A Short Trip Through My Portfolio, With Sequins

Joan Didion opens her essay "Goodbye To All That" with the declaration that it is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. But with my career, it was in fact just the opposite: More »

I Am The Anonymous Model

Modeling was my first job, and is to date the one I've held the longest. My final stint, which started in Paris and wound through cities almost too numerous to mention, spanned almost two years. Then, this summer, I quit. More »

Modeling And The Tragedy Of Karen Mulder

The news that '90s supermodel Karen Mulder was arrested in Paris for making death threats to her plastic surgeon could be written off as, at worst, a punchline, or at best, the latest expression of an unbalanced woman's erratic behavior. More »

Top 10 All-Time Model/Runway Mishaps

For those who can't get enough of model dodgem, I took a trip through the YouTube to dredge up only the most interesting variety of catwalk pratfalls and near-misses. More »

"Not Rape Epidemic": The Modeling Industry Is Anything But Immune

The modeling industry sets up camp at the crossroads of youth & beauty and age & wealth — and moreover, it's an arena where those qualities cleave to the most predictable gender and power divide.

In Which Tatiana Discovers That Fashion Week Is Kind Of Great

I realize I use these column inches more often than not to write about the drawbacks of being a model — the situations and encounters that make me feel, as casting superagent James Scully said earlier this summer, “Like [a] greyhound we plan to shoot after a race.” Today is a little different. More »

September Vogue: Last Ladymag Standing (And Jumping)

September Vogue jumps out on the news stand for all the wrong reasons. On her fourth cover in three years, Keira Knightley's hair looks reminiscent of a baby primate (though not in a cute way), her pose is all wrong for the Balenciaga she's wearing, and her expression has a whiff of self-consciousness and striverdom about it — like some vogueing drag queen's idea of a Vogue cover. Which means the stuff inside must be doubleplusungood! Although my esteemed colleague, Dodai, has already brought you two of the issue’s more bizarre contributions to the fall fashion discourse, fear not! There’s still plenty left to see from the summit of the fall ladymag pileup. Keira Knightley in Berlin, Sasha Pivovarova in scarlet and alabaster Alexander McQueen, Caroline Trentini in the only Caroline-jumps-for-Condé editorial that has ever made any sense, and what the cover shot would be if this were a real fashion magazine, as we take deep breaths, don sensible footwear, and scale, together, Mount Vogue, after the jump. More »

September Marie Claire: Some Say Fashion, It Is A Hunger, An Endless Aching Need

September’s Marie Claire does this one thing that immediately endears me to its cause: the mag identifies the models in its three 10-page fashion stories! Each girl gets a teensy little Q&A — kind of like the ones in Playboy that tell you curvaceous Kristy’s favorite color and college major — wherein we learn that Anna from Illinois once burst into tears on a shoot, Eva from Krnow dreams of being a lawyer, and Valerie from St. Petersberg would like to meet J.D. Salinger. Models! We’re just…like…you? Let's investigate, after the jump. More »

September Allure: I Wish You Would Step Back From That Ledge, Julia Stegner

With a slender 27 pages of fashion editorial, this September's Allure doesn't break any records (not that my shoulders didn't appreciate the reprieve; lugging these monstrous issues on the subway sucks). After the jump, I parse the modeling in the baby of the fall ladymag litter: Julia Stegner almost falls off a cliff, Raquel Zimmerman lends her face to floury powder and brick-red blush, and Ingune Butane channels Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface. More »

September Harper's Bazaar: Let's Go To The Rodeo With Feathers On Our Faces!

11 whopping fashion stories crowd the September Harper’s Bazaar, counting the wacky Obama-themed Tyra story and the token "goofy" story that has become the magazine’s signature. (This month, Bazaar editors asked designers to pose, with models, as a character of their choosing — Michael Kors picked Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, Alber Elbaz hammed it up as James Bond, and Donna Karan chose, weirdly, a hurricane. And then there's Karl Lagerfeld!) Bazaar’s 101 pages of fashion is, incidentally, 30 more pages than Vogue’s September issue. Not that anyone is counting! Join me, your Anonymous Model, after the jump: it's time for modeling workshop. More »

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

American Vogue’s online reality series, Model.Live, unveiled its first episode today, and I’m sad to report that it’s not the irretrievably tacky, so-bad-it’s-good, corporate-sponsored suckfest I was hoping it would be. (Hoping? I am a mean-spirited person.) The series — which, at $3 million (or around $31,000 a minute) is some of the most expensive online television yet produced — follows three models as they navigate the discombobulating month-long global merry-go-round that is the fashion weeks of New York City, London, Milan, and Paris. More »

Size Zero Models Welcome At London Fashion Week

The news that fashion models will not be required to pass health checks before working in London Fashion Week got me thinking about the perennial skinny models issue. You know, the size zero conspiracy my cohorts and I cooked up. (True story: we were totally just trying to found a diet support group, but then this Brazilian started in with the calorie counting, someone’s hips went down to 33.5”, and a Lithuanian was all like, ‘We are in all of the magazines, and we work with all of the clients, so why don’t we just hoodwink untold millions of the world’s young women into associating thinness with beauty?’, and then Vogue booked her and I guess we all just went a little crazy for a while there.) More »

September Elle Is Full Of Double-Jointed Models, Dumb Fall Trends

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.

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September Glamour Actually Makes Fashion Fun — And Freckled

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. Below, Tatiana trains her model's eye on the fashion editorials in the newest issue of Glamour...and finds a lot to be encouraged by.

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What Part Of "In A Different City Every Week" Is Giving Away My "Relationship Tentacles," Asswipe?

Don't hate Tatiana because she's beautiful.* It's summer and she, mere mortal like the rest of us, has invested an excruciating number of its precious hours in the courtship of a dude who turned out to be a total dick! And just in time for her agency to step in and remind her she is officially "fat" by the standards of September's New York Fashion Week. In today's Modelslips, Tatiana re-learns that lesson about why it's a bad idea to look for dudes immature enough to think you're perfect, because if you're sufficiently close to perfect — and Tatiana is, bless her heart — you'll have them fooled for long enough to get high on that oxytocin-sired hallucination of soulmatehood and consequently, become understandably alarmed when they abruptly shake off your hand and ask to use your phone to call another girl. (Wait, seriously Tatiana? You fell for a dude without a cell phone?) (And who exactly decided "9/11 was an inside job" was the new pickup line?) Anyway, after the jump… what happened when Tatiana tried to take a romantic European vacation with her pen pal, The Guy. (Feel free to call him "The Boy"; he was born in the mid-'80s.) More »

Ruslana Korshunova, No Longer Anonymous

Over the weekend a successful young fashion model touched off a minor media circus by killing herself. Almost immediately, details of the beautiful life cut tragically short swooped in to fill blanks; the apocryphal tale of her "discovery" by benevolent industry scouts; her melancholy poems; how she'd been watching "Ghost" the night before. It was mostly bullshit. But there is something about great beauty that inoculates us to the more mundane realities of life, which was that Ruslana Korshunova was an immigrant from a desperately poor country who came to New York at a scarily young age to make money to send back to her parents. In that way she was no different from the tens of thousands of kids from former socialist states whose parents send them thousands of miles to work in restaurants and gas stations. It's generally more legal, and the living conditions a little nicer, but as our anonymous model columnist Tatiana has discussed before in this space, the people governing a model's fate are no less predatory and self-interested, and the experience is only slightly less anonymous. Herewith, Tatiana's initial thoughts on the suicide of a pretty girl from Almaty:

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Dear Models Of The World: Are We All Too Busy Starving Ourselves To Form A Union Already?

Modeling. I'll be honest: I didn't really give much of a shit about the plight of its willowy practitioners before I met Tatiana. Now, Tatiana's going to be okay: she's doing this to travel and learn and meet the sort of people you wouldn't meet performing the other types of slave labor to which educated young twentysomethings generally subject themselves, but the rest of them remind me of all those once-promising high school basketball players languishing in foreign club teams and living paycheck to paycheck in incredibly cramped quarters with nothing getting them up in the morning beyond the whole "Well, I've held out this long…" rationale. Which is to say, models are just like us. Except! In what other industry can your boss get away with telling an 108-pound cash cow like Coco Rocha: "We don't want you to be anorexic, we just want you to look it"? I mean, sure, it's one thing to "look" anorexic to me, an objective observer, but this is an industry, as we found out yesterday, in which the conventional wisdom holds that Karolina Kurkova is "fat"? Anyway, after last week's harrowing experience volunteering for the Plutocracy, Tatiana came up with some good ideas for reforming the business. We really do hope the agencies of the world take her advice! More »