Yes, I Am A Model

Model Channing Andreya, Photo by Alain Levitt
 

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.


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.”