NEWSLETTER

TEXT BY ALEX MINDLIN

Modeling schools have a reputation as expensive, highly enjoyable wastes of time. One Staten Island teenager’s school had made her walk around Central Park with a book on her head. Kim was an advanced student, and she had been allowed to teach a class in runway modeling. We discussed the tricks of the trade. “You have to wait three seconds at the end for the camera to get a picture of you,” she said. “Sometimes I teach little kids, and they need time to blow little kisses, or put their sunglasses up.”

The models changed and got their hair done amid the stink of styling products and singed hair in a raised nook at the corner of the dance floor. On normal nights, it was the club’s VIP room, and it was enclosed by a transparent wraparound glass wall, which had been covered for the occasion with a black nylon curtain held up with masking tape. The curtain billowed out through a doorway set in the glass, allowing for an occasional view of the guys in baggy suits who had begun to fill the club at nine, drawn by an hour of open bar. One of them, a goateed slob with a nest of curly hair, kept popping through the curtain and telling the models to pose for pictures. Coincidentally or not, many of his shots seemed to have models changing their clothes in the background.

He said he ran a website, and gave me a card. “I’m with the Village Voice, the New York Times,” he told me. “I’m a real photographer.” I pointed out that he had a little point-and-shoot camera. “It’s a Leica, from Germany!” he said. “I don’t need the big camera. Trust me.”

The show was supposed to start at 11:00, but the hairstylists were still spraying and teasing at 11:30, to the promoter’s distress. Over the music, I could hear someone’s badly distorted, overamplified voice trying to keep the audience interested. ‘Oh my God, 2008, the Grand!” he kept yelling. “Oh my God, Fashion Week, 2008. You are going to love these ladies!” KahriAnne was frantically getting the girls in order (“You, and you, and you, and you”) when a guy with a shaved head and a walkie-talkie came in and started yelling at her to hurry up. “Get the fuck out of the way!” she squeaked at him, making shooing gestures.

That was when the masking tape gave out and the curtain started coming down. Two makeup artists, a photographer, and I ran to hold it up, grabbing hanks of it, standing on tiptoe, and splaying our arms, as if shielding a changing friend behind a beach towel. For the first time, the guys in the audience seemed genuinely excited, shouting and cheering. The threat of embarrassment loomed very near: The occasion was just this close to turning from a fashion show into a bunch of underdressed teenagers in a smelly room.

Somehow, the curtain got retaped, and the speakers boomed, “Ladies and gentlemen! Fashion Week 2008!” The girls started walking. One of them tripped. Nobody from the club had cleared a path, and they had to wade into the audience. As they came backstage again, they were breathlessly interrogating each other: “Did you get stuck in the crowd?” “They wouldn’t get out of the way!” They seemed furious, and excited, and very happy.


Channing Andreya, the model from the LeSportsac job who had compared herself to an Oompa-Loompa, is a very thin, six-foot-tall black woman somewhere around the age of 20, with wide-set, perfectly symmetrical eyes, an infectious guffaw, and legs that make up about 60 percent of her height. She has not been to the gym in three years, but she has a perfect 32-24-34 figure

Channing, who is from Memphis, speaks in a warm, lazy drawl: She pronounces “steal” as “still,” “design” as “disahn.” Back home, her father works for an insurance company, and her mother, a nurse, works for a state program that pairs visiting nurses with very poor single new mothers. “At the end, she always takes the girls and brings them to our house,” Channing said. “She says, ‘It’s not too late for you to do this.’”

She is a fervent Christian, although she hates the word “religious” (“I’m in a relationship”), and she believes that prayer gets fast, concrete results. Prayer, Channing believes, brought her first big job, a campaign for Ampro hair products that has put her face on websites, billboards, and 18-wheelers around the country. “I prayed for my boobs, too,” she told me. “You should see my sisters. And I had eczema when I was younger, and the whole bottom of my face was white, but I prayed and fasted and they laid hands on me.” Her religion allows her to be disarmingly direct: She happily discusses her celibacy (she and her fiancé abstain from sex), and she invited me to church and asked me how much my wedding had cost. Recently, she told me that she had prayed for me.

Channing moved to New York in late January, taking a robin’s-egg-blue room in a sterile brick condo tower in Tribeca, along with a designer and an ex-model, Katie, whom she calls “my fabulous white twin.” Channing, who does not have an agent, spends hours every day fielding emails and phone calls about work, and goes to perhaps 15 castings a week. Still, since coming to New York, she has booked exactly one paying modeling job: a short $500 shoot for a clothing designer’s “look book.” The rest of the time, she works for free—or for clothes or makeup—or hands out magazines and flyers for $30 an hour.

This is not as bad as it sounds. The fact is that, among models, the line between success and failure is almost invisibly thin. Since jobs tend to be brief, almost all models spend most of their time looking for work. In that way, they resemble those fast-metabolizing little animals that devote all their waking hours to finding food. The pay is good enough that they can afford to work infrequently without taking day jobs—unlike, say, actors and musicians. And doing unpaid work is still deeply engrained in model culture. Being seen by the right people is worth so much more than being paid: At the LeSportsac job, for example, Channing caught the eye of Memsor Kamarake, the fashion director at Vibe, who told her to call him.

It does not hurt that Channing benefits from the beautiful-people gravy train. In many ways, she lives in a parallel, different city, insulated by her beauty from everyday life. When she wants to go out on weekends, she lets a “model wrangler” take her and other models for free meals at trendy restaurants. Then they are ferried in limos or Escalades to Marquee or Tenjune, where they get free bottle service in the VIP section. Promoters pay the wranglers to bring models, because they know that pretty faces attract paying clients; Channing gets messages from two or three such handlers a day. “They’ll say, ‘Hey, I’ve got a dinner on such-and-such night, followed by a party here—wanna come?’” she told me. “I love this style of going out. It’s much better than going out on your own, because you have protection.”

I asked Channing how she makes rent—after all, her apartment probably runs about $4,500 a month. “I am a seed of Abraham,” she told me.


On the evening following the LeSportsac job, Channing walked the runway at a show in a Hell’s Kitchen lounge for Marco Hall, a young designer who is a friend of hers and who would be paying her in clothes. She had to get there five hours early, and she walked west from Midtown, trailing a rolling suitcase. She was wearing Michael Kors boots, into which she had slipped ripped-out Puma insoles—a trick she learned from her roommate Katie.

Models carry around a surprising amount of luggage. At a fashion show, much of the backstage area is usually given over to mounds of suitcases; and the average working model, careening across town from casting to casting, carries a sack of diaper-bag proportions. In Channing’s suitcase were her portfolio, an appointment book, hairbrushes, flat shoes, Gatorade, and what she called her “snack bags”: Zip-Locs packed with cashews, raisins, and dried fruit. Most models also carry around a pair or two of three-inch heels, which are vital for castings but impossible to walk around in. In any building where a major casting is going on, leggy, big-headed women clog the ground-floor lobby near the elevator bank, changing out of their sneakers into heels, safely out of the casting directors’ sight.

The backstage area at the club was a freezing, cement-floored room where a tough stylist named Lisa sat among an ocean of shoes, noting their sizes on a clipboard. In the background hovered an androgynous model named Porscha in a black baseball cap and a sleeveless, hooded, fur-lined jacket.

“Channing,” Lisa said, jutting a thumb at the girl, “Would you show her how to walk?” Channing walked to the corner of the room and then marched back toward us in a kind of hipshot strut, her legs replacing each other in a single line.

“Just walk how she walks,” Lisa told the girl. “Try to hold your arms the same, your posture, how your legs are. See how she prances? How she’s like a horse?”

Porscha tried a few times, and then she and Channing tried strutting toward each other, but the new girl wasn’t getting it.

Then Channing had a thought. “Show me your natural walk,” she told the girl. “Show me how you walk down the street.” Porscha broke into a butt-shifting stride, her ass toggling back and forth like a light switch. Both women giggled. “I swish my butt,” Porscha said sheepishly. “I got a stank walk.”

Channing thought. “Less stank,” she said. “More queen.”


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