Next!

I want to tell you about a feeling I would have in my stomach before modeling castings. A frenetic energy, a fluttering that carried me each step as I would approach wherever the casting was. Sometimes it would be in the office of the brand, sometimes in a photo studio. Sometimes it would be in hotel rooms, and sometimes a casting director might invite you to a go-see, and you’d meet them, one on one. One time I found myself on my own, in my underwear, at midday on a Sunday in a casting director’s apartment, very aware of how alone I was at that moment. Most castings weren’t like this, though. For the majority of them, I was one of many. I walked everywhere, even in winter, because I wanted desperately to burn calories and because I was never sure I’d be long enough wherever I was to buy a bicycle. I’d know when I was approaching the casting because I’d start to see a few guys with pronounced cheekbones and skinny black jeans among the regular street goers. It would have started already, that pit-stomach feeling, but it would increase.

In Milan, during fashion week, the city would fill with models. There were castings seemingly everywhere, and so wherever I would turn, I’d see other models. The flutters were constant. I remember one time my agency sent me to cast for Moncler, the expensive outerwear brand. I was excited. Even though I don’t like Moncler jackets (not that I could have ever afforded them, but I thought they looked like inflated bin-liners), it was a big brand. If I could walk in their show, I thought, it would definitely mean something. Milan Fashion Week was twice a year––in pre-pandemic times––once in September showing the following year’s spring/summer collection, and once in February showing the fall/winter collection of that same year. This casting was in early February, when morning mist would hang over the canals, then clear, revealing a piercing, cloudless sky.

To be in fashion week was to be stepping into the future, a reminder that fashion existed on a speculative timescale. On that February day, when I went to cast for Moncler, I walked down a busy Milanese street, following Citymapper on my phone. I arrived at my destination, stepping through a massive doorway that opened into a courtyard. My heart sank. There was a long line snaking its way through the space. My agency had told me that Moncler was only looking to cast a few guys for its show; they already had a few booked who had done their campaign, and they had a roster of regular bookings. I thought they had given me this information as a boost: they’re only looking for a few guys, but here you are, being called for the casting. Instead, I guess they had said it as a warning. They are only looking for a few guys, and it’s a crapshoot. I couldn’t count the number of models in the line in front of me. It snaked back and forth enough times that I couldn’t get a good sense of it even if I’d tried.

I waited two hours to get into the casting itself. It was a cold day, so cold that I couldn’t read or hold my phone out because my fingers were numb. I kept my hands in my pockets, rocked back and forth in my black Doc Marten boots, and watched as my breath curled up into a little cloud of steam. The shadows of the other models traced long and skinny along the pink courtyard wall. I heard a guy behind me tell the model he’d come with that he really needed this job. The guy nodded but said nothing. But I think this could be the one, he continued. I have a good feeling about this one.

They finally called me inside. I was handed a jacket two sizes too small for me, and the second it became clear that the arms stopped somewhere midway up my wrist and I was never going to be able to zip it closed, I was told to leave. Next! I fumbled with the jacket, accidentally dropped my portfolio, and spilled a composite card on the floor. I didn’t bother to pick up. A two dimensional me looked up at the ceiling, only to be stood on by the hopeful guy from the queue. Next! We walked out into the Via Stendhal together, in silence.

The model-turned-sociologist Ashley Mears calls it “the jackpot.” That’s what we were all doing in that line, what the flutters in my stomach were. They were the judders of the gambler, my body’s version of the clammy hands of the slot-puller. Two lemons and a cherry. Fashion is about fantasy. There was a negligible chance of me getting that job for Moncler, but I still waited for two hours even after seeing the long line of models that slunk its way around the courtyard. Not enough, I went from Moncler to another casting, and another. I kept pulling the lever.

***

Now, a few years removed from modeling, I’m interested in why.

Why did I keep going to huge open castings when the probability of booking them was so slim? What was it about the dream of walking in a fashion show that was so enticing that it managed to draw us in enough to stand in the freezing cold on that Milanese street? The anthropologist Giulia Mensitieri, whose recent ethnography of Paris and Brussels-based creatives working in fashion, The Most Beautiful Job in the World: Lifting the Veil on the Fashion Industry, caused a stir throughout the industry, argues that fashion is “overexposed.” What she means is that the dream of fashion––the money, the fame, the craft, the artistry, the fabrics, the exuberance and excess––is a blinding light. It simultaneously draws you in, mothlike, while it obscures the reality of what is actually going on. The light is so bright that it washes out the edges. This, she argues, is how the fashion industry ends up being so exploitative. (...)

There are many ways to describe fashion’s excesses. It’s the toll that it takes on designers like Raf Simons, who caved under the crushing pressure of having to do six collections a year. It’s Burberry burning $37 million of product to maintain brand value. It’s the fact that the industry contributes 20 percent of the world’s global wastewater and trillions of plastic microfibers into our oceans (which then come back to us, in our salt). But the excesses are part of that blinding light, the exact thing that makes fashion so enticing. Mensitieri’s book is important for showing that these excesses provide cover for the exploitation that happens up and down the fashion chain. It’s not just the sweatshop workers in emerging market economies who are taken advantage of, she notes; it’s everyone except the tiniest minority right at the top of the fashion pyramid. It’s photographers working for a magazine for exposure, models working to pad their books and stylists to build their portfolios. All of this unpaid. It’s “unjust,” noted Karl Lagerfeld before he passed, impassive behind his dark sunglasses and untouchable position at the top.

As a model, the exploitation was fairly obvious. It was my agency charging me a $300 printing fee for a bunch of composite cards, which models take to castings and leave behind with casting directors, and another few hundred dollars for my portfolio—a plastic binder with the agency’s logo on it. It was having to pay out of pocket for test shoots early in my career to build my book, then paying more money to do them over after shaving off the facial hair, which I’d hated, that my agency had told me to grow. It was the models I knew sharing a studio apartment in outer Bushwick, with a shower curtain in the middle of the room for some privacy. (They were each charged over $1,000 monthly by their agency to live there.) (...)

The fact that you are selling your image also makes the rejections sting in a different way. To be a successful model is to commodify your likeness. You are essentially selling a product, and the product just happens to be the way you look. And while I’m sure it sucks when you sell clothes to be told repeatedly that your product isn’t quite what the customer is looking for, at least there is a sliver of comfort in knowing that there exists a clear separation between you (the salesperson) and your product. In modeling, that distinction is almost nonexistent. I could never quite get over the fact that I was handing over a com-card with a picture of my face on it, and that the “no” wasn’t a complete rejection of me, in my entirety. I started to question everything, not just my looks. The constant rejection was a very intimate way to be hollowed out.

While this never got easier, the thing that eventually broke me was one that no one warned me about, and thus I had no way of preparing for––the way the industry extracted time. I could never understand why a brand would hold an open casting to see five hundred or so models when they could have pre-selected a handful and still had ample choice? Why make us stand around in the cold all day only for a moment’s consideration? I have often wondered: How much of my time as a model did I spend actually modeling (like walking a runway or posing in front of a camera) versus chasing the dream, standing in lines waiting to be considered, or sitting in a make-up chair or draping myself on a sofa, waiting to be called?

To model was to wait. To wait for my turn to be cast, to wait on a set, to wait for the shutter-click, to wait to succeed, to make it, to see my face on a billboard, and, even more, to make rent, to pay off my debts to the agency, to simply keep going. This waiting, this never-knowing life of ellipses, is how the dream functions, and it’s the one aspect of the industry that Mensitieri doesn’t touch on. I think the pre-pandemic industry was so good at carving out great swathes of wasted time because to dream requires time. It’s in those wasted moments that we were given space to lean, ever so closely, into the dream.

by Barclay Bram, Guernica |  Read more:

Image:Barclay Bram

[ed. My nephew Tony is a top tier model, and I've followed his career from the beginning. This seems like an eerily accurate account of some of our conversations. Despite the glamour, the fashion industry can be a brutal and extremely competitive business. Here's a famous shoot he did with Sølve Sundsbø and more at The Fashionisto.]