Model behaviour

Models wait to be auditioned for Fashion Week 2009. Photo / Herald on Sunday

Hundreds of hopefuls gathered yesterday morning at Auckland's Viaduct in a shed-like building on Halsey St. Near-universally slim, tall and young, each got one chance to impress. Each strode out, posed and then turned in front of representatives from almost every major fashion house in New Zealand. "There's a stream of legs from nine o'clock until 12," says one modelling insider of the casting process. "It's what we refer to as a cattle call," says another.

These girls are competing to emulate their role models in the glossy fashion rags and the contestants on New Zealand's Next Top Model. From the hundreds at audition, only a couple of dozen will make the cut and have the mixed blessing of walking the catwalks during next month's New Zealand Fashion Week. Next week designers will confer and decide who they should cast – shattering the dreams of many wannabes – and engaging in behaviour worthy of wild scavengers.

Given that many shows run one after another, not all designers can get the models they want. Red 11 modelling agency head Amanda Betts says representatives of well-known New Zealand clothes-makers have been known to shout, swear and make threats when their first choices aren't available. The whole casting process, says Betts, is "like throwing chips to seagulls."

While New Zealand Fashion Week is dwarfed by similar events in New York, Paris, London and Milan, locally born model Jenna Sauers knows the casting call well. Until recently Sauers trod catwalks in Europe and America – as well as last year's New Zealand Fashion Week – and has appeared in fashion spreads in Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour and InStyle.

She's been privy to the best and worst of a profession that ranks high on the list of teenage girls' preferred careers. For two years Sauers, under the name Tatiana Anymodel, wrote an anonymous blog on feminist website Jezebel dishing the dirt on the trials and tribulations of international modelling – including the pressure to lose weight, the drug and sexual abuse and an economic structure that leaves many catwalkers impoverished.

Last month she outed herself and announced that she was quitting the profession. Speaking from New York, Sauers, 23, says girls need a reality check before they decide to try walking down the runway. "A lot of the ways the industry advertises itself are not necessarily the full story. People's perceptions of modelling can be misleading."

Sauers wrote in her farewell blog that there was one particular model who probably could serve as a poster-child for the dangers of the industry. The model was managed by her mother who pocketed her daughter's considerable earnings from television commercials. She was engaged in an intimate relationship with a male musician, one with a penchant for barely legal girls.

After not seeing her on the fashion scene for a while, the next Sauers heard of her was that she was in rehab for a heroin addiction. "The story – with the stage mother, the influence of one of the many dudes who f*** 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."

While this story took place in the US, and Sauers says the New Zealand scene is "much cleaner," there is a common complaint catwalk models here share with their overseas peers. Fashion Week is the highest-profile event on the modelling calender, but the pay rates are not commensurate with the attention. While 1980s supermodel Linda Evangelista famously told Vogue in 1990 that "We don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day," rates for a typical model for a catwalk show are a tiny percentage of that figure.

Betts says models are typically paid $100 per show, ranging as high as $300, and sometimes as low as $50. "Fashion Week will kill me for saying this," adds Betts. Payment, she says, is often in kind rather than cash. Dresses rather than dollars. The opportunity to strut on the catwalk is welcome to many models, but Sauers says: "You're left wondering how it is that opportunity will turn into the opportunity to pay your rent. It's shameless, really."

Models are considered private independent contractors, not covered by minimum-wage or youth rates regulations, and they work for an agency that enters into a contract with designers. Agency commissions are typically 20 per cent, says Nova and Clyne Management head Kim Larking, and this is paid directly by designers and doesn't get cut out of a model's take at Fashion Week.

Betts describes Fashion Week as a "roller-coaster" for models. Sauers says that the entry requirements for amusement park rides and modelling are strikingly similar. After starting aged 8 doing childrenswear modelling in Farmers and Postie Plus catalogues, it was only a growth spurt at age 14 – when she grew to her adult 178cm – that allowed her to start doing "grown-up work."

"It's basically, 'you must be this tall to ride'," she says. The spectre of underage models walking in an adult world – complete with access to alcohol, pressure to lose weight and exposure to lechers – has haunted the fashion industry around the globe. Across the Tasman concerns were raised in 2007 when a 12-year-old was selected as the face of Gold Coast Fashion Week, and again last year when 14-year-old Polish girl Monika Jagaciak was due to appear.

The outcry over Jagaciak led Australian Fashion Week organisers to last year ban under-16 models from the catwalk. New Zealand Fashion Week has followed that lead – to a point. There's an out clause in that underage models can be allowed, with the approval of organisers, and if the model is chaperoned at all times. Managing director Pieter Stewart declined to disclose how many underage models appeared at Fashion Week last year, but sources in the fashion industry says there were at least a couple strutting their stuff. And within the fashion industry itself, opinions are mixed on modelling age limits.

Larking, who says he has "probably 50 per cent" of Fashion Week models on his books, says the age limit is a "responsible thing." Designer Karen Walker says she doesn't impose any age limits when casting her shows, and NOM*d designer Margarita Robertson says the setting of any age limits doesn't make an awful lot of sense. "In this day and age it's quite PC," she says of the current policy. "There have been times when we have used girls who were 14 – not because they were 14, but because they had the qualities we were looking for." "But," concedes Robertson, "if we're going to have an age limit, 16 is probably right."

While there are instances of New Zealand designers skirting the age limit, Sauers says the situation isn't nearly as bad here as it is overseas. When she appeared in Milan Fashion Week last year, their much-vaunted 16 years and over policy was flaunted almost at whim. "Nothing I saw in Milan convinced me that those age limits were being respected." Organisers of Milan's fashion week also made headlines when they banned size-zero garments from their catwalks and said they would also insist on models having minimum Body Mass Index scores to guard against skeletal models with inevitable eating disorders.

Sauers, at five-foot-nine, had a modelling weight of just 50kg. Even being this thin, she says there was still pressure for her to drop more weight. At one fitting in New York, a designer was having trouble. "He couldn't get the collar to fit right. A belt around the waist was causing these funny pulls across the bodice," says Sauers. The designer, in frustration, turned to his model and exclaimed: "What are you? A size two?"

This sort of comment, while not usually so blunt, is common, says Sauers. Outright eating disorders were very rare in the profession, in her experience, but she says it was far more common for models to have what she calls "disordered eating." When working, she says a regular day's food intake could consist of a banana, an apple and packet of soup and "maybe five or six inches of baguette."

"I would consider myself one of those models who definitely exhibited symptoms of disordered eating over short-term periods for short-term gain," she says. "Or rather, short-term loss."

Amanda Betts says she is pro-active in dealing with underweight models, removing them from her books. In the past four years she's culled three from a current book of 40. Kim Larking says it's "very rare" to come across a model with an eating disorder and those with eating disorders are usually expert at hiding it. "If you could pinpoint exactly – among your associates and friends and peers and co-workers – who has an eating disorder, you'd be a mind-reader," he says. Size zero, he adds, is bizarre and unattractive. "We all generally understand what looks good and what doesn't. You don't have to be a designer to know that."

Grand gestures in the form of Fashion Week policy don't really seem the answer to Sauers, anyway. She's seen noble words in Milan and London turn hollow when it actually came time to enforce them. From 14-year-olds to laxative-abusers, the former model is cynical about whether the fashion industry really has the heart to follow through. "It's an industry that is necessarily focussed on image and outward appearances." She says there has been a lot of heat and noise, but not much light.

Despite her complaints about the profession – and she has many – Sauers says there is some fun to be had. Modelling during fashion weeks has all the thrills and spills of putting on a theatrical performance. Makeup and hairdressing calls can be up to five hours before the event, leading to very early starts for models appearing in morning shows. There's a team of stylists, makeup artists and dressers backstage, fussing over appearances and designers offer pep talks.

Last year, backstage at Lonely Hearts Club's bogan-themed show, a brown piece of cardboard had the following pearls of advice for models written in red Vivid: "You are a hot bogan bitch who is into motocross. You also go to the drag races in the weekend. No smiles. Confident but not angry." Then, the moment of truth. The lights go down, the music starts, and the show is about to begin. "There's a moment of nervousness," says Sauers of the final few minutes of waiting to step into the limelight. "You're always worried about doing something to disrupt the performance – like falling over."

Falling down is a near-universal fear among models, and Sauers says she had always avoided such an embarrassment in her career – until she appeared last year in Trelise Cooper's show at New Zealand Fashion Week. She was one of two models who fell during that show. "It's nerves and really, really, really, really tall shoes that haven't be worn before, added to slick, freshly painted catwalk," says Sauers. "The thing to do is get back up and carry on and smile – which the audience seems to like because you usually have to walk down the runway so stony-faced."

As for the walk, pose and turn itself? It's hardly rocket-science, says Sauers. "It's actually pretty simple, it's just walking. Mostly I was able to hit autopilot at that point."

But the show is not over then, far from it. Designers inevitably have more outfits than models, so once a girl gets off the runway, the backstage crew goes into overdrive. "As soon as you've stepped out of the area that's visible to the audience there are dressers who're waiting by a rack of clothing with your name on it – and they immediately start pulling off your tights and taking off the belt and unbuttoning your coat. "There are hands all over you, and somebody is calling up a pair of tights for you to step into and then, suddenly, you're in a new outfit and you step back into line."

A rapid adjustment of a collar by the head stylist, a brush through the hair, an application of lipgloss later, and the model is ready to repeat the whole process.

Each show requires up to three costume changes, and in-demand models can be booked for up to five shows in a day. And, through all this insanity, no food. Being all made up, and with scant time between shows, Sauers says taking time to have a sit-down meal at Viaduct restaurants near the Fashion Week venue wasn't an option. "And you definitely don't want to go to a service station and eat some nasty fast food," she says.

The only sustenance on offer backstage last year was copious amounts of energy drinks from sponsor Red Bull. Fashion Week managing director Pieter Stewart rather snippily says meals are not the responsibility of Fashion Week and, moreover, "if a model has several shows in a day, then I would expect they take their lunch or buy it just as everyone else does when they go to work."

Karen Walker, who holds her exhibitions away from the main venue at the Viaduct, says her exhibitions always have catering for cast and crew. EVEN in the worlds' most tightly regulated and best-catered Fashion Week, the models – who for a brief moment are the stars of the show – face a short shelf-life. Youth, a quality considered essential by the fashion industry, forces adult catwalkers off the runway. Sauers says she saw equal numbers of 15 to 20 year-olds and 20 to 25 year-old models working the international fashion circuit, but that there seemed a near-universal Logan's Run-type cull once a model turned 25.

Once retirement age is reached, and high-profile designers no longer require their services, models have a stark choice. Staying in the industry requires a side-step into commercial work, or progressing further up the food chain. Both Red 11's Amanda Betts and Clyne Management's Kim Larking are good examples of this.

Betts once was a teenage model alongside Rachel Hunter and Larking posed as a male model on the catwalks of Milan and Paris. Both, after their teens, transitioned into more commercial work such as catalogues and television advertisements before settling into work at their respective modelling agencies. But Sauers says she's quit the clothes-horse game.

Well, quit wearing the clothes and posing at least. She is now a writer, presently covering New York Fashion Week. She is as far from the airhead model stereotype that you can get. Her once-anonymous blog demonstrated her as equally capable of discussing the lack of merit in Ugg boots ("They make feet look like pastel sausages") or the effect of the recession on the fashion industry ("The propagation of inanities like 'investment' dressing is just evidence that even most industry experts are only grasping at straws, just like the rest of us"). She even uses the word stagflation.

Writers, of course, suffer no mandatory retirement age. Sauers says she is refreshed by the potential future her new career offers: "I could feasibly do this well into my 20s."

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If ever more proof was needed that the fashion industry encourages its models to look close to death, look no further than Lonely Hearts Club's latest emo chic collection entitled "Brains for Dinner."

This is the look that the fashion house will be showcasing at Fashion Week next month. Lonely Hearts Club creative director Steve Ferguson says he cast models with "a ghostly, awkward aspect", and then, using makeup, "sunk their eyes and cheeks a bit, because we wanted a sombre, deathly edge". He says the resulting retro-gothic look isn't an intentionally cutting commentary on the fashion industry, but rather it came from watching early Peter Jackson zombie films.

"It was Bad Taste that really started it," says Ferguson. He rejects the link between overly thin models and unhealthy body image in the wider public. Besides, he says, the New Zealand modelling scene is far from emaciated. "I don't think it's a concern here. You've got to remember that some of those models are naturally skinny – that's how they are."

Ferguson, along with his partner Helene Morris and friend Amy McFarlane, founded the fashion house in 2003. Lonely Hearts Club was highlighted early last year by the UK's Marie Claire magazine and their clothing is now stocked by stores in Australia, Japan Hong Kong and the United States.

Despite these inroads overseas, like many other New Zealand designers trying to work through the recession, Lonely Hearts Club has this year scaled back its involvement in Fashion Week. Instead of a solo catwalk show like they put on last year, this year they're putting on a less costly installation.

Ferguson says that while sales are holding steady, the current economic climate encourages caution. "Everyone's going to tell you it's been hard, but we've experienced some nice gradual growth. We're really just taking small steps and being careful until things pick up again."