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"

Karen Mulder was a blonde 5'10" Dutch teenager who shot to fame after a friend sent in pictures of her to the Elite agency's famous Elite Model Look competition. Within two years, Mulder had given up high school to work full-time for clients like Valentino, Giorgio Armani, Calvin Klein, Yves Saint Laurent, and Versace. She made the covers of British Vogue, Italian Vogue, and various international editions of Elle, among many other magazines. At 21, she bagged a multimillion-dollar multiyear contract with Guess? She was picked as one of Peter Lindbergh's iconic gaggle of leather-clad biker supermodels in American Vogue in 1991, when DUMBO was still thought of as a little dangerous.

That's Mulder second from the right, between Stephanie Seymour and Naomi Campbell. Her career, still managed by Elite, flourished through the 1990s. Mulder capitalized on her wholesome look with commercial gigs, like her two appearances in Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Edition, and she became a Victoria's Secret model. There was a Karen Mulder doll, made by Hasbro. Mulder dated a racecar driver, she dated Prince Albert II of Monaco, she dated a real-estate developer named Jean-Yves Le Fur. They broke up, but it was still Le Fur who picked her up off the floor of her Paris apartment and called the ambulance in the winter of 2002, after Mulder attempted suicide by overdosing on pain pills.

The suicide attempt and the coma she would lie in for two days following it came after Mulder had told the press, "From the beginning, I hated being photographed. For me, it was just an assumed role, and in the end, I didn't know who I really was as a person. Everybody was saying to me, 'Hi, you're fantastic.' But inside, I felt worse from day to day." It came after she laid a formal rape complaint in France against Prince Albert. It came after she said, "My job distracted me from my worries. It enabled me not to be myself, to pretend I was someone else." It came after a notorious appearance on French television where her various claims — that men at Elite had raped her, that she had been coerced into having sex to garner better contracts, that Elite had used her and other models as sex slaves in a ring that extended through the top echelons of French society, implicating politicians, members of the police, and other top officials, that her own father had raped her, that she had been sexually abused by a family friend from the age of 2, that she had been hypnotized and raped, kidnapped and raped, and raped some more — were regarded as so potentially libelous that France 2 not only never aired the segment, but destroyed the master tape. No matter: In a series of more-or-less coherent magazine interviews, Mulder repeated most of her accusations, and added that her agency had encouraged her to use cocaine and heroin. She told the Daily Mail, "They tried to turn me into a prostitute because they thought it would be so easy. I was raped by two bookers. I reported them and they were fired. Another time I was shut in the office of [a high-profile man from the modeling world] for a whole day. All these people who betrayed me I used to love very much. Then I realized how big the conspiracy was. It brought in the government and police, who both used Elite girls. People have tried to kidnap and poison me."

Her suicide attempt came after she was packed off to Montsouris hospital and heavily sedated for five months of treatment for depression and anxiety. (Gerald Marie, the head of Elite Paris and one of the men Mulder had accused of raping her, paid.) It came after Marie was filmed on hidden camera by the BBC trying to give a 15-year-old model £300 for sex, and bragging of how many entrants to the Elite Model Look competition — average age 15 — he was going to sleep with that year. It came after Mulder's attempt at a crossover music career resulted in the release of a cover of "I Am What I Am", which peaked at number 13 on the French pop charts in the summer of 2002. It was after recanting all her rape accusations, and explaining that she was in fact dealing with the aftermath of childhood sexual abuse and had "gone overboard," that the former supermodel tried to kill herself. Since emerging from hospital, and until her arrest yesterday, Mulder has kept a low profile.

How a woman like Mulder, one of those people who journalists are always quick to say "has it all," could fall so far, so fast is not really the question that commands interest here. We all know this story: it's got drugs in it, and predatory older men, and very young women, and the abject self-consciousness of the individual whose worth is in her pictures. It's always more or less the same story, even if Mulder, with her recantations and paranoid stories of kidnapping and poison at the hands of a shadowy "they," isn't always its most credible narrator. It's the story of Wallis Franken, of Ruslana Korshunova, of Katoucha Niane.

It's the story presented in a 60 Minutes segment from 1988 that reported, according to author Ian Halperin, "about the many models who had been drugged, raped, and sexually harassed by the world's top agency owners." (Halperin characterized the segment as "shocking.") It's the story of the BBC's undercover documentary of Elite executives offering to pimp out their models for drugs. (This was seen as "alarming" and "surprising.") It's the story models like Sena Cech are telling when they talk about being coerced into sex by photographers and clients at castings and on the job. (These accounts, and model Sara Ziff's documentary that provides one vehicle for them, were described in the Observer by writer Louise France as both "shocking" and "surprising.")

What amazes even more than how little the story actually differs from telling to telling, how fundamentally the same its elements remain, is our capacity for disbelief. It takes a certain dedication to one's own credulity to insist on being "surprised," "alarmed" and "shocked" by a situation that has been the subject of interest from such under-the-radar media venues as 60 Minutes going back a generation. As a culture, we have so far managed, through every news story and blog post and exposé, to maintain an innocence of the realities of the modeling industry that is almost touching. Or nearly culpable.

Our persistent willingness to be taken aback by the notion that wealthy, powerful, older men, when left in charge of a younger, poorer, female workforce, might generally act as something less than gentlemen, is testament to the power the multibillion-dollar fashion industry wields as an expert creator of narratives. It's this attitude of disbelief that allows agency directors to claim they had no idea some of their models were using cocaine and that some of their bookers were dealing it to them, or that some photographers like to sleep with models and some bookers encourage models to go along with it. Our endless capacity for shock is what gets Karen Mulder sedated and lets Gerald Marie retain, to this day, his position as head of Elite Paris.

The longer we keep up our charade of disbelief, the less the industry will change. One of the most chilling scenes in Sara Ziff's documentary, Picture Me, didn't make the final cut. A model was talking about a photo shoot that took place she was 16, with what Ziff has described as "a very, very famous photographer, probably one of the world's top names." When the girl left the studio to go to the bathroom between shots, the photographer cornered her in the hall. Then he started touching her dress. "But you're used to this," Ziff reported he said. "People touch you all the time. Your collar, or your breasts. It's not strange to be handled like that." Then the world-famous photographer put his hand to her crotch and forced his fingers into her vagina. The teenager, who had never even kissed anyone before, just froze and waited for the man to walk away. They finished the shoot, and she never told anyone. The day before the New York premiere, she begged for the scene to be cut.

But more and more models are speaking out. (I have.) If only we can dispense with our "shock" at what they have to say, perhaps this is an industry where some realistic chance for improvement remains.

Supermodel Karen Mulder Arrested For Threatening To Attack Plastic Surgeon
"We Need To See You Without Your Bra, He Told Me. I Was 14. I Didn't Even Have Breasts Yet."

Earlier: The Not-Rape Epidemic: The Modeling Industry Is Anything But Immune
Suicide And Abuse In Fashion's Top Echelon
Ruslana Korshynova, No Longer Anonymous

With a wink and a nod to the infamous Prada Spring/Summer 09 show, which featured the shocking sight of models in ridiculous platform heels tripping and falling all over the slick concrete runway, Singapore photographers Ivanho Harlim and Shysila Novita together built a spread that re-writes potential tragedy as tongue-in-cheek farce.

The ONTD FashinFags grabbed some scans — and I have to say, I'm laughing with them. The female model here is Sharon van de Pas, and the guys are Sahib A. and Bertie R.

I don't know that the shoot exactly carries off the impression of being at a runway show — pray tell, why are there only two men watching the proceedings in this empty white room? But the concept is clearly represented, and it's pretty funny.

Falling on the runway is reputed to be a career-ender, but that rarely actually happens. (Monika "Jac" Jagaciak fell at Hervé Leger — and then booked a debut spot at Calvin Klein. Katie Fogarty fell during her first trip out of the gate at Prada, and it has hardly set her back. Everyone recognizes that models generally don't fall because of their incompetence, but designers'.) As far as we know, nobody was actually hurt at the show L'Officiel is spoofing. Having a giggle when no persons or careers were injured seems devilishly irreverent and appropriately un-self-serious in the way that the best fashion magazines can be, not mean-spirited.

And from an aesthetic point of view, I love that this shoot shows how clothes move without resorting to some dumb concept that would inevitably involve making Sharon van de Pas jump. So is this officially a meme now? How delicious.

The best laugh-out-loud moment is when you realize that L'Officiel included the exact runway look that Katie Fogarty was wearing when she tumbled so badly she had to take off her shoes. It's quirky cosmic justice that this look should become emblematic of that fall, instead of Miuccia Prada's design chops.

See? Now who says fashion people are humorless.

Calamity Inspires Art, No? [ONTD]

Earlier: Top 10 All-Time Runway/Model Mishaps

WWD inferred the worst from Marc Jacobs' decision not to throw one of his typical post-show megabashes, as well as the fact that Zac Posen, Calvin Klein, and Alexander Wang were among those who similarly cancelled their party plans. This week, even the New York Times couldn't seem to resist the convenience of the party-over metaphor, casting a vernissage at the new Diesel store as a gathering of lost souls. Welcome to the brave new fashion, where frivolity is out and celebs don't pack the Beatrice Inn. Except it didn't happen that way.

I'm no gadfly compared to some, but I go to the occasional night spot, and I can't say I've noticed any appreciable difference in the quality or tone of revelry on offer this season. Maybe I wasn't going to the echelon of party that was canceled to begin with. But this week it seemed like there was the same familiar mixture of people in day-glo accessories, fedoras, Derek Blasberg, your boyfriend's also-a-model ex, and cash bars as ever. Perhaps I've always sensed a ticking heart of melancholia at the center of these kinds of gatherings, where the dance floor has air quotes and everyone puts up the tiresome pretense of not mugging for the party photographer, even back when the economy was gaining ground as opposed to ceding it. (But that probably has always said more about me than about my surroundings.)

Earlier this week I actually saw Lara Stone in person, and I couldn't help but unabashedly stare at her while I stood waiting to pay $18 for a martini that proved to taste like it had been mixed inside an empty orange juice carton. I also saw a man dressed in chain mail and a guy who had light-up rods, actual spiny, glowing bones, sewn onto the outside of his black gloves, like an extra from Blade Runner. Alexander Wang was being congratulated on the stairs, and someone wanted to go to the Purple party, but someone else was like, "When is Olivier Zahm ever not at the Beatrice?" and frankly it all felt very September '08, which is to say it felt very much like any other fashion week. It was sniffy noses and ironic flannel and heavy eyeliner. It was Blackberries and coats that looked like muppets killed for a good cause and testing your clout by lighting that cigarette inside. The other night someone who looked about 19 asked Patrick McMullan who he was shooting for. "I would've recognized your son, I think," she said, semi-apologetically.

Every story this season is about how fashion has become such a terrible, morose End Times-y affair. The narrative is that before, shows were always buoyed by the rising tide of economic good fortune and front-row bold-face names and the parties, they were always terribly glamorous and fun. Now shows are always things you sneak into out of the drudgery of obligation, and when you're caught in the act, you give mealy quotes to the press about how sorry you are, how inconsequential even you recognize it all to be, and how attendance at this particular temple of Baal is unfortunately mandated by your job at this little magazine that covers fashion. And the parties that follow the shows, well, nobody who recognizes the seriousness of Our Straitened Circumstances could possibly acknowledge any interest in such frothy frivolity.

Thing is, you could have written that kind of story last season, or any other season for that matter. Models were getting paid in trade last season too, and a great many seasons before. Editors have always been people aware enough to acknowledge some self-doubt on the question of the actual relative importance of this season's heel or bag; the fashion set is not dumb. But nobody in the media would have thought to cast any previous season in any such light. The before/after is a constructed narrative, and it's one I'm just getting a little sick of reading. This industry, which I love, is troubled — nearly 20,000 jobs were lost in textile and apparel manufacturing and retail in the month of January, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, and many designers and stores are struggling across the spectrum of price points — but all the deckchairs on the Titanic rhetoric seems like unwarranted melodrama, simultaneously too dire and not serious enough. (The last recession, in the early 1990s, gave us Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Marc Jacobs.) It's too early to write fashion off; and it is, dare I say it, frivolous to do so because of some party that was or wasn't thrown.

As The Economy Goes, So Do The Parties [WWD]
Despite Happy Meals, There Are Troubling Signs Around Fashion Week [NY Times]
At Fashion Week, Everyone Looks Sullen, Not Just The Models [NY Times]

Earlier: Chloé Sevigny Party Made Me Hate Fashion Week, Life
I Think I Hate Fashion Week

1. Karen Elson closing the show at Zac Posen, Fall/Winter '08/'09

The culprits in this case were British supe Karen Elson's insane heels. Hers is practically the platonic form of a runway fall — she sinks to the ground inside her giant pouf of crinoline with all the tragic drama of Holly Hunter in that scene in The Piano. Bonus points to Caroline Trentini, who helps her up, and to front row guest P. Diddy, who breaks rank to offer a hand. Elson's smile shows she handled the fall with charm.


2. Jessica Stam at Chloé, Spring/Sumer '06

Canadian Jessica Stam took a tumble at Chloé in her chunky-heeled platforms. Her palms-down faceplant looks super painful, but she gets up, shrugs, and shakes her head a little, smiling ear to ear. Which is about the classiest thing one could do.


3. Everyone at Prada, Spring/Summer '09

This show deserves a special mention for the sheer number of runway pileups it caused. Prada's shoes for the season included little black knitted sockettes that were attached inside the shoe — but as any woman who's ever tried to wear heels with socks or tights before knows, if the sock starts sliding around on the slick leather of the shoe's interior, you're as good as sunk. (One tip for increased traction: gel insoles seem to grip the bottoms of socks better than most.) The models in this show proceeded under the conditions with all the elegance of puppies walking on marbles; some fell more than once.


4. Kamila W. at Vivienne Spring/Summer '07 and 5. Naomi Campbell at Vivienne Westwood Spring/Summer '94

Vivienne Westwood, who wastes no opportunity to style her show looks with 9" bondage fetish platform heels, has caused a few pros to fall over the seasons — most theatrically, Naomi Campbell and poor Kamila W. The British supermodel discusses her 1994 fall in an interview with David Letterman the following year; Dave is righteously indignant that nobody from the front row stopped to help her up, even though she was obviously in pain. I'm amazed she wasn't more badly hurt, and say what you will of Campbell, her professionalism in standing right back up and smiling is impressive.

These guys, on the other hand, from the NBC local affiliate? They can eat shit and die. Kamila was trying her best to negotiate fashion's highest heels — and a watering can filled with water (you can see it sloshing out onto the runway as she trips). Go to hell, snickering anchormen.


6. Milana Bogolepova at Dior Cruise '07

No list of runway misadventures could be complete without including my own icon, Milana Bogolepova! This gorgeous Russian's unfortunate stumble atop teetering heels at Dior Cruise has adorned my posts ever since Moe chose it out of some Google ImageSearch for "model slip" a year ago now. People say she had been drinking backstage. My kind of girl.


7. Tiiu Kuik at Oscar de la Renta Fall/Winter '04/'05

Tiiu goes too wide on the turn, and nicks the inside of her pants leg with her opposite foot as she overcorrects. Cue trip. It's just like that time you caught your shoe inside your super wide-legged pants and skinned both your palms outside the lunchroom in high school (or maybe that was just me?)


8. Monika Jagaciak at Hervé Leger Fall/Winter '09/'10

In case you missed it yesterday: this 15-year-old Pole has already mastered the runway fall. Righting herself with a smile — and protecting her dignity with a strategically crossed knee — is the essence of charming cool.


9. Iekeliene Stange opening at Marc Jacobs, Spring/Summer '07

Why, don't models ever think to remove their troublesome and dignity-endangering footwear onstage, you ask? When they have the presence of mind of Dutch supe Ikeliene Stange, they do indeed. Walking Marc Jacob's long, shiny-painted, downward-tilting, snaking Manhattan-shaped runway, Stange found the unworn soles of her flat sandals slipping on the paint and twisting off her feet. She tries first to right the shoes, then shrugs as if to say, Not my fault, Marc, and kicks them off as though there were nothing to it.


10. Abbey Lee's fall and Karlie Kloss's train at Rodarte, Fall/Winter '08/'09

Last September, before there was Prada, it looked like Rodarte had had the worst imaginable season for model mishaps in New York. Australian model Abbey Lee teetered a little in her shoes as she came down the runway, and as she was exiting, she fell flat on her face. Then, in the show's finale, Jourdan Dunn, Karlie Kloss, and Kasia Struss were all supposed to pose in their long chiffon gowns through a series of lighting changes, before the rest of the models would walk in a line through them to parade the show's looks again. Kloss hits her mark and stops, not realizing her train is trailing right across the runway where the other girls are going to have to walk. Struss just sort of stares at her, while Dunn, posed behind Kloss, inches closer across the runway, trying at first furtively, and then with real urgency, to kick the offending train out of the way. Finally, Sasha Pivovarova leads the line of other models out from the wings, and when she hits Karlie's dress she leans down, picks it up, and tosses it quickly out of the way. Problem solved.

Earlier: Fashion Week: Living The Nightmare In 6-Inch Platform Heels

There are fewer castings. The jobs pay less. Some friends who aren't already with agencies in New York, Paris, London or Milan are having trouble getting representation. Some friends who were represented in those places have been dropped, or told that they shouldn't bother coming to town for the shows. Some of the top names, including Coco Rocha, were missing from Paris couture week (which did not actually last a "week" but rather ran for three days); I wonder if it was because rates had fallen to a level that Rocha found untenable (but which a 23-year-old Ukrainian you've never heard of did not)? Ali Michaels is apparently sitting this whole season out.

And that's logical enough, because this fashion week, everyone's putting on a group show or a less-expensive presentation where models pose in a tableau vivant or even a showroom presentation that involves using only a couple girls who change into dozens of outfits each. Or not showing at all. Financial backers are in retrenchment. Some labels simply won't survive. A few weeks ago we learned Marc Jacobs was canceling his famous after-party; this morning came news that he's slashing the guestlist for his show by more than half.

If I could have one wish, it might be that news stories about fashion models losing income would not lead with canards about us getting free designer dresses and being paid $15,000 to walk on the runway. I can't imagine anyone who's not Naomi Campbell has ever, in the history of fashion, been able to ask that kind of a fee. What we're talking about here is, in 99% of cases, a matter of a dress, and, if you are very lucky, $100. Those dresses aren't "free", they're earnings. Models do shows for the luster, the allure of being seen by the right editor in the front row, the chance at getting enough buzz to book a campaign: it's hard to imagine buzz featuring highly in a fashion season defined mainly by its lack of after-parties and economic austerity.

This business has a more direct connection to consumers' whims than perhaps some others. As soon as people stop buying dresses, I get paid less to advertise them. Fashion is a tenuous concern at the best of times because it involves convincing women who earn a third less than men to spend $1200 on a dress to do certain things that perhaps include attracting the attention of men. As soon the light changes and that particular creative distribution of priorities takes on a sudden aspect of farce, consumer spending falls, and people get laid off or, in my self-employed case, have fewer opportunities to work for less money. It's that simple. So, yes, CNN Money and lady at that dinner, this crisis is real and it should be no surprise "even" models feel it.

Fashion Models Feel Financial Crunch [Reuters]
Ali Skips The Season [Fashionista]

Related: Revolutionary Thinking [Fashion Week Daily]
Monique Lhuillier And Naeem Khan Decide Against February Runway Shows [WSJ]
Iodice To Give Away Free Dresses Instead Of Staging Runway Show [WSJ]
Sass & Bide Drop Out Of New York Fashion Week [The Cut]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They all knew, and nobody directly intervened.

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

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

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

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

Death By Design [Vanity Fair]

Earlier:
Ruslana Korshunova, No Longer Anonymous

Latoya Peterson's excellent essay, "The Not Rape Epidemic," a version of which was published in the brand new anthology Yes Means Yes, and was blogged about last week by Megan, isn't exactly a gentle holiday season comedown. But I was struck, reading the piece — which is both moving and important — by a strange feeling of recognition. Peterson defines a new term, "not rape" — the kind of sex and sexual attention young women get from men which is, if not outright unconsenting, some measure of coerced. Not rape is every kind of uncomfortable experience you're made to feel complicit in: for choosing to go to the party, for wanting the kisses but not knowing how to say 'No' to what came next, for ending up alone with someone you thought you could trust — or, in Peterson's case, for opening the screen door a few inches to a friend-of-a-friend one summer afternoon while her parents were out.

The essay made me think of all the times I've not been raped. And all the other women in my industry who've not been raped.

Most models start working in their early teens. The youngest girl I've ever lived with in a model's apartment, a girl who went to the same grown-up job castings our agency gave me, was 12 years old. (We were working a fashion week in a secondary market, and her show list was easily twice as long as mine and our 16-year-old roommate's. The clients just loved the 5'11" middle schooler; she gave her age as 14.) My first real modeling job was a photo shoot for a major European magazine — and when I got to the studio that day, I was greeted by the sight of a 17-year-old Russian, posing topless, smoking a Marlboro. She told me in broken English that she'd been working full-time for three years. I think I'd gone a week in Paris before I met an Arkansan, also 17, who'd dumped her boyfriend of several years to sleep with with a man old enough to be her father who happened to be the director of her (major, well-regarded) agency.

I can't count the number of girls I meet in this industry who speak in regretful tones of that short-lived "relationship" they had with that older photographer or client; I can't count the number of men I meet who radiate the unmistakable sense that they have literally been sleeping with 17-year-olds since they were that age themselves. Agency directors in the mold of Gérald Marie. Financial backers. Clients. Or any of the industry hangers-on, the restaurateurs and the importer/exporters and the gossip columnists who end up at the parties we go to (because, you soon learn, going to parties is sort of part of the job).

And the fashion industry, which is an industry I love and whose vital importance as both an economic engine and a field for the projection of women's dreams I affirm, probably has a case to answer for perpetuating the idea that teenaged girls — or the occasional leggy 12-year-old — are the equivalent of grown women in every way. There are some photographers — Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, for example — who will only work with models over the age of 18, because, as Inez told me once, before then, you don't really know who you are or what you're comfortable with, anyway. And the modeling industry, or at least some of its players, probably should be more careful about the level of supervision and the kind of working environments it provides for their youngest charges.

You spend a lot of time in this line of work away from your regular support network of family and friends, in cities where you may not speak the language, working with an agency that, while technically in your employ, pretty much feels like your boss, down to telling you how to dress and comport yourself. I won't even pretend I know the intricacies of the sexual assault statutes in Milan or Paris or Hong Kong — let alone the responsiveness of the local police to such complaints. A 15-year-old from a small town in Ukraine probably wouldn't have a hope. Being not raped is something our work environment tacitly encourages us to shrug off.

A few months ago, a 19-year-old friend of mine told me a particularly sad story about a model we both knew who had just turned 17. Part of the story was that she had been dating a man in his mid-twenties, a sorta-famous musician, and the relationship was over. (The other part of the story involved heroin.) There was a long pause. "The thing is," my friend said, with a rueful laugh, "I was sleeping with him when I was 16, too."

I know these kinds of relationships — which, at the very least, are characterized by regrettable power dynamics — are not unique to the fashion industry. And even within it, they're not exactly normal, just more common than perhaps would be ideal. But I think it is worth considering whether these kinds of inappropriate behaviors are connected to the fact that, in this industry, you're treated as an appropriate professional stand-in for adult women from menarche — or from when you hit 5'9", whichever comes first.

I reached that height threshold when I was barely 13; I remember that was the year men started leering at me on the bus, or pestering me with awkward come-ons. It has not gotten any easier since. As women, we are so often compelled to see ourselves as nothing more than our bodies — to look, in essence, through the eyes of the men who objectify us without our consent, and to want to dislike what it is they see. As someone who is complicit in my own objectification for a living, as someone whose work is in my body, I think I maybe even feel this discomfort more keenly. I sometimes buy into the whole notion that life would be easier, somehow, if I were less attractive, if I didn't have a job that required me to hit the tight/revealing/short clothing trifecta every day I have castings, that I wouldn't get this kind of unwelcome attention if I could somehow change myself. (I know that's not true, because it isn't a function of my choices, and because I don't think a single one of my women friends from outside the industry has experiences that are in any way different.) The other night I got briefly out-of-step with my boyfriend, and as soon as I turned a corner, the rolling public commentary on my looks that is the reason I usually keep my headphones on even if they're not plugged in to anything, not to mention why I wear dark glasses whether it's sunny or not, started up, courtesy of a group of middle-aged men who were standing on my street. My boyfriend heard and when he caught up he looked at me, aghast. I thought at that moment, At least now he gets, if only for a moment, what it's like to be us.

Sometimes it's difficult to define yourself as a woman in this culture by any other measure than your persistent fear of men. Men can do things that we will never be able to do without first brokering some kind of peace with the fear. In case the fear doesn't produce itself in your gut whenever you're alone in public, in case you don't know any survivors of sexual violence yourself, rape is made a plot element of television shows and movies every single day, male violence fills the news, and even the media created for us and by us constantly interrogate what it means to be raped and what "counts" as rape, as if we didn't know, or might forget. And as Peterson's essay illustrates so aptly, there are a million male behaviors that are not so much rape as rape spectrum, or rape-ish, or not rape by degree instead of by kind, an entire constellation of potential violations, that almost every sentient woman has more than enough reason by experience to be afraid of. We are taught to put such extraordinary faith in such ridiculous talismans — I can go jogging if it's still light, I can walk these three blocks if I hold my keys out, I can leave my drink unattended while I go to the bathroom if I put a napkin over it, I can trust him if he's so-and-so's friend — that, if we stopped with the bargaining for a minute and actually thought about the chances we have to take to live as men take for granted or to try and have some semblance of trusting romantic relationships, we might never leave the house again. Refusing the fear — walking home alone when the buses have stopped running, doing anything at all alone after dark to make the point that you can — doesn't feel entirely liberating, either. It mostly feels stupid. (I still do these things, sometimes, because if I'm going to feel putting-a-napkin-on-my-drink stupid, I might as well occasionally feel walk-home-drunk-alone stupid.) How to contend with this fear is, I am convinced, the major question of 21st century womanhood. Are there any positive ways to define yourself, as a woman in the Western world? I'm still trying to come up with some.

The last time I was not raped was earlier this year. I had flown to a major market for work, and rather than stay at a hotel or in agency housing, I thought it would be more fun to sleep on the couch of a guy close to my age, who I think I suspected even then would not prove a lasting or dependable friend. One night, he had his girlfriend and a few of his friends over for a late dinner, and afterward, we all had a couple drinks. I think I was nursing my third glass of wine around 1 or 2 a.m. when my friend called it a night; two other guests left shortly thereafter, and soon it was just me and a part-time male model, sitting on my friend's porch. We were talking about David Foster Wallace, who was at that point still alive, and I liked the conversation right up until he put his arm around me, grabbed my breasts, and tried to kiss me. I was in a (different) relationship then; I'm the kind of boringly faithful girlfriend who mentions her absent boyfriend to new acquaintances at least once every few seconds. If my talking points that night had a chyron, it was Not Interested Or Available! And what's more I could hardly see how our nerdy patter could be misread as an attempt at flirtation, let alone an invitation to suddenly slide my sundress down my shoulders and make a grab for my breasts. I stopped, told him curtly that wasn't acceptable, and scooted away. He made some dismissive, faux-innocent comment — Really? That's not OK? — that implied I was the one with the problem, but he promised not to do it again, and I uneasily returned to our conversation, hoping that he'd leave soon. Within five minutes, he tried to kiss me again. I wrenched free and went inside, but my friend and his girlfriend were asleep, and the male model was my friend's close buddy — they went back much further than he and I did. Since it wasn't my place, I didn't feel like I could ask him to leave. When he followed me into the living room, I turned on the loudest, most grandiose, least romantic movie I could find — Scarface — and sat as far away from him on the couch as possible. He kept on creeping closer to me, and he rebuffed any hint I gave that he should think about going home.

I thought if I consented to his rubbing my shoulders, he might limit his other activities. (I was wrong.)

I thought if I stiffened at his every touch, he might get the message. (Wrong.)

I thought if I said clear, standard-issue stuff like "Don't do that," he might abide it. (Wrong.)

I thought if I joked, changed the subject, made light of Tony Mottola's creepy relationship with his younger sister, he might cease the pawing and get a clue. (Wrong.)

I thought if I hunched my shoulders so he couldn't work my sundress off them, he might not decide to reach for my zipper instead. (Wrong on that count, too.)

We watched the movie until 7:30 that morning; he would find a way to put his hands on me, as if to say, "I'm in control here," and eventually I think I got too tired to always be swatting him away. He only got up to leave when my friend walked through his hallway to the bathroom as the credits were rolling. The male model said, "Well. I suppose I'd better get going," in a tone of voice that meant, since you are clearly no fun and I locked my friend's front door behind him. It felt like a very long time before I heard his car start.

When my friend suggested hanging out with the male model a day or so later, I tried to explain what happened, and why I didn't want to see him again, but he avoided my gaze, and said something that implied I'd misunderstood his model friend's intentions. My then boyfriend, never having had the opportunity to witness the diligence of my long-distance fidelity, was suspicious and mistrusting of me as a rule — rightly or wrongly, I thought if I told him, I'd get an argument about why I was "always" in strange cities with strange men, and why I'd been so thoughtless as to end up alone with this creep, and drinking at that. It wasn't really any of my agency's business, plus my booker in that city — one of the only straight men employed there — had long made a habit of standing too close to me, and once rubbed my knee under a table, so telling him was out. And, besides, as violated as I felt, I know it could have been much worse. It was not rape.

A major theme of Latoya Peterson's essay is the importance of words, because articulating an experience can help stop it from being reproduced. "This is how the Not Rape epidemic spreads — through fear and silence," she writes.

Women of all backgrounds are affected by these kinds of acts, regardless of race, ethnicity, or social class. So many of us carry the scars of the past with us into our daily lives. Most of us have pushed these stories to the back of our minds, trying to have some semblance of a normal life that includes romantic and sexual relationships. However, waiting just behind the tongue is story after story of the horrors other women experience and hide deep within the self behind a protective wall of silence.

I polled the other Jezebels, and virtually all of us has been not raped. Megan has written bravely about her sexual assaults before; the rest of us can remember, variously, high school boyfriends who pressured us into doing things we weren't comfortable with, guy "friends" who helped us through breakups, only "he decided to take advantage and I decided to let him," and all the older men who magically started hitting on us when we turned 13. One of us had a college professor angle for some "side boob action" and the same Jezebel had to deter a friend of her parents by punching him in the stomach. Another had her mom's graduate student assistant corner and grope her in an empty office when she was 12. Only one of us says she's been lucky enough to never have to contend with these kinds of situations.

As Peterson writes,

At age fourteen, I lacked the words to speak my experience into reality. Without those words, I was rendered silent and impotent, burdened with the knowledge of what did not happen, but unable to free myself by talking about what did happen.

I cannot change the experiences of the past.

But, I can teach these words, so that they may one day be used by a young girl to save herself

Related: The Not Rape Epidemic [Racialicious]
Yes Means Yes: Visions Of Female Sexual Power And A World Without Rape [Amazon]

Earlier: Not Every Sexual Assault Starts With A Man And A Gun
'Cosmo' Tells Me I Was 'Gray Raped'; Feministing Says It Was Rape. Are We Really Arguing About This?

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

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

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

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

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

For some reason, Caroline Trentini has practically never within living memory been permitted to keep both feet on the ground in an American Vogue editorial. Anna Wintour’s favorite springy Brazilian, seemingly without regard for osteoarthritis or patellar tendonitis, casts herself nobly aloft in every season, in every setting, and in every conceivable kind of pump, flat, sandal, mule, platform, and T-strap. Sometimes in the past she's had partners in airborne crime like Elise Crombez (whatever happened to her? Did she age out of the industry at a ripe old 26?) but most often it's Carol, alone, doing what apparently comes naturally. In case you've forgotten her crucial gravity-defying role in Vogues past, they even run a June 2008 photo of her midflight in crampons and 24k gold fur on a Patagonian glacier on page 544:



So. Surprise! There's a jumping editorial in this issue. But! This time, instead of heading into mid air to sell sheath dresses to office workers (in some makebelieve world where office workers can afford Lanvin), Caroline jumps for a reason. Kind of. It took a while (in fact it took so long I'm half sure the jumping overlapped with a ready made narrative completely by accident) but Vogue finally found a story where Caroline leaping in frocks makes sense — because she's posing with the three kids who'll take turns playing Billy Elliot when it opens on Broadway October 1. Dancers! Dancers jump!


And the results are beautiful.
Seriously, the editorial is kind of breathtaking.




And then the magazine goes and ruins all the uncharacteristic pro-Vogue mojo it dredged up with that heavenly dozen pages by painting the distinctively freckled and pale Trentini the color of burnt Cheetos and giving her a vicious bikini wax so she can wear a swimsuit that makes my vulva scream and reach for the smelling salts. Oh well! The aesthetic contact high was nice while it lasted.


September Vogue to me signifies a worrisome rubicon in the gerrymandering of the definition of "model" to include any two-bit celebrity with a film or an album or a divorce to promote. (I have nothing against actors and I think Keira Knightley is a fine practitioner of her particular craft. But I don't try to do her job and I ask the same courtesy in return.) Ordinarily the actress — supposedly a ringer to drum up readership, although that paradigm appears increasingly flawed — gets the cover because she is profiled inside; the "fashion spread" accompanying the inevitable puff piece is just a bit of lifestyle-y, cult-of-celebrity-reflecting extra bang for your buck. But in this issue, there is no profile. Keira Knightley has 18 pages of this magazine to herself to illustrate a paragraph about Berlin and "the current generation of intriguing, intelligent provocateurs working there." Keira Knightley isn't an actress posing for showy portraits to illustrate, however obliquely, her own press: She's treated here like any old pretty face attached to a random (no, really random: Knightley admits she had never even been to Berlin until the shoot) concept — and a wardrobe of this season's clothes. She is, in these pages, presented more as model than actress.
So it is my judgment of her as a model and nothing less when I say she looks, on almost every page, perfectly awful. She doesn't know what to do with her hands. She doesn't know what to do with her face. She doesn't know what to do with her mouth, so in picture after picture, she lets it fall limply open. She doesn't know whether to mug for the camera or grasp for some idea of high-fashion gravitas; she sort of does both and she sort of does neither and it all comes off badly more often than not. In this jailhouse dress photo she's actually grimacing.


As one commentator noted, a propensity for holding your lips pursed and half-open makes it look like you're always blowing on an invisible bowl of soup.


Keira Knightley has more of a neck in that sketch likeness she's holding up than she does in most of this edit. One of the reasons why non-models just aren't as good at showing fashion to its best effect as models are is because they don't have the practiced photographic subject's knack for guessing how the human body will read in two dimensions from a given angle — so here I am worrying why this beautiful woman doesn't appear to have a neck, instead of thinking about either of those potentially interesting dresses.


This is her best shot and it's pretty fantastic. But is it worth the 17 other hammy, overacted, more or less off-looking lavishly produced editorial pictures full of light and color and signifying nothing? I say no.


Because, seriously, what kind of a culture are we living in that when Anna Wintour tells an Academy Award-nominated actress to tie a trash bag on her head because some art world folks are dossing in Berlin (apparently for such deep and meaningful reasons as the fact that in New York you can't smoke anywhere anymore), the Academy Award-nominated actress automatically does it? I tell you who ties trash bags on their heads because Ms. Wintour says so: Models. And we submit to the vagaries of fashion editor whims good naturedly, because it's an honest living and better than many, and because we certainly aren't inclined or empowered to question a shoot's direction like, say, a respected actress would (or should) be. And we do it because we don't have the comforts that being Hollywood's second-highest paid actress confers. Keira Knightley, you may be beautiful, but more importantly, you have at least some measure of talent; you ought to be sharing that with the world. Don't just model, because done barely adequately it's bullshit, trust me.


Now. Back to sublime: It's Sasha time.


Sasha Pivovarova is a goddess. The lithe Russian elf (who, as a part-time artist, would've been a much better fit for that Berlin story than Knightley) is nevertheless the perfect foil for McQueen's clothes, which can skate close to excessively baroque territory. She wears these dainty little embellished slippers in every shot and it makes for a really nice change from the ubiquitous 4 lb heavy, 7" tall editorial platforms.


I don't dig the waxed-candyfloss hair and I know it must have been painful to achieve. But, I think, thoroughly worth it.


For future reference, Anna Wintour: This is your cover shot.

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



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



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



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



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



Seriously?



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



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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

Lily Donaldson gives a tutorial in how to behave around the native Other. This is an eternal fashion meme: the Other might be Masai tribesmen or Indian schoolchildren or checkout clerks in one of those palatial, fluorescent-lit Midwestern hypermarkets. Or, like here, 10-gallon-hatted rodeogoers. Whatever the conditions on the ground, it’s your job as the model to look fabulously distinct from the human backdrop; you have to be both an ornament and a foil while maintaining your self-consciously alien presence. Sometimes you interact with the Other, but only in ways that highlight your essential difference. Watch how Lily does it.


It’s okay if you make the Other nervous, like that small blonde child who looks like she’s too frightened to move. These are parables of cultural interaction, and the rule of thumb is always that they’re as scared of you as you are of them.


Exhibit 1: The dude in the black hat is totally more comfortable looking at that horse’s ass than at the ass of the supermodel two feet away from him. Nice.


Posing with things in your mouth isn’t fun (although Masha Novoselova pulls this one off nicely). Rather than take a Freudian field-trip, I’m concentrating on the practical here: these shots are hard to light, the lipstick takes 15 minutes and you have to hold your lips in pretty much the same wide spread smile from the second the makeup artist starts lacquering you up to the instant the last frame is shot. Your teeth hurt from almost biting the metal and your tongue goes dry. Depending on the angle the photographer’s shooting from, you might have to roll your bottom lip under a little, or stick your upper lip out, so that your pout reads as evenly plump in the picture. Don’t let any random lines form across your philtrum or at the corners of your mouth! The jewelry wants to smear the lipstick. The lipstick wants nothing more than to jump all over your teeth. (And, should that happen, the makeup artist will jump in to scrub your pearlies with a Q-tip. Fun!) Getting the jewelry to lie just so without casting any weird shadows or looking “strange” takes minutes that feel like hours. It’s often the simplest seeming shots that are the most like keyhole surgery to achieve.


And anything involving feathers being stuck to your lids with eyelash glue is gonna tickle.

Freja Beha Erichsen is one of my favorite models for projecting pure androgynous, languid, jolie laide attitude. Look at her: she’s wearing insane double-pleated clown pants and an absurd ruffled shirt, both in red leather — but she makes the outfit seem normal, a given, even. Her pose isn’t a pose so much as a had-a-long-day slump that is also, somehow, effortlessly elegant. Yes, I said it! Elegant. In red leather clown pants.


Wow. Just wow.


Nobody, but nobody, does the open-mouthed, eyes narrowed, angry-cute face like Coco Rocha. I always picture her at a restaurant where some idiot dude has kept her waiting for 20 minutes and she’s just seen him walk in the door and is about to deliver the emphatic dressing-down she's spent the time mentally rehearsing. But she’s probably just channeling the scalp pain of that tacky black wig.

The most well-known model featured is 19-year-old Cato Van Ee of the Netherlands, who is the veteran of a Prada/Miu Miu double exclusive (an "exclusive" is industryspeak for when a major house puts a new model on lockdown for its show alone, and a high-profile exclusive reliably precedes a major blow-up: see Kloss, Karlie, who was exclusive for Gucci and Calvin Klein the season before she walked 64 shows in three cities). 20-year-old Arizona native Madeline Kragh has spent a year working mainly in Sydney and Athens, but her New York presence is apparently nil when the series kicks off. Austria Alcántara, a shy-seeming 16-year-old Dominican and an alleged high school senior — whose age, curiously enough, was reported as 14 this February — rounds out the cast.

The first episode introduces the three…characters? Subjects? Everyone at Vogue is insisting on maintaining a distinction between ‘reality show’ and ‘documentary’, which I personally find kind of precious. Especially given the sky-high production values and manipulative piano tinkling that bookends every scene.

The main action happens when the girls’ representatives at the agency IMG meet for a strategy session more than a month ahead of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week — an agency-as-benevolent-parental-surrogate set piece that would probably irritate me more (the managers talk about the girls in all kinds of borderline condescending ways, as if they were pets) if it weren’t so very dull. Meanwhile, the well spoken and composed Cato talks with some regret about seeing all her high school friends go on to university while she pursues a career that may well prove all-too-ephemeral. Austria is clearly being set up as the quiet girl fashion will deliver from her shell.

But my favorite — and the girl who seems most likely to bring a little levity to the self-serious production — is Barbizon survivor Madeline. She has an affective sort of goofiness about her on camera, and her gawky nervousness lends the proceedings authenticity. Also, she puts her foot in her mouth in the most charming way possible. “When I was in university, I was going to school,” she muses at one point, before averring, “I became my own person, my own model...I don’t want to be like another model."

Since the show season documented is this past Spring’s, information about what happens to the girls’ careers over the four fashion weeks is readily available online — a disconnect the Internet series, for all its tie-ins with Bebo.com and sponsor Express.com, strangely refuses to acknowledge. (I won’t give any spoilers, but it looks like someone has visa issues, and Austria’s age may stand in the way of a highly desirable gig. Who knew, in this age of 12-year-olds walking for Marc by Marc Jacobs, that there was such a thing as a model who is too young!)

Model.Live seems harmless enough, and possibly even realistic, if a little sanitized and unnecessarily heavy-handed (the point about modeling often being lonely and isolating is made with voice-over from a manager talking about the “independence” the career demands while B roll of Cato looking lonely on a street corner and wafting down a river in some kind of gondola plays. Really). Ditch the sad piano theme and it could even be fun to watch; in any case it’s nice to see something about the industry that doesn’t have the primetime television stain of ANTM antics.

Related: Model.Live [Vogue.tv]

Anyway. After re-evaluating its plan to improve models’ health, the British Fashion Council announced that nobody will have to get a doctor’s certificate to walk the runway. But the BFC would like you to know that some of its proposals are going ahead: under-16s won’t be on the catwalks, and alcoholic beverages won’t be backstage.

To which I say, thanks for nothing, British Fashion Council! Bad enough that 90% of shows — yes, even the high-profile ones — don’t even pay, you have to take my free booze as well?

Seriously, though, I’m just tickled that so many people take an interest in my and my colleagues’ health. I know your motivations are pure, and that the politicians involved in advancing this cause aren’t the slightest bit interested in furthering their own electoral ambitions by coat-tailing on a high-profile and heavily mediatized industry’s most visible issue. I’m happy that there have been symposia and inquiries and initiatives and hectoring articles in the press.

I don’t even mean that entirely sarcastically: as uncomfortable as it makes me for strangers to think about my health as an Issue, let alone their issue, and as much as I privately grit my teeth and think of all those (well-meaning?) articles whenever a cool and interesting-looking chick I meet at a party finds out what I do for a living and immediately starts a conversation about dieting, it is good news that that people are at least thinking about models’ well-being. It doesn’t pay to be too flippant when, after all, people have died.

But I have one solution, guaranteed effective, that doesn’t involve forcing me to go to a doctor and fork over more cash than I make working a show — hell, more cash than I made during most entire fashion weeks — to answer questions about my eating habits a five-year-old could intuit the “correct” answers to.

It doesn’t involve agencies better screening their charges for disordered eating (although come to think of it that would be nice), it doesn’t involve relying on Body Mass Index (I have never, not for a day in my life, had a BMI in the “normal” range — and my 35” hips mean I’m considered a heifer by certain clients), it doesn’t involve open letters and unkept, unkeepable pledges to put “full bodied, healthy and radiant Mediterranean types” on the catwalk. It also doesn’t involve taking away anyone’s hard-earned mini bottle of champagne.

If the fashion industry is to change the image it presents, clients — magazines and designers — will need to stop demanding, preferring, and booking underweight models.

Plenty of clients pay lip service to the idea of not promoting an ideal that plenty of models have a hard time living up to (Ali Michaels and her amenorrhea, Coco Rocha and her diuretics). But I have worked at 110 lbs and I've worked at 120 lbs. And when I’m thinner, I just seem to book jobs much more consistently, no matter the city. Clients bite when I happen to look my boniest.

Other approaches to the problem have their drawbacks. The reason the BFI abandoned some of the proposals they spent so many months developing was because they felt they would be unenforceable, would fail to achieve the desired affect — and because of the lack of international coordination.

The industry has a way of reducing ideas with potential to well-intentioned sop. Madrid’s decision to only permit models with BMIs of 18 or over to work? When I worked in Spain, my booker actually told me, “Don’t think just because this is Spain you can eat whatever you want and get fat, Tatiana. You need to watch those hips.” Milan’s vaunted no-more-size-zero-girls solution — that thing they were going to do with having models’ BMIs be over 18 and models themselves be over 16? Last time I was in Milan, my model apartment roommate had just turned 15, and the only mention of health was this message, inscribed inside the back cover of my portfolio book:

THE RIGHT BALANCE

Wellness and Beauty. Beautiful,bud Healthy above all. Ask a specialist for any diet program, or physical activity you intend to start. For any information, contact Associazione Servizi Moda or you Model Agency.

I never did contact the ASSEM. But I live in hope that the fashion industry will find a way to associate beauty with health with more than just some type on a page.

Related:Fashion Capitals End London’s Plan To Ban Size Zero [Times of London]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May the makeup artist who did this never work again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Normally Glamour — aside from having terrible covers and terrible writers — also underwhelms me with its fashion. Sometimes it’s so lifestyle-y and light I feel like I’ve mistakenly picked up a catalog; except of course for the fact that all the shit pictured still has the inflated designer pricetags. Imagine, then, my surprise in finding September’s issue actually contains one of my favorite fashion stories so far this season — “I Want Fun Fashion!” romps through the countryside with eight pages of color and spunk and pretty floral dresses I now have to covet. All that, plus smiling models, unidentified models, lampshades on models’ heads, and one smokin’ hot biracial model, after the jump.

This shoot could have totally gone into the territory of whimsical, self-consciously "eccentric," kitsch-for-kitsch’s-sake — why yes, that is an antiqued birdcage you spy in that charming wooden canoe — but instead the whole thing, from the props and setting to Sabina Karlsson’s nonchalant badminton-guitar, just puts me in a good mood. The model on the right, Valeria Garcia, isn’t even wearing high heels. Hot.

And can we pause for a minute to dwell on Sabina K’s gorgeousness? Those freckles. That hair. Her smile. Her tooth gap! She even has a blog (unfortunately she doesn't write it in English). Sabina, who is Swedish and Gambian, came in second on Sweden’s Next Top Model. The girl who beat her seems to be working mainly as a parts model — proving that all is right with the world and that taking pole position in anything-NTM doesn’t necessarily mean shit on the fashion front lines. In fact, being second or third is (well, nearly always) better.

For future reference: whenever anyone on a shoot breaks out “lampshade hula dance” as a concept, know that you’ve strayed far from the realm of taste.

This picture just makes me want to live in a house in the country with my best friend and run around in Best Costumes for the Day while collecting vintage luggage and globes where we mark our travels with pushpins. And then we would cool our impeccably shod heels with evening games of Scrabble and drink strong coffee from dinky floral china teacups.

Who the hell is this girl? Why do they crop off her head? And why does Glamour, like so many magazines, insist on never crediting its models, anyway?


I often wonder just why it is that this particular emanation of the hands-on-hips pose has come to dominate women’s fashion recently. Ordinarily, holding your arms akimbo gives you good posture, as well as flattening your stomach and sticking out your boobs. But this pose does the opposite — bending your wrists backwards so you can brace your hands against your abdomen and thrusting your shoulders forward turns your chest into a hollow, gives you freakish man hands, and your weirdly angled arms always look as if they were photographed from behind and then digitally stuck back onto your torso. When you see this pose from the side, the model inevitably looks hunchbacked. Why do women sell dresses to other women with this pose at least 15 times per magazine?


Oh my God, Glamour's using Sabina, a model of color, in two of this issue's three shoots! Please tell me this is progress. Hair and beauty editorials are often the exclusive domain of lily-white, oh, let’s say, Argentines and Brazilians (such as, ahem, Vanessa Cruz and Valeria Garcia, the other subjects of this hair editorial), as though the magazine’s black audience didn’t exist. Is this an appropriate coda for the Glamour black hair fiasco? Maybe! In any case, Sabina looks hot with purple eyeshadow. And it totally made my day that they didn’t spackle over her freckles.

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

The Gallstone Of Rouen
By Tatiana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hate men.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

At around 2:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, a 20-year-old model named Ruslana Korshunova jumped from the balcony of her ninth floor apartment in New York's financial district. A Kazakhstani of Russian heritage, she had modeled since the age of 15; top London agency Models 1's Debbie Jones tells a great story about her discovery and tracking-down of Korshunova after seeing her pictured at German club in an in-flight magazine. (I suspect Jones is spinning a typical fashion creation myth: Korshunova told UK Elle magazine that when she was 15, she submitted her own photos to the Moscow agency iCasting, a version somewhat shorter on romance and international intrigue but vastly more believable.)

Korshunova followed the usual career path of an Eastern European model — working abroad from a young age to send money back to her parents, who remained in Kazakhstan — albeit with considerably more success than is common. A slight 5'7.5" with braces and Rapunzel-esque hip-length hair, Korshunova nonetheless shot out of the normal model demi-monde of sometimes sweet, sometimes snide, always obsessive commentary on TheFashionSpot.com. She wowed casting agents and booked a slew of clients during her five years in the business. Korshunova worked for Marc Jacobs, Blumarine, Vera Wang,
Paul Smith, DKNY and Moschino; she booked a cosmetics campaign for Clarins and starred in a Nina Ricci perfume ad. She shot with Mario Sorrenti, Patrick Demarchelier, and Paolo Roversi. She had covers for European editions of Vogue and Elle, she had pictures inside American, Japanese, and Italian Vogue. Korshunova, it appeared, had grabbed fashion's brass ring.

She had achieved the kind of career that must have been reasonably consistent, and decently-paid, though of course pursued in total anonymity — even her doorman told the New York Daily News he didn't know the girl he saw return home at 5 a.m. on Saturday was a successful international model.

No doubt this is a story made more interesting in the eyes of some by the allure of Korshunova's profession. Journalists have already taken to calling Korshunova "the beauty," "the lithe looker," "the 5'8" head-turner," "the green-eyed blonde beauty," playing the fashion industry's own exoticizing, objectifying game. On Fox news - where else? — Geraldo Rivera showed "the last images" Korshunova. The camera lingered over her dead body — pale, bloodied, and partly covered by a sheet — while Rivera in a voice-over called Korshunova's ex-boyfriend's description of the model as "a good person" a "kind of a lame quote." I am not linking here on purpose.

It is as a woman, not a mannequin, that I'm sure Korshunova's loved ones will remember her. And irrespective of her field, one has to wonder at the process by which a girl decides to kill herself four days before her 21st birthday.

I did not know Ruslana Korshunova, but I do know something of depersonalization and loneliness of this profession, and its occasional outright miseries (Korshunova also told UK Elle, of her worst professional experience, "We were in the Alps shooting, high
up in the snow, and I was wearing a tiny dress. We were so very cold and it was snowing so hard — we couldn't see a thing. I thought I would not live to see another day.") The Daily News reports that Korshunova wrote long messages in English and Russian on a social networking site; the messages make frequent mention of things like love, desire, dreams, and rainbows; they
read as the missives of a very young girl who has discovered that romance often fails to live up to its promise. Korshunova quoted inspirational Internet poetry about the importance of forgiving quickly, kissing slowly, loving truly, and laughing uncontrollably, which the Daily News apparently mistook for her original work. In March, she wrote, "I'm so lost. Will I ever find myself?" In her most recent post, on May 30, she mused angrily that "Love does not take away from one in order to give to another."

Korshunova spent her last night watching Ghost with her ex-boyfriend, 24-year-old Ukrainian immigrant Artem Perchenok.

Many models would have envied Korshunova's career; many women would have envied her beauty. But clearly, leaving home at 15 to travel the world under the often-lax in loco parentis care of a series of agencies, even when it culminates in a nice Craig McDean editorial and a Dior Beauté campaign or three, can take a devastating toll.