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.

Tatiana is back! She's the anonymous model behind the tell-all fashion industry column "Modelslips," a feature I can't think about without getting distracted by the thought of the song "Molly's Lips," which has nothing to do with anything. Tatiana is feeling a little cranky these days. Sometimes it seems like every week is fashion week! And models? You know how she was just saying they aren't dumb? Yeah, she sorta takes that back a little. Herewith, a bit on how the model populace is responding to the candidacy of Barack Hussein Obama.

The industry is, after all, full of gay men whose , and immigrants who might think fondly of the notion that fellow foreigners also be allowed to access America's wealth of job opportunities. And didn't all those designers stand up poor Laura Bush?

Yes, well, sure. But the models? Zey are another story.

Once I walked all around Paris with a charming Pole who introduced herself after a disastrous casting ("I fucken' het dis shiit," she said, shooting me one of those baleful, Eastern European looks), told me she wanted to be a war correspondent, and shared the story of her roommate, a 17-year-old Arkansan who had somehow cheated on her boyfriend of three years with the director of her agency after less than a week abroad. Both the men were named William; the Arkansan, said the Pole, "Spends a lot of time crying and saying shiit like 'I love Billy but I have dis conneeeekshun with Bill.'" I thought I had made a friend for life — likes to read, check; finds castings often exasperating,check; finds examples of hapless late-teenaged decision-making funny, check — until we walked through Paris's gay district and saw two men holding hands.

"Disgusting," sneered the Pole. "I think all the mens like dis should be shot."

Well then! I thought. You'll have something to bond over with the insurgents!

Maybe I've just been lectured on the unconscionable evils of abortion by one too many blue-eyed small-town Argentines, and met one too many 5'10" rural Lithuanian teenagers who sneer at the idea that homosexuals can raise children, but modeling has actually forced me to question the notion that travel always broaden horizons. I know, I know, I am the same person who just wrote about models being smart and worldly and accepting etc. etc. The fact is that I'm pretty sure Kate Moss, for all her horizon-broadening, is fairly provincial but that she is nothing compared to a kid I met at LA Fashion Week.

Sometimes a mind will see only what it wants, no matter how you change the details of scenery. And sometimes, nothing reminds you just what gears domestic U.S. politics turn on like a trip to one of those cosmopolitan fashion epicenters where your days are otherwise full of expert eye shadow blending and the interrogation of the hemline and people who use edgy as if it had some concrete, timeless value.

Models often come from small towns in out-of-the-way places to which globalization has not been kind; places where political conservatism — and the more traditional strains of religion — can seem like a shelter from the storm of modernity. I remember a mother-daughter pair I met in New York, fresh from a small town near Orlando, who told me that the reason "things" are "the way they are" today is due to the fact that people no longer get their values from church. Exiting a go-see recently in Milan, I overheard another model telling her mother that inside, at the casting table, there had been seated a drag queen (whom the daughter referred to as "a tranny.") The mother paused for a long time.

"So he was probably gay, huh," she said quietly, as she tucked her 15-year-old's stilettos into her purse.

But nothing prepared me for last fashion week, in Paris, when every one of my American room-mates in our scuzzy 16th Arrondissement models' apartment revealed herself to be a Republican.

Late one evening, conversation between a mother-daughter pair from a small New Mexico town and an 18-year-old from the South side of Chicago had turned towards politics.

"I'm voting for Obama," I said off-handedly, no doubt sounding very tired after a day of castings and a fitting.

"Who's that? The black guy?" asked the mother.

"I liked Romney. I thought he was so inspiring — a young man with all these new ideas," gushed the Chicagoan.

The mother turned to me. "You know the problem with Obama, don't you?" she continued, her eyes beginning to narrow. "He won't put his hand over his heart or say the Pledge of Allegiance. If he's gonna wanna be president of my country —"

"Oh my God! That's terrible!" broke in the Chicagoan.

"Uh," I said, "That's not —"

"— My son fought in Afghanistan for this nation," continued the mother. "There are all these people who hate our way of life, who want to kill us. And I'm sick of people telling me this isn't a Christian country: It was founded by Christians with Christian values, how more Christian could you get? And Obama's worried saying the Pledge would send the wrong message? I can't vote for anyone who would disrespect my country like that."

"Uh, that's not true," I said. "Barack Obama says the Pledge. He learned it as a child. You can see him saying it, plus singing the anthem or what have you, on YouTube."

"What do you mean, I saw the pictures! He's just standing there, his hands by his sides. He's not saying no Pledge. And you know what else worries me: his father's a Muslim!" The mother drew back her lips as she said it, as if trying to avoid the contaminating syllables. "The very people who are attacking this country. Like I'd vote for one."

The mother then launched into a story of her experience facing a cancer scare without health insurance. Biopsies, a spree of short hospital stays, and various tests had left her $30,000 in debt.

"Well, Obama's health care policy would make every American eligible for insurance kind of like members of Congress get, so you wouldn't have to be uninsured," I pointed out.

"But he wants to give free care to illegals!" the mother brayed.

Around this point, the Chicagoan began talking about "the thing that really bothers me" — affirmative action. Apropos of very little, the mother shared her experiences observing "people wearing big, gold chains, and expensive clothing, like name brands," picking out "the best cuts of meat, and fried chicken," at the supermarket, to be paid for on EBT.

I'm ashamed to say that rather than counting off the studies that show students admitted into tertiary programs because of affirmative action outperform the overall undergraduate pool, plus the studies that show white women (such as the Chicagoan, and myself) are the group affirmative action has most benefited, or than regaling everyone with my own somewhat embarrassing story of the time, back when I was earning $10.50 an hour before taxes in one of those coastal, blue-state cities where rent happens to run around $1000 a month, when I went to an anonymous government building and was found to be too wealthy for food stamps, and rather than explaining to the mother of a model that a picture can tell less than the truth, I left the living room and quietly went to bed.

The mother was still talking about "the black guy" as I fell asleep.

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.

Fashion Week is over! But we'd be remiss if we let it slip back into the rosy glow of memory without telling you how it all ended for our anonymous model Tatiana. When last she caught up with us, she was contemplating the overthrow of global capitalism in the wake of a soul-sapping shift working as a fitting model for a Top American Designer. But you don't need Heidi Klum to tell you; fashion is fickle and Fashion Week Friday landed Tatiana firmly back on Team Third-World Exploitation And Pretty Shoes. Find out how and why she sold out in our final — but not final final: She'll be back to periodically dish from Paris and Milan and all those other exotic locales that host international fashion shows! — edition of Modelslips.

The last day of New York fashion week did not seem promising. I had a show and two presentations, one of which was slated to take eight (!) hours. Presentations differ from runway shows in that they're basically live modeling: you stand around in front of an audience in extremely uncomfortable footwear, until everyone gets bored and goes home, or the free booze runs out, whichever happens first.

Shows, at least, have a period of anticipation, and a moment of excitement when you finally do step on stage. Presentations tend to suck — you can't eat or drink, the assistants look askance at you if you have the temerity to ask for a bathroom break, half the time you're not even supposed to talk to the other models — and on top of everything, they're even more likely to be paid in trade because clients think presentations are easier than runway. As a makeup artist at my first presentation of the day put it, "Well, you guys just stand around, right?" (Hey guy, just a question, you don't happen to be receiving your remuneration for services rendered in dresses, do you? Okay, yeah, so fuck you.)

Makeup artist proceeded to glue my false eyelashes on upside-down. It took him three botched attempts to attach them correctly, and there was still a pointy ridge of fake-lash base that scraped my eyelid every time I blinked on the right side. Plus the lashes obscured my view of the ridicu-tanned Nicky Hilton when she came for her share of the bellinis.

But Friday afternoon, well, rocked. I was working for a designer — or, let's face it, design team— that, like Wednesday's, steals shamelessly from vintage fashions, then reproduces them at minimal cost in the massive industrial sweatshops of China and Indonesia, only to charge absurd markups back home, and is owned by a parent conglomerate that also holds a sheaf of other global brands. Its founder is noted for having once donated to Rick Santorum. Yet I can muster nary an ounce of outrage; everyone was just too damn agreeable!

The presentation was animated by a superior concept — instead of the usual stand-and-pose B.S., the models were paired off and told to move, walk, talk to each other, play with props, as we saw fit. My partner was a Russian spitfire named Anzhela, who held an eating competition with me backstage (I love it when clients remember to feed the models!) and kept my spirits high through the 18,000th outfit change.

Plus, did I mention there was champagne? And the clients didn't mind giving some to me?

But most importantly, you could just tell that this was a team that enjoyed working together. When the head designer asked the stylist if it wouldn't be better to change the outfit rotations so more models could be out front-of-house at one time, the stylist simply explained the reason for her current method, and the head designer backed off with an apologetic, "Oh, great! Don't let me micromanage you. That sounds perfect." After weeks of working in each other's pockets trying to make the collection coalesce, nobody seemed snippy, tired, or glaringly incompetent. Even the dresser with the cold mustered enthusiasm.

At the end of the night, when the audience had gone home, the makeup artists had packed up, the hair stylists had wheeled their suitcase of tools to the door, and the food was almost all eaten, there was still plenty of champagne, and it was clear that everyone present was intending to take off their shoes and start partying, right there in the showroom. This team had more energy after shooting its fashion wad than the Top American Designer's crew had built up even a mere day before the show. I wanted to stay and party with them.

But I didn't. I had a plane to catch, because I'm following the fashion whirl to different climes.

It's been fun being your New York Fashion Week mole, but I'm not sure I can keep up with posting almost-daily without either ham-fistedly blowing my cover or boring you all to tears. ("Castings: 12. Fittings: 1. Extremely long conversation about the bitches who steal our hard-earned clothes at our models' apartments. Saw framed letter from Vice President Cheney to Nicole Miller CEO Bud Konheim thanking the latter for a donation of 9/11 commemorative neckties. Lynne sent her best." True story. I digress...)

However, I don't see why I couldn't crank out a periodic update. I'll tackle your questions, rant, and disperse as much industry insider info I can wheedle in any seven-day period. So think up some things to ask me, mmmkay? And send them to Moe. Stay fierce, Jezebelles!

Welcome back to Modelslips, in which our anonymous fashion week model Tatiana "slips" about what it's really like trying not to "slip" while starving herself down the runways of New York's inimitable Fashion Week. Yesterday she worked a job for a Top American Designer! Sound glamorous? It was sooooo not.

Top American Designers don't cast models like me in their shows. They always plump for at least one token "new" girl with buzz, an Abbey Lee or a Karlie Kloss, but their true desire and budget leans toward the established set. Top American Designers cast Freja, Anja, Magdalena, Natasa P and Caroline T., all the many-voweled, leggy, Vogue-nabbing girls with abused hair, perfect skin (well, okay, Caroline T had a big zit on the side of her forehead yesterday morning), and bulging portfolios.

There's just one problem with casting your show directly from the tippety-top of the women's board: Olga, Agnete, Denisa, etc. tend to be rather in demand just now. You should be able to get each of them in for a brief fitting. But when you're a Top American Designer, you don't have one workroom, filled with a bunch of sweet Latina grandmothers who can set sleeves in their sleep, turning out garment after garment. You have things coming from this sample producer and that, knitwear arriving from thither and yon, things being tailored here and there, and the shoes you've designed being shipped from factories near and far.

In the days before a show, when your sleepless, overworked design team's various ideas are harvested from points of manufacture all over the world, you tend to need a little bit of time to make sure everything fits — one sample house's interpretation of a Size 2 is not necessarily another's — and that, you know, the colors match and the things with the highest markups, the shoes and bags, are properly thrown into relief by the outfits. Anabela's hardly going to stick around for hours and miss the Temperley show while your styling team sorts through a giant pile of items to come up with forty-odd runway looks. But for a hundred or so bucks an hour, I will.

My odyssey began simply enough. Early in the morning, I walked up to a nondescript workroom, full of people too important to follow smoke-free workplace legislation. Maybe fifteen minutes later, I tried on a look from a collection that appeared generally decent — wearable, mass-market-friendly, reworked 1970s and 1940s styles for people too scared to shop vintage — with the help of four dressers. The head stylist looked at me from the neck down, puffed out her lips, and vetoed it. I sat back down for the rest of hour while the team came up with something else.

It soon became apparent that this was not a happy showroom. Trying to be a team player, I complimented the cut of a shirt with a flattering cowl and fluttery sleeves. "This looks so, uh, vintage; it's beautiful," I murmured to one of the assistant stylists. "Oh, it's just a knockoff of something old," he said, glumly. When an assistant dared approach the head stylist, deep in contemplation of a wall of Polaroids, for a fabric choice, she wheeled around and said, "Do I look like I have eyes in the back of my head? A set of arms growing back there? Wait a fucking minute, okay?!" Forgetting she hadn't yet assigned me a pair of shoes to match the skirt and turtleneck I'd donned, she hissed at me to get something on my feet. "I won't even look at you girls without heels! I can't dress you without your fucking shoes. Which heels? The gold slingbacks!" The assistant asked again what size I was, and when I told him 38, he returned minutes later with a pair of 36.5s. Just then one of the polysyllabic names waltzed in, everyone's voices rose by a delighted octave, like a married couple interrupted mid-fight by the pizza guy, and I was dispatched to spend another thirty minutes reading the Times.

Looks proceeded at a snail's pace all day. Only the accessories man seemed genuinely happy; "I think we have a real something, a real edge, here with these bags," he said into a reporter's mini tape recorder. "We have the crocodile, the Italian calfskin, the pony. These are going to be huge for us." (Perhaps he hasn't heard?)Someone else spoke very carefully to the same reporter about the role of music in the life of the head designer. What kind of music? "Lately, Wyclef Jean."

I found it stupendous to imagine that all these people — these lounging, sighing, shiftless men and women, myself included, spending the day occasionally opening new bottles of water — were being paid. Sometimes, on the days when the creativity doesn't exactly crackle through the air, and the standing and walking and posing seems like slog for more reasons than just the too-small shoes, it hits me that this is an industry that tolerates horrendous, offensive levels of waste here in the Western upper echelons, at the same time as it diddles Third-World garment workers out of sadly needed pennies. Top American Designer, like numerous brands of its stature, is known for having its clothes made in the U.S. commonwealth of Saipan. MADE IN THE USA labels can be affixed; U.S. labor laws need not be followed. The head designer, present yesterday, makes a minimum of $14.5 million per annum, plus additional stock options, I read in WWD. The head designer is a billionaire.

The pace of the styling did not improve as the day wore on, and it was dark by the time I left to go home. Thank God for reading material, and Japanese food. Today, I'm back to walking in more shows — of course, I can't tell you which ones. At this point I'll gladly take the frenetic energy of a runway show, even one that pays in clothes, over the dead air in that room. It is really possible to suck all the fun and performance and beauty out of fashion by making it this giant, world-sourced, automated, machine of perpetual wealth. Bring on the shows; what they have in store for my hair notwithstanding.

Welcome back to Modelslips, in which our anonymous fashion week model Tatiana "slips" about what it's really like trying not to "slip" while starving herself down the runways of New York's inimitable Fashion Week. Today Tatiana has a big day at the tents...but earlier this week she learned some big bombshells at a not-so-impressive casting.

Normally, at castings, I see a selection of the same thirty or forty runway models in town. There's the cool Somali girl, the Sudanese raised in San Diego, Pole 1 and Pole 2, NYU girl privilege case, Texas Girl, various Australians and baleful Russians, and the girl with huge cheekbones who looks intimidating. The redhead reading The Kite Runner. The Canadian with the teeth. Every go-round, we sort ourselves into an order, and pick up with whatever light patter we broke off when the casting agent called us up at our previous encounter. Not so the casting held for the three designer finalists of Project Runway, Season 4.

I saw girls I'd never laid eyes on before: of the hundreds who must have had their moment on the tape-mark on the slick studio floor, I saw runway girls, plus girls, commercial girls, girls not in agency show packages, girls of every race and nationality and look, girls unlike any I'd seen anywhere before. A clusterfuck of a cattle call, marshaled by a manic little guy in a film festival t-shirt who was patently thrilled that his coffee-fetching job had on this day put him in such proximity with such a large group of pretty women. We had to sign non-disclosure agreements. (But believe me, it's not fear of the wrath of Bravo holding me back from naming names right now. If anything, it's the haunting thought of provoking a look of opprobrium in Tim Gunn's eyes.)

When I arrived, the stompy Amazon hordes had already filled the studio to capacity, and then filled the lobby of the building itself. People were talking about fire codes, and it was clear the folks in charge were totally unprepared to actually run a casting — as if they didn't know putting out the fashion equivalent of a bat signal would make every booker in town call up every model on his list and send them all to the same address at the same time.

The manic guy was manning the doors, and the line stretched down the block. I overheard a model letting out the secret on her BlackBerry as she exited — couldn't even get around the corner before yelling the news onto someone's voicemail — but for some reason, I didn't believe she had the top three right. For one thing, she kept on getting a designer's name wrong, in between protestations of how "OMG so COOL" it was to be there because she was "SUCH a HUGE FAN."

But I took my number, waited, and got Polaroided; I walked on the slippery floor, and I introduced myself loud enough for the camera. And there they were, three pairs of critical eyes sitting behind the table. A woman and two men. No dummy-fourth designer in evidence.

Maybe this isn't even such a big deal. Everyone who cares to will find out the final three this Friday, when the actual trio of shows takes place. When I walked out of the casting, I had the same instinct that earlier girl did: shout it from the Bryant Park steps, information wants to be free, etc. etc. But when I asked a friend yesterday afternoon if she wanted to know, given there are still six designers in the competition, she got a horrified look on her face and said, "Don't tell me! Don't tell me! I couldn't stand it if Christian were in it. I can't take another Jeffrey-wins moment."

It's called a spoiler for a reason. So I'm keeping my lips sealed, for now. I'll tell you more Friday — and in the meantime, if you really want to know, you can email Moe.

In other news, I met a Pole yesterday who begged me to go out with her because she was rooming with a bunch of models who don't drink because of the calories. Had they not heard of the drunkorexia movement? We proceeded to get rejected from some event at Beatrice Inn and drown our sorrows in nachos and margs. Models: during Fashion Week, we're just like US!

Welcome to Modelslips, Jezebel's inside guide to Fashion Week as seen through the gimlet eyes of our very own 35-inch hipped, gel-schellacked, damaged-hair and hotdog-eating Anonymodel "Tatiana." She's smart! She's thin! And she's BEHOLDEN TO NO ONE. But what she was this weekend was a little bored, and so, instead of tripping down the runway (no that's not her above left), she answered your questions.

The biggest difference between modeling and, well, other jobs I've had, is how much surprise is inherent to the former. It's kind of cool that, on a given day, you might get a call from your agent informing you that you're booked on the next plane to Prague. The perpetual motion of fashion pulls even people like me, the totally unknown, relatively-interchangeable, low-hanging fruit of the modeling world, to locales we might never have dreamed of, back at home. And then sometimes, it doesn't.

This weekend, Diane von Furstenburg had her show, as did Alexander Wang, Hervé Leger, Preen, Miss Sixty, Abaeté, Sass & Bide, Threeasfour, and Tuleh. Even Elisa Jimenez, that spit-marking freak, and Zulema, that crazy-eyed model thief, had shows. I was on option for a total of five jobs this weekend, including one or more of the above. An "option" is modelspeak for a Pretty Good Shot at a job — it means the client likes you enough to want to officially nab first dibs on you for a given time slot. Some options get upped to confirmations, some dematerialize for reasons unknown. Of course, as with grades, there is options inflation: Prada is notorious for putting hundreds of models on option for shows or campaigns and then picking only a half-dozen or none at all, in which case they'll just start their process over. But, in general, options are strong indications of interest, and over the long term as many as one half should come through. Given the rough formula of Jobs = Options X .5, I thought I'd be working all weekend.

Instead, my options collapsed like a house of cards. Every last one canceled. Even the designer who, right after his casting last week, called me back uptown and kept me in his studio for five semi-clothed hours, causing me to miss three other castings while I feverishly wriggled into and out of every scrap of cloth the man designed in the last six months — the designer whose wholesale volume I read in WWD just topped $1 million — dropped me. Five unpaid hours. Sometimes them's the breaks.

I'm afraid I consequently failed to do anything particularly model-esque this weekend. Aside from going to the usual castings, and hitting up a sample sale where I popped my Christian Dior ready-to-wear cherry to the tune of $200, I did not actually work. I did not get my hair done, nor was my makeup professionally applied. I did not walk as if my shoulder blades were tied together by an invisible thread, and I did not go to any crazy cocaine-and-champagne parties at sweaty clubs in the Meatpacking District where a quarter of the models were drinking water to feel "full." I did not see the Fug Girls or Fern Mallis or even Nolé Marin. I sat home watching crappy TV, went to a museum, and wondered why I keep reading about Max Azria talking up the apparel economy when my agency has BCBG on its blacklist for non-payment.

But I'm not in low spirits. I'm confirmed for various shows this week — heck, even Chanel Iman had a slow start to her New York fashion week last season — and if my five weekend options all fell through, then the formula should hold that nearly all of my remaining options should come through. Either that or I'll find out I'm going to Prague next weekend.

Instead of regaling you more with tales of my uneventful weekend, I took the opportunity to answer some of your (very thoughtful and much-appreciated!) questions.

1. From Wolf Biter: What's the most ridiculous direction you've ever been given on a photo shoot? How do you feel about nude shots? Who's the nastiest designer you've worked for? The kindest? Who is the most like Jacobim Mugatu?

I'm fine with nudity, personally. I consider it a point of professionalism to just wear the clothes you're given. The stylist picked them for her own unsearchable reasons, and it's not my job to say things like, "Oh, I'm not comfortable wearing a huge crucifix/exposing my left nipple/jumping around in those ridiculous Hammerpants." I'm a model. The least I can do is wear the clothes. Luckily enough my boyfriend has no issues with my chest appearing in the occasional fashion magazine. My professionalism finds its limits in only one area: depictions of smoking. I just don't see why I should advertise Philip Morris gratis.

The nicest designer I've ever met was also the most deeply annoying. Kris Van Assche stole my boy Hedi Slimane's spot at the helm of Dior Homme, and for this I will never forgive him. Hedi Slimane could design darts that made me weak at the knees. Hedi Slimane took a fashion backwater where the main creative activity was making the two-button-suit v. three-button-suit question seem new! each! season! and turned it into a phenomenon people actually paid attention to. Men in skirts! Madonna in menswear! Karl Lagerfeld lost over 88 pounds to wear Hedi Slimane's suits. That is a fucking fashion talent. And then his first assistant, Kris Van Assche, took over the label and made this.

So even though he seemed like the nicest guy in the world when I met him, I was still crying on the inside. Because just one season prior, I would've had the chance to touch Mr. Slimane.

2. A series from goodcheapfun: Is it funny or horrifying to watch a fellow model take a dive on the runway?

Horrifying. And always particularly horrifying because nobody ever steps in to help: at a lot of runway shows, the front row is seated just inches from where we walk. But there's a kind of diving-bell/don't-touch-the-strippers aspect to runway work. Whether it's Naomi Campbell plopping on her ass or just poor Kamila W. hitting the floor, nobody ever offers a hand. I live in fear of ever working a Vivienne Westwood show. I adore her aesthetic, and applaud her stance on hiring minority models. But she has a longstanding habit of expecting her models to walk in 9" fetish heels, heels that can and have broken ankles. I think I'd be too frightened to take a step.

3. Are underage models, i.e. 15, paid fairly or are they taken advantage of (and how the hell can they work in the US, don't we have child labor laws?)

I think the teens are paid as well as the models who've reached the age of majority. There's no such thing as youth rates for modeling jobs — but most of the youngsters have higher expenses, since they need to live in chaperoned apartments, and/or have a parent traveling with them, so they'll see less net from a $4,000 job than, say, I would (come on, someone, send a $4,000 job my way! I have consumer debt like the rest of y'all). In general, I think you're less likely to be sexually harassed on the job if your high school profession is modeling instead of the ubiquitous alternative, retail. I've done both. Modeling is full of gay men who tell you you're fierce and make ribald jokes you can actually laugh at. Retail is full of creepy managers constantly undressing you with their eyes and angling to cop a feel. As for child labor laws, I think modeling falls into the exceptions governing entertainment and the arts, so there are child and teen models the same way there are child and teen actors.

4. If models eat do they promptly throw it up?
I don't, and I've never knowingly lived with a bulimic model. The rates of eating disorders among models, for all the attention the issue has attracted, are actually relatively unstudied by academics. One extremely small, non-peer-reviewed study performed at the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2007 compared models with female undergraduates, and found that the prevalence of eating disorders did not differ significantly between models and students. However, models were significantly more likely to smoke, and twice as likely as students to report vomiting after meals. But all the models who admitted vomiting for weight control claimed to do so only occasionally, meaning they wouldn't necessarily all meet the criteria for a bulimia diagnosis.

5. From BadUncle: If I can toss in a question, I'd like to know if you ever feel proprietary about your image? Like, do you get angry or embarrassed by a client's concept or a photographer's execution?

One of the few reasons I still read American Vogue is for Jeffrey Steingarten's food column. Like lots of models, it's never been my favorite fashion mag because it's very repetitive month-to-month and even page-by-page in some cases. But Steingarten's a genius. In a piece about the truffle hunters of Piedmont, Italy, Steingarten asks one of his sources, a man who's coming to the end of his career, what he dreams might await him in heaven. The old man pauses, and says that all he would really, really like to see is all the truffles he's ever retrieved in one room. Just to see what they look like, all together in one place.

I have kind of the same feeling about my pictures. I sell the rights to my image for a living. I'm complicit in my own objectification, and I have no role in the creation or dissemination of the pictures I animate, yet I'm still unmistakably there. I do not feel proprietary about these images — I think you give up that right when you sign the agency contract — but I do feel a strange sort of attachment to them. I get my photo taken dozens of times daily, if not hundreds. Every casting agent snaps a zillion Polaroids (sometimes I think the fashion industry is single-handedly keeping Polaroid in business). At shows, where everything from the hairspray to the nail polish to the champagne is sponsored, photographers from all the donor companies crowd the backstage, getting hundreds of frames of whatever in the makeup artist's hands. Then, on the runway, the whole press corps snaps away at you, not to mention editorials, with their hundreds of discarded frames. They're all tiny, tiny parts of me.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to see every picture I've ever appeared in in one place. How high would the stack be? How many megabytes would I fill? When do I look most confident? Most nervous? What was my best haircut and color after all? When there are so many pieces of you out in the ether — liable to turn up in in miniature on the back pages of magazines with captions like "Models backstage at the X show," or plastered on posters for the public to scribble on, or stored in a designer's archives as an indelible record of collection Y from year Z, should anyone ever care to look it up — and when your job depends on being able to take a good picture, these are the (moderately self-obsessed, semi-male-gaze-theoretical) things you think about, from time to time.

Greetings! And welcome to Modelslips, Jezebel's inside guide to Fashion Week as seen through the gimlet eyes of our very own 35-inch hipped, gel-schellacked, battle-weary, jealous boyfriend-having human clothes hanger! Our Anonymodel will be dishing it out all Fashion Week, so she can't use her real name, which is why we'll call her Tatiana. She's smart! She's thin! And she's BEHOLDEN TO NO ONE. We'll be checking in with Tatiana all week, as she goes from show to show to party to hotel lobby to afterparty etc. etc.. In this inaugural post, she answers some of our most pressing questions — and opens the floor to you!

Good afternoon, it's your fashion week mole, Tatiana. You don't need to know much about me, but I will tell you that English is my first language, I have attended college, and I'm a woman. Like most of my tribe, I came to New York Fashion Week jobless and penniless so I could attend 974 castings, drink a few gallons of free booze and hopefully, somewhere, somehow, get an actual company to pay me actual money for an actual job. I decided to mark this first (and kinda boring) Friday of Fashion week by taking on some of Moe and Anna's model questions.

Do Models Eat?

I, personally, eat, and thus far the industry representatives in New York have been very accomodating of this habit. In Paris for shows recently I was not so lucky; a man at my agency squeezed my love handles and dubbed me the "fat girl," and no amount of self-sacrifice (truthfully, I'm not that good at self-sacrifice) would make him stop. (If I lost five pounds, he'd tell me my "pants were flattering.") But as the great philosopher Gisele once pointed out, fashion is an industry dominated by people genetically predisposed to be lanky and skinny. Like most models, 90% of my work was done that fine day in the late '80s when my ectomorph parents melded chromosomes. I've always been "that girl who could eat whatever I wanted" — if it sounds horrendously unfair, consider the fact that I was constantly hungry growing up. Now that I'm old, I watch it a little more. But only a little. I butter my pasta. I consider chocolate mousse a sacrament.

As for everyone else, there are a lot of models who are quick with a restaurant recommendation, and I've witnessed many a meal disappear behind a lipglass'd pout. I also know firsthand that current Teen Vogue cover girl and rumored anorexic Karlie Kloss's passions include French fries — and yeah, if I was the subject of a vile anorexia rumor I'd be conspicuous about eating my fried foods also, but that is because I am not anorexic.

I don't keep track of my weight so much as my measurements. Fashion models are supposed to have bust/waist/hip stats of 34"/24"/34" or less, and you'd be crazy not to think that was an extremely thin standard. Girls with 34.5" or 35" hips aren't exactly rare, but certain clients (like, say, Balenciaga) like skinny models more than others. And this definitely takes its toll on a lot of girls. I had a roommate who used to send me weird text messages every afternoon detailing what she'd eaten that day; half the time it was a simple "omg i've only had a Starbucks hazel nut capicino haha i feel so good!" She also told me that apples are the ultimate diet snack and introduced me to the concept of the negative calorie food. I've been on jobs where the other models picked despondently at side salads and called that "lunch." And there are certain girls I do not know personally whose bony frames always make me do a sharp intake of breath. During Fashion Week, paradoxically, it's almost too hectic not to eat junk food. I will inhale street vendor hot dogs on foot, and I see plenty of girls cramming Snickers bars.

Are Eastern Bloc Preteenagers the only ones who get work?

Yes. Eastern Europeans and Brazilians. They are seriously 80% of the industry. And they are all 15 years old and six feet tall and hungry. Except the Poles, who are uniformly 15 years old, six feet tall, and extremely kindhearted.

Is it as tiring as they say?

The preweek hustle is insane. I had 12 castings and a fitting on my busiest day; an Australian girl I met that day had 24 appointments. (She made them all.) My model book weighs nine pounds and I can't really afford cabs. So yeah, that's tiring.

Once you get a job, the indignities are fairly minor. You could need to be on set pre-dawn, or stay there until the middle of the night, wear wool coats in the summer heat or frolic in swimsuits on wintery beaches while holding challenging poses — oh no! But there is an undercurrent of total depersonalization in a lot of the work, and that irks. In its least harmful form, you'll find yourself getting stuck with pins (doth not a model bleed...) and talked about as if you are not in the room or cognizant of anything happening. In its more harmful manifestations, you get situations like this week's Marc Bouwer show, where powerful stage lights over the runway actually caused burns to models' skin and eyes. Apparently nobody foresaw the danger, or thought to intervene.

Okay, but the money's pretty awesome, right?

I fucking wish! I'm in this for the travel and the experience. I grew up poring over mags like The Face and Nylon at the library; how could I not be thrilled to meet designers, and see their collections months before the public? The jobs you hear about are the hundred-grand photo campaigns for Victoria's Secret or million-dollar commercial shoot for a skin care line in Japan. But you can spend all day posing for one half-page photo in American Vogue and wind up, after agency commission, with fifty bucks. (Commission varies by city, from 20% in New York to 70% in Paris.) Fashion shows generally pay a handful of runway stars exorbitant rates, and give the rest of the workaday model pack a flat fee somewhere between $300 and $1,000. Plenty of the smaller shows will pay $100 plus some clothes. Probably the biggest brand to pay in trade is Alice + Olivia, which gives $500 worth of clothes to each of its models. Which is all well and good until you have to pay the heating bill.

Are models vain?

Very. It's practically homework for us to study ourselves in the mirror, trying to memorize our angles for incorporation into future poses. But I often think of something Margaret Atwood wrote about women, mirrors, and vanitas paintings in The Blind Assassin. She said Western culture tends to confuse vanity with the search for flaws. "What is it about me" can so easily be construed as "What is wrong with me?" And these days it's an obsession that plagues just about everyone.

Does everyone do mountains of coke or what?

I've never actually seen anyone do coke on the job. But yeah, I've been offered coke more times than I care to remember at parties. I've never actually indulged. Um.. does that make me a pussy?

Are Models Dumb?

It would be really easy to just quote a few quick examples to debunk this myth — models like molecular biology M.A. Sunniva, Eamonn, who has a law degree and has been accepted into Cambridge's art history program, fellow Cambridge acceptee Lily Cole, Estonian National chess team president Carmen Kass and genuine World-of-Warcraft computer geek Rachel Clark come to mind — but that would belie just exactly how annoying this particular stereotype can be.

Models aren't a particularly educated bunch. The industry does everything in its power to prevent you from completing high school, much less college — and a lot of girls, coming from abject poverty and whatnot, are complicit. But uneducated does not equal dumb. The amount of traveling alone that models must do tends to make them more curious, independent and emotionally intelligent than the average person you meet at a party. (The average person you meet at a party who assumes you are dumb because you are a model, arghhh) If I were dropped in an unfamiliar city and didn't speak the language, and had to make three appointments in different neighbourhoods, I'd want a model helping me figure out the public transportation, not an urban planning Ph.D.

That said, models definitely say awesomely dumb things sometimes. Like, a few weeks ago, one announced, apropos of nothing, "You know, models are in, like, the five percent of people who look like models."

Word.

Do a lot of models have, uh, a Naomi Campbell attitude?

This is going to disappoint you, but the atmosphere among models is almost always positive. Girls will ask to look at each other's portfolios, and I've gotten some of the sincerest compliments in my life from a charming 14-year-old Russian on her first trip outside the country. I was at a casting the recently with Ali Stephens, and I can report that in addition to having a comely Linda Evangelista-ish curve about her upper lip, she is both very sweet and funny.

Okay, so what is the worst part of the job?

Jumping in high heels sucks to a degree I cannot overstate. But I'm going to have to go with the hair. (I know, feel sorry for me please.) Hairdressers are downright sadists on some jobs. So many of those elaborate hairstyles you see in magazines and on runways Hurt. Like. Hell. Tight cornrow braids criss-crossing your scalp, instant-facelift ponytails, extra hair stuck on with a glue some lispy stylist swears will come right off in warm water (lies of this nature are not funny!), giant wiggly ziggurats of teased and pinned bouffant. Scratchy wigs placed over the hairspray-plastered turban of your own hair, held on by pins that dig into your scalp. I've seen it all. And I've experienced the burns from the tools required to achieve these looks, and had my own product-crud-encrusted hair yanked out in the dismantling process. I know a girl who worked Fashion Week in Japan, and she said she would never go back there. When I asked her why, she held out a hank of her hair for me to feel. She had the driest, brittlest, frizziest, most damaged hair I had ever seen and I am a model and we damage our hair for a living. She told me she'd been working up to four shows a day, and that at every show they'd just soak her scalp in chemical relaxant to remove the product from the show before. Folks, that's your first beauty Don't.