YES, I AM A MODEL - PART 1

TEXT BY ALEX MINDLIN

On the third day of Fashion Week, Bryant Square Park had been turned into the usual billowing white tent city, its granite steps patrolled by cameramen and security guys with clipboards. The main tent, at the top of the steps, had been covered in a cloth scrim printed with maidens in togas.

At the bottom of the steps, Brianne Murphy and Channing Andreya were shivering in pink ponchos, puffy gray berets, and elbow-length knit gloves. “We look like plum-colored Oompa-Loompas,” Channing said. “Fashion rejects.”

The two women were handing out a special fashion-week edition of Metro, a free newspaper, wrapped in a pink sleeve promoting LeSportsac’s new line of bags. “Metro fashion?” they kept saying. “Metro fashion?”

“I am so freezing,” said Brianne. “My butt is numb, if you must know.” Brianne had pink pouty lips and blond hair that kept escaping from her hat. She was keeping a close but fruitless watch for industry types who might advance her modeling career. “I’d rather be inside doing the runway,” she had told me a couple of days before, “but this is what you have to do to get in.”

During a lull, Channing and Brianne started talking about odd modeling jobs they’d done. “I’ve done a website for L’Oréal, a Halloween-costume catalog, and an ad for a dentist’s office,” said Brianne. “I did a wig website.”

“I did a wig website too!” Channing said. “All these red ghetto-fabulous wigs.”


Fashion Week is model season, of course: The well-known faces get an airing, and a few new models get their names known. But it is also a time of tremendous activity for New York’s underworld of struggling models, the nameless pretty women who spent February running up phone bills at the cheaper Midtown hotels, grinning for casting directors’ Polaroids while clutching sheets of paper scrawled with their names, and grimly swishing around trade-show booths at the Javits Center. Nor do struggling models only work in high fashion. Midlevel models are like artificial food additives: normally unnoticed, but ubiquitous once you start looking. The grinning, blurry girl on the package of no-name socks is a model. So is the woman reading a chatty script about the orange-soda market in the video that plays at an investors’ conference. And the pink-lipped, blow-dried bunnies handing out shots of Bacardi at Johnny Utah’s are models too, of a sort. This is their story.


Most modeling careers, successful or not, start with a string of what are called “test” or “TFP” shoots. “TFP” is the saddest and most hopeful acronym in modeling. It stands for “Time for Print.” In TFP shoots, the model is paid in pictures, which she can put in her portfolio, and in exposure—the chance that someone with pull might see her wherever the pictures are eventually used.

On websites that models frequent, like Model Mayhem and One Model Place, photographers post dozens of notices a day seeking models for such shoots. On February 26, an animal-rescue agency in Kansas City was casting “Maxim-style glamour shoots with Pitbulls” for its calendar. A photographer in LA wanted ten models for test photos that she could show potential clients. “In between shoots,” she wrote, “there is a pool table and foozeball for entertainment, and food and drinks for everybody.” And someone on Craigslist wanted women to pose nude, but sniffily noted, “This book is art for art’s sake, and not for profit.”

Working free, or near free, is not just for the young and desperate. I once spent an hour hanging around a photographer’s studio in Chinatown, interviewing everyone who showed up for the chance to appear in a little-known Brooklyn nonprofit’s publicity brochure. The job would take half a day and pay $200. I expected a parade of down-and-outers, but I met a Columbia professor who had done print work for MasterCard and Carnival Cruise Lines and a stoned-looking 25-year-old Brazilian guy who had modeled in Milan, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Greece. There was a 33-year-old ex-runway model, another Milan veteran who said he had just gotten $1,200 for appearing in an Absolut commercial. I asked him whether $200 was worth his time, and he guffawed, showing fine white teeth. “You want the truth?” he said. “Yes and no. The days of the supermodel gig, and having that be your only job, are over.”

Models are anxious these days. “There could be ten other five-eleven girls that have my look,” one experienced blonde told me, after we spent an afternoon trudging from casting to casting. “Which one are they going to go with? There are so many models out there that clients can be pickier now. They can say, ‘We didn’t like her eye color,’ or, ‘She has a tattoo—let’s pick the next girl.’”

TFP shoots sometimes attract people who fit only the loosest definition of “model”—people looking for a consoling distraction, a way of playacting. One Saturday in Bed-Stuy, I met a wide-eyed, apple-cheeked Russian-Ukrainian 26-year-old named Zhanna, whom I had found through a Craigslist posting, where she described herself as “a professional fashion model originally from Russia.” Like the “Russia” part, the “professional” part was only sort of true: Zhanna’s modeling experience consisted of handing out liquor shots in Brighton Beach. “I wound up drinking all the sample liquor,” she told me. “I was like, ‘These people are not Russians—they don’t drink!’” On the other hand, Zhanna has done at least 30 TFP shoots, and today she wanted to look goth. “The vampire,” she said, “is my favorite monster.”

I followed Zhanna to a six-story warehouse, where she was meeting a photographer who had found her on Craigslist. He turned out to be a tall, ponytailed Swede, whom I’ll call Lars: a man so polite that the only sign of distress he ever showed was a fleeting, pained look.

When we arrived, Zhanna pirouetted self-consciously. “I’ve put on a little weight since the photos I sent you,” she said. “Is it workable?” She had no suitably goth outfits—she had expected Lars to have something on hand—so she went into the bathroom to change into a corduroy minidress that she had brought. After a minute, she popped out. “I forgot my eyeliner,” she said. A little later, she announced, “I have no black eye shadow, so it has to be brown.” She had also brought the wrong lipstick. “But I have something silverish,” she said. “Ah,” Lars deadpanned. “Silver.” The look made its third or fourth appearance.

Then Zhanna had a stroke of inspiration.

“Do you have ketchup?” she asked

“What? Ketchup?” said Lars. “For what?”

“For lips,” Zhanna said. “Same color. I’ll put ketchup. I’m serious.”

Lars did not have any ketchup. After she disappeared into the bathroom, he pursed his lips and leaned over to me. “It’s not exactly what I was expecting,” he muttered.


Like any event that takes over a city, Fashion Week has fringes—tiny shows that are mentioned on no official schedule and get no press coverage. These are mostly held in nightclubs or lounges, and little money changes hands to put them on. The club owners let the designers use the space for free, since pretty girls draw an audience; the models work for free, since they need the exposure; and the makeup artists and hairdressers work as a favor to the designers. The only people paying are in the audience.

One night, I spent five hours sitting in a cloud of hairspray at a gloomy, mirror-paneled Midtown club called the Grand. The occasion was a show by KahriAnne Kerr, a pixie-like 25-year-old designer who was showing heavily ironic turquoise and acid-purple shirts and dresses. Some of the clothing was meant to look inside out: Dresses had bra-like cups sewn over the bodices, and shirts had lines of beads mimicking seams. One blouse had an iron-on image of a locket that read “I won’t call the police on you.”

I briefly interviewed KahriAnne, who stands about five feet tall and speaks in a little girl’s voice, while she was hiding behind a rack of shirts and eating a Three Musketeers bar. She said she hated holding shows in club—“the lighting is shit.” As for the models, “They’re free,” she said. “I’ve never seen them before. I tell ’em I like a lot of attitude—‘Be rock stars.’ But I’ll take what I can get.”

The models themselves were mostly teenage girls from Long Island and the boroughs, supplied by a third-tier agency that had picked them up at modeling schools. “I’m doing this show because my agent told me to, because they know what’s best for me,” said a 17-year-old named Kim Bode. She was 6' 1", and the makeup artists had given her raccoon-like circles of eye shadow. Most of the models said they “loved runway modeling.” They watched with rapt attention when KahriAnne showed them where to walk, and a couple of them squealed after taking a practice spin through the empty club. “That was so much fun,” somebody said.


TO BE CONTINUED
YES, I AM A MODEL | 1 | 2 |

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