irritating questions."

But the Times makes it sound like Britian's Missing Top Model doesn't actually break down any barriers in modeling — it's really the same old, same old: Thin is in.

"Rebecca's disability didn't cause me any problems," a photographer says after shooting Rebecca, 27, a stunning brunette who was born with a deformed hip and wears a prosthetic leg. "It was just the fact she's not really in shape. Most models are pretty toned, slimmer, more agile."

Disabled, And Seeking Acceptance in Fashion [NY Times]

Earlier: You Wanna Be On Top
TV Show Searches For Disabled Model
Related: Britian's Missing Top Model [ONTD]

"[If anyone was offended], I apologize because that was not my intent… It's my number one passion in my life to stretch the definition of beauty. I listen to many heartbreaking stories of women who thought they would be happier if they looked different. I want every girl to appreciate the skin she's in."

It's clear that Tyra had good intentions and meant to celebrate diversity, Hawaii and hapa people. And it's true that the photoshoot did not involve blackface in yhe historical sense of the word — as a minstrel-type of impersonation.

The fact remains: Race is a construct, and Tyra and her team acted as though it has a rigid structure. She used certain signifiers — hair, skin — to indicate a model's racial makeup. If you have brown skin, does that mean you are black? Tell it to all the light-skinned black people out there, or to someone from Fiji or South America. Does wearing something made of grass make you Polynesian? If you wear feathers on your head, are you Native American?

Also, how can you look at this and think that it's okay?

But It's just fashion, right? It's just about an interesting picture. Mixed people are cool, looking mixed is cool. As one blogger noted, "it's not like the girls were made to pull their eyes back while standing in the middle of a rice paddy or wearing blackface while eating watermelon." But as I wrote in October, race is not silver eyeshadow, a bubble skirt or couture gown. It's not something you put on for a photo shoot to seem "edgy." Race is not trendy; you can't take off when you feel like it. Tyra apologized to those offended, but not for the concept… Does that mean we'll see her do it again?

Tyra Banks Apologizes Over Bi-Racial Episode of 'ANTM' [StyleList]
'America's Next Top Model' biracial photo shoot: Uh, been there, done that [Zap2It]
Today on 'The Tyra Show': Tyra Addresses Biracial Controversy... And MY Headline! [BuddyTV]

Earlier:

ANTM: Biracial Is The New Black (Face)
ANTM Models In Oh-So-Trendy Blackface Shoot
ANTM: A Mildly Autistic Girl In Mildly Offensive Blackface
Oh No They Didn't: French Vogue Does Blackface

The agency claims that it "aims to raise the standard of models to a new height: beauty achieved from the perfect balance and unity of spirit, mind, and physical body," and that promoting Christian values through the models on its roster is a way to promote a spiritual beauty of sorts, as well as a way to help models find their own inner beauty in an industry that is notoriously ugly to women. I suppose it's not entirely strange to consider that some models would be more comfortable working for an agency that fell in with their religious views, but I'm not quite sure how any agency is going to promote a religious viewpoint when their models are actually working, as the only statements models are typically allowed to make on the runway are those presented by the clothes they're given to wear.

Christian-based talent agencies, film distributors, and record labels are nothing new, but most people involved in such endeavors are putting out Christian material that is clearly aimed at a specific audience. Christian rock bands carry religious themes in their songs and often play to largely Christian crowds, and the same can be said of Christian films and Christian novels. Surely there are already many Christian models (and models of all religions) working today, but how the Christian model will promote religion while doing her job is yet to be seen, and it will be interesting to see how the agency secures high profile jobs and campaigns for their clients without compromising the values they seek to endorse.

Christian Modelling Agency Preaches Spiritual Fulfillment To The Fashion World [Guardian]

Fast's Managing Director, Amanda May, tells BBC News that "There was a team change and we're glad we stuck to our vision. "The decision to use the fuller girls is something we have been talking about."

Fast had previously worked with model Hayley Morley, who wears a size 12, for a photography exhibition, titled "All Walks Beyond the Catwalk," which, according to the Guardian "features models aged 18 to 65, in sizes 8 to 16, wearing outfits created by young London designers," and "aims to change the narrow vision of beauty offered by the fashion world."

Part of Fast's motivation for putting larger models on the runway, aside from making a statement regarding the celebration of all body types, might have been to make a point about his own clothing line, which Alice Fisher of the Guardian notes has been criticized in the past for only appearing to be wearable by the super-thin. "It was interesting to be shown how wrong that is," Fisher admits, though she also says that the addition of larger models also served to point out how thin some of the other models were (and the need for different undergarments/better support bras for women with larger breasts, which apparently weren't provided.)

Still, though the casting might not have been a perfect success, it's encouraging to see designers like Fast stick it to both critics and naysayers within his own creative team in order to put a wider range of models on the runway. In doing so, he's able to showcase a variety of models—and, perhaps, attract a variety of customers, as well. As May notes, "There's this idea that only thin and slender women are able to wear Mark's dresses and he wanted to combat that. We wanted women to know they don't have to be a size zero to wear a Mark Fast dress - curvier women can look even better in one."

London Fashion Week: Catwalk Row Over Size 12 Models [Guardian]
Larger Models Spark Fashion Row [BBCNews]

As Margaret wrote, Crystal Renn is the highest-paid plus-sized model in America. Discovered at 14 and told to basically change her body, Renn went on to a successful modeling career - but also a serious struggle with anorexia and bulimia. Eventually, Renn - and her body - couldn't take it anymore, and with her agency's support, she segued into plus-size modeling, where she's a major star. And while I'm generally skeptical of 23-year-old's memoirs, as a Salon interview with our friend Kate Harding shows, she's got some important things to say in Hungry: A Young Model's Story of Appetite, Ambition, and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves .

Asked how the industry can change, Renn says,

I think, ideally, it starts with sample sizes. A Size 10 for the sample sizes would be a great start — up from, like, what? A 2? A 0? That's a huge step. Then they could pin the clothes to very thin girls, the ones who are naturally thin, but curvier girls, like a size 14, could get into them. I know that, because I'm a 12, and I've been able to get into sample sizes — you know, with a lot of effort [laughs] — but I do editorials all the time, and sometimes we have to work with it. And you can absolutely pin the clothes down. I have size 24s pinned to me all the time. So I think a 10 would be a great starting place so no one could say, "Oh, well, the sample sizes are the reason we don't hire bigger girls."

As to her ultimate hopes, Renn is pragmatic.

Nobody should look on the runway and see only 14s. That's ridiculous. I think there should be all different sizes on the runway, and I think that should be what's modern. Let's stop making one body type cool for a decade and start to say all shapes and sizes are accepted — and not only accepted, but absolutely ideal, the most beautiful. Health! Health is the most beautiful.

And that's a crucial point: the idea is not merely a token spread per year featuring only plus-size models (like the upcoming Glamour shoot, in which Renn features) but to showcase a range of healthy body types. It's important to remember, of course, that Renn is still a model: at size 12, she's not large by average American standards, and her proportions are, of course, "conventional." She has the genetic gift of being photogenic that few women possess. And the message to take away should not necessarily be, "ooh, I should be a model, too!" -I'd hate for this story to glamorize another unrealistic scenario - but that a few more young girls could be, and make a success, without needing to starve themselves. (And as an interview with Glamour insta-star Lizzie Miller shows, the typical plus-size experience is less exalted.) My point is, this should still not necessarily be the dream - and that's a bigger issue - but it's wonderful that she's shown one can be healthy and true to one's self, and achieve hers.

Dying To Be The Next Gisele [Salon]

Lizzie Miller's Glamour Shot [LA Times]

Related: Crystal Renn Battles Anorexia, Finds Success As "Plus-Size" Model
Coming This Fall: More Naked Fat Ladies In Glamour!

[New York, September 8. Image via Getty]

NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 08: Models of the Models International Agency pose for photos at the Models International Agency's 'Return Of The Supermodel' at the Campton Gallery on September 8, 2009 in New York City. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images)

Renn, who is America's highest-paid plus-size model, was discovered by a modeling agent at age 13 and told she could be on the cover of Vogue... if she just lost 70 pounds. She starved herself down to a size 0 and secured a modeling contract, but was still told she was too fat. On Sunday, she told The Guardian:

"I did everything: I didn't eat, I exercised, but I couldn't make myself the shape they insisted on. Eventually someone suggested I become a plus-size model."

She found greater success after regaining the weight. First, Anna Wintour asked her to appear in Vogue (in the "shape issue," of course). The shoot led to a non-weight related appearance in Italian Vogue, then several other Italian fashion magazines and four international editions of Vogue. In addition to being featured in several ad campaigns, she walked down the runway with Jean-Paul Gualtier for the finale to his prêt-à-porter 2006 collection in Paris. Most recently, she appeared in Glamour's May bathing suit spread:


She'll also be featured in the magazine's "naked fat girl extravaganza" in November.

Renn says people in the fashion world are becoming more interested in showing "the natural shapes a woman's body takes when it's not being deprived of food," but we're skeptical, as one fashion spread featuring plus-size models in their underwear does not a revolution make. However, Renn's agent Gary Dakin of Ford Models, tells The Guardian there is reason to believe that this time things will be different:

"I have been in this business for 11 years and I have seen this debate ripple through the fashion world a number of times," he said. "This time, though, the momentum of the debate feels different."

Big Is Now Beautiful For Models On The Catwalk [The Guardian]

Earlier: Glamour Tries Not To Make A Big Deal Of Its Plus-Size Model
Coming This Fall: More Naked Fat Ladies In Glamour

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

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


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


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


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


All images via Made in Brazil

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

[New York, August 5. Image via Splash]

(Click to enlarge.)

With the lines between fashion, eroticism, and porn becoming less and less clear, it seems perfectly on point for a sexy slew of stylized skin mags to arouse new curiosity.

While most mainstream American magazines tend to be rather modest, magazines like French Vogue (see Lara Stone, etc.), Purple Fashion and Dazed & Confused will often print "artsy" nudes.

Kaufman adds Paradis, the biannual "magazine for the contemporary man"; Jaques, a "fashion-conscious erotic mag" with a no-airbrush policy; the rather self-explanatory Butt Magazine; "smut-meets-art" pub S Magazine and Purple Sexe to the list. These publications are "high-end," and along with the bare breasts of model Lily Cole, you'll find an interview with Damien Hirst and photography by Juergen Teller.

It's interesting to think about the subtle intricacies that make a nude photograph "highbrow" or "fashion." When Agyness Deyn poses without clothes, is it automatically a fashion shoot? When a woman poses for Straight Stuntin, is it automatically porn? (I also wonder about the sexualization we place on womens' bodies; a woman with D-cup breasts can have just as much or as little sexual experience as a woman with an A-cup, but chances are, we'd read a nude photograph of a woman with D-cups as "sexier" or "raunchier." And do some people automatically think a naked woman is wilder, sexier, raunchier if she is black?)

And why is it that crotch-centric American Apparel ads can be so distasteful, but the crotch-centric cover of Paradis (with strategically placed peacock feather) can be so pretty?

A New Wave Of Erotic Mags Blur The Line Between High-Style and Smut [Refinery 29]

Earlier: Advertising Taking Cues From Porn: What Is The World Cumming To?
Why French 'Vogue' Is Better Than American Vogue, Part I: Boobies
The Emperor Model Has No Clothes
American Apparel Will Satisfy All Your Crotch-Covering Needs (But Just Barely)

To prime the pump:

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

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

Other questions? Post them below.

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

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

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

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


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


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

Photo: Elina Kechicheva


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

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


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

My nose doesn't actually look like that.

Photo: Stefania Paparelli

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

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

Photo: Stefania Paparelli

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

Photo: Daniel Bernauer

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

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

Photo: Vassilis Karydis

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

Photo: Toni Torres

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

Photo: Russ Flatt

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

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

Photo: Michael Waring

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

Photo: Liz Hamm

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

Photo: Liz Hamm

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

Photo: Liz Hamm

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

Photo: Kylie Coutts

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

Photo: Kylie Coutts

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

Photo: Kylie Coutts

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

Photo: Fabio Chizzola

See Some Shots From My Portfolio Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My name is Jenna Sauers.

I smiled, and told him that I would.


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


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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. First there's the rampant Photoshoppery. Not just on the ladies — take a look at the diamonds under the word "dimepiece" on the cover.


2. The models. Though the publication delivers a mix of interviews with rappers and half-clothed ladies, the models are actually the stars, and there's an interview with each one. After spending so much time looking at the lean, curveless cookie-cutter jumping mannequins that women's magazines offer, it's oddly refreshing to see a completely different body type on display. Not just on display — fetishized, sexualized, celebrated. These women — who would never be seen in Vogue — are superstars on these pages. And as sexy as these poses are — as butt-focused as the magazine is — there's actually very little nudity. Nipples are covered; thongs and underwear are worn.

Although: To be clear: This is a magazine featuring women with big butts. That is why it exists. It's not high-brow, it's not intended to be social commentary. It's what you call spank bank material. It reduces women to parts. Still: It's fascinating to see these women posing with confidence, since most of the world tells them that they are not the right height, size or shape to model.

3. Ethnic diversity. More than you might think.

4. "My Girlfriend Got A Girlfriend." While crudely illustrated with one woman holding a fork while between the other woman's legs, this interview deals with lesbian misconceptions and stereotypes. In addition, this magazine also has a story called "Why Gay Hip-Hop/Rap?" which argues that rappers have stolen style cues from Liberace and Elton John and a gay rapper would be "hip-hop's chance to live out its true meaning — that is; a voice to the voiceless, an all-inclusive genre which transcends…"

5. The cupcake diet, recommended by a model named "Seven."

6. A model with what seems to be a visible Cesarean scar.

7. "The 10 Model Commandments," which reads like a Crap Magazine Essay From A Dude. While some of these assertions - "nobody likes a liar," "nobody likes a thief" — are valid; the author loses me on number 6, with its Biblical "unsanitary female" whining.

[Florence, June 25. Image via Getty]

Girls present fashion of the label Miss Blumarine on June 25, 2009 in Florence, Italy during the 'Pitti Immagine Bimbo' fashion fair. The 69th children's fashion show, taking place from June 25 to June 27, showcases the spring/summer collection of 2010. AFP PHOTO DDP/TORSTEN SILZ GERMANY OUT (Photo credit should read TORSTEN SILZ/AFP/Getty Images)