Pricing beauty the making of a fashion model pdf

I want to share with you a piece of advice your father gave me, almost 18 years ago. I was new to modelling, and was facing teething issues like creating my space and finding my place. She discovered her love of working out almost by accident when training with her husband, Swedish bodybuilder Jimmy Lewin.

We found a way of rising to the challenge by tasking a guest editor to do it fo. While other catwalk capitals including London and New York held the vast majority of their shows digitall. But as fashion itself h. Based in London, Jade is an award-winning fashion and beauty photographer who works with fashion brands and bloggers alike, as well as high-profile industry brands such as Manfrotto and Lastolite. Her career highlight so far was a campaign for N. Cheryl Bell is absolutely furious.

The posts about it all over social media offered a surprisingly glowing review from a notoriously tough crowd. The change? If you know nothing about Marcellas Reynolds, you should know this: He is a model fan. A fan of what? Models that walk the runways, show off in the catalogs and look fierce in campaigns. All of that is evident in his book, "Supreme Models: Iconic Bla. Ryan Bradley designs the balance between the facial images and the patterns in his paintings so that they compete for foreground status.

Both elements have powerful identities. The patterns are intricate, and explore the possibilities of distribution. Fashion Nova was among the top-trending fashion brands online in How did a retailer with only five stores get so popular? Associating its brand with Cardi B and Kylie Jenner didn't hurt.

Possessing a combination of poise, glamour and authenticity, Isabella Moore has years of operatic training and performance in her repertoire. This Nigerian-mixed-Singaporean Chinese beauty only turned full-time as a model with local modelling agency Mannequin last year.

Despite her past exposure th. To the outsider, the modelling world seems all about beauty, luxury and glamour. But in reality, there can be a dark side. Trying to fit your body into everchanging trends can be e. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Authors Imprint Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established to support exceptional scholarship by first-time authors.

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy. Poster boards are used to keep track of models, clothes, and accessories, backstage at a show. A great deal of thanks are in order to many people without whom this project would never have left the runway.

I thank my respondents for their time and generosity in interrupting their hectic schedules to share their stories and thoughtful reflections about their work. To my former bookers and managers, I am especially grateful. These pages are at times critical of the fashion world, but I hope they also show my respect for the work of modeling agents.

While at New York University, I was lucky to find a creative team of mentors—indeed, I think they are fine examples of edgy. Thanks to Harvey Molotch, my intellectual muse, and to Craig Calhoun, who has such an inspiring mind. I am in continual awe of Judith Stacey for her generosity, guidance, and remarkable style as a sociologist; I could not have asked for more from an advisor.

Viviana Zelizer warmly welcomed me into her field, and Joanne Entwistle gave me generous support during my time in London. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, I was fortunate to study with William Finlay, who gave me a push just when I needed it, and who continues to be a mentor. Thanks also to Olya for her kindness and curiosity and to Dasha for her hilarious company. Finishing the book was a challenge eased with the support of colleagues at Boston University, especially Sigrun Olafsdottir, Julian Go, and Emily Barman.

I was helped just in time with the work of my undergraduate research assistant Laura Wing. My editor Naomi Schneider I thank for being an early believer in the project, and then for displaying such patience with me to the end.

Earlier versions of some of these chapters have appeared elsewhere. I am grateful for permissions to use these materials. Special thanks to Beowulf Sheehan, who kindly provided all photographs for this book except where noted. Thanks lastly to my family for all the years of love and encouragement—and to my dad and Kathy, for countless bowls of saimin, to my mom, for late-night cups of tea, and also to Alexander Gilvarry for writing with me.

And to my sister Jennifer, for a lifetime of friendship, this book is yours. That was what he told me as I sat in a Starbucks in downtown Manhattan. I had come in search of a quiet table at which to crack open a social theory book, one of a number of texts I was assigned as a new graduate student in sociology at New York University. Instead I found myself seated across from a model scout who was handing me his card and telling me that I could be making a fortune as a fashion model.

He was in his forties, tan and balding; his two companions, who were listening to him intently, looked about twenty years younger. It seemed a lifetime ago; I had just celebrated my twenty-third birthday, well past retirement age for a model, and the books weighing down my shoulders were a reminder of a new career ahead.

On my way out I passed their table, and the loud-talking agent stopped me: Hey, which agency are you with? The young women smiled at me. I quit modeling six months ago to become a full-time graduate student. Why not?! He began lauding my look and then asked for my phone number so that we could talk and he could present me to the agencies in New York. He introduced himself as Todd, a model scout, and he described his pretty companions as girls whom he had recently discovered.

Meeting Todd was simultaneously off-putting and intriguing. I arrived at grad school wanting to study the gender politics of beauty and the body, an interest that took root when, as a teenager modeling in New York, an agent told me to try to look as lean as possible. The going joke around his agency, he explained, was "Anorexia is in this season. But now, at the age of twenty-three, I was happily retired from a world in which I had been advised by age nineteen to lie about my age to seem younger.

Todd called regularly over the next few days and explained that his job as a scout was to scour North America in search of new talent for all the major New York agencies, which in turn would give him a cut of the commission for every successful new model he found. He lavished praise and extolled my potential to make it big in various articulations: You have a very strong look, someone will like you.

I think you gotta real cool look, a New York look. You can be a full-time student and full-time model. And, finally, there was his tantalizing promise: I can make it all happen for you in a few hours. What is a look, and how is someone like Todd able to see value in it? The very words fashion model conjure up images of rich, glitzy women in luxurious clothes strutting down catwalks and posing for world-famous photographers, the stuff of celebrity, fame, and fortune—glamour alive in the flesh.

When Sasha was fifteen, she met a Japanese modeling agent at an open call audition in her hometown of Vladivostok, a harbor city in Southeast Russia. She can still remember the Polaroid picture the agent took of her: I looked terrified!

She was invited to leave her grey port city that summer during school vacation to work as a model in Tokyo. It was an unlikely destination for a girl known as Virus at school for her thin body, so skinny in fact that she wore three pairs of stockings under her jeans to fill them out. The customers carried on with her as usual: Oh, you should be a model! The teen waitress, in her first job in her hometown suburb, demurred as usual, too interested in high school social life and sports.

But the thought stayed with her until she moved to Manhattan at the age of nineteen to attend Baruch College, where she majored in nutrition, the cost of tuition defrayed by her middle-class family. In between classes, a scout stopped her on Fourteenth Street: Have you thought about modeling? This time, she said yes.

When I first met her at a magazine casting in New York, Liz was twenty-two years old, precariously balancing college classes with modeling castings, but doing neither activity well. Her grades were slipping, and she was perpetually in debt at her agency, which had advanced her the start-up costs of putting together her portfolio. Her teenage savings account quickly depleting, Liz made ends meet by waitressing and babysitting. Just as Liz contemplated leaving New York, Sasha was about to arrive.

By the time she turned twenty-two, Sasha had traveled around the world, living in agency-owned model apartments for no more than three or four months at a time in cities such as Paris, Tokyo, and Vienna. She was embarking on yet another journey, to New York, where she hoped her luck would change and her look would catch on in the fashion world. Here we have two young women, both with brown hair, brown eyes, and fair skin. Both are twenty-two years old, though they can and do pass as teenagers.

Over the next few years, both will attend hundreds of castings in fashion capitals around the world. They are two out of hundreds of thousands of contenders around the world chasing one of the most widely shared dreams among girls and young women. Both Liz and Sasha know, as their sea of competition knows, that the odds of having the right look to become the next top model are stacked against them.

Triumph and failure in a culture industry such as fashion modeling are enormously skewed. As in art and music markets, in fashion a handful of people will dominate the top of the hierarchy with very lucrative and visible rewards, while the bulk of contestants will barely scrape by, earning a meager living before they fade into more stable and far less glamorous careers.

So extreme is the success of the winners that economists call these winner-take-all markets. And just where does its value come from? Success in markets such as fashion modeling might on the surface appear to be a matter of blind luck or pure genius.

But luck is never blind, nor does genius work alone. Behind every winner in a winner-take-all market such as fashion modeling is a complex, organized production process. The secrets to success have much less to do with the models themselves than with the social context of an unstable market. When dealing with aesthetic goods such as beauty and fashionability, we would be hard-pressed to identify objective measures of worth inherent in the good itself.

Rather, an invisible social world is hard at work behind the scenes of fashion to bequeath cultural value onto looks. The backstage of fashion reveals a set of players—models, agents, and clients—and the peculiar rules of their game that usually remain hidden behind the brilliantly lit runways, the glossy magazine pages, and the celebrated glamour of fashion.

This is precisely how glamour works: through disguise. Glamour, after all, has its roots in medieval Celtic alchemy. Glamer is a spell, a magic charm, that is cast to blur the eyes and make objects appear different from, and usually better than, their true nature. This social world is enormously important in determining the realm of beauty and fashion ideals; after all, the relations of cultural production determine the possibilities of cultural consumption. Ultimately the clandestine world of fashion teaches us about much more than beauty and apparel; it holds lessons for the nature of modern work, markets, decision making, and new forms of racial and gender inequality.

This is its story. A look is not the same thing as a quality commonly called beauty. Neither Liz nor Sasha is best described as particularly beautiful. Sasha has big brown eyes and a small face framed by brown bobbed hair. She resembles the manga characters out of Japanese comic books.

Liz is very skinny with imperfect teeth, thick, dark eyebrows, and almond eyes. It is not theoretically demanding so much as theoretically engaging, a fair trade for clarity and readability.

Writing at the crossroads of economic sociology, cultural sociology, and the sociology of gender, Mears covers considerable ground and brings together subfields that normally remain distinct, without becoming unfocused. The end result is a nuanced, and deliciously complicated depiction of an industry.

Pricing Beauty offers a dazzling, engaging, utterly original contribution to public and scholarly understanding of embodiment, gender, race, culture, and markets. A riveting work of priceless beauty! I learned a lot and you will too. She reverses stereotypes of gender pay, sexuality, and the making of markets.

It is a first-hand analysis that does not let up in its page-turning intelligence and unremitting clarity. Mears takes us behind the curtain of high-stakes fashion. Drawing on her own experiences as a model, Mears uncovers the far less glamorous side of the industry, one that few of us will ever see.

This is sociology at its finest: thoughtful analysis, great storytelling and an empathetic perspective on the lives of so many who pursue their dreams, only to find a few nightmares along the way. A must read for anyone interested in understanding how celebrity is made. The Rules of the Game Behind-the-scenes, participants may work together, but they do not nec- essarily work together harmoniously.

Cultural producers struggle inter- nally for power and recognition. These invisible players comprise a competitive world of high-stakes careers, and they calculate their steps according to two opposed logics: on the one hand, making money, and, on the other, creating art.

These models, bookers, and clients work pre- dominantly in catalogs, television commercials, and print ads for goods such as toothpaste, electronics, and commercial clothing. This prestige may but may not pay off in the long run with huge financial gains.

It is a gamble that underscores the entire undertak- ing of fashion; it is, as sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call it, a rule of the game of fashion. Producers tend to separate themselves into two broad social networks: those that work in editorial fashion, and those in commercial fashion. To navigate these nuanced differences, all produc- ers socialize with each other, watch and imitate one another, and cultivate social ties and friendships that form the basis of the fashion modeling market.

Fashion producers are constantly conversing, circulating gossip by phone, text, and e-mail, gossip that spills out of their offices and studios and into happy hours, dinners, and late-night parties around downtown Manhattan and central London.

On more than a few nights I found my- self sharing drinks with bookers and models well into the early hours of the morning. The Problem of Pricing Beauty Within their editorial and commercial circuits, bookers must figure out which clients prefer which kind of look, and both must determine how much models are worth.

How do they determine the price of something as nebulous as a look? Pricing is a particularly troublesome endeavor for cultural produc- ers, because in most creative industries there is no clear correlation be- tween price and quality.

The problem of pricing exemplifies a larger quandary faced by cul- tural producers, and, for that matter, people in any market. It is the prob- lem of uncertainty, the inability to state in advance what one wants. In fashion modeling, bookers never know which looks will appeal to clients; mean- while, clients never really know which models will be most successful in selling their products. This is because consumer demand is fundamen- tally unknown, a vexing fact of market life that advertisers and market researchers routinely attempt to remedy, but never with much success.

Amid all of this uncertainty, fashion demands constant product renewal. Fashion is, after all, fundamentally about change.

Spurred by gossiping producers, successful goods accrue more success, while most entrants fail, leaving a wide gap between the winners and the losers. The success of the few obscures what amounts to measly rewards for most. Though the odds of making it big or making anything at all are low, modeling is regarded as very attractive work, especially for women. In American popular culture, modeling is glorified as a glamor- ous and prestigious career for young women, as evidenced in teen fashion magazines.

Though the prob- ability is slight, the possibility of hitting the jackpot is so deceptively at- tractive that modeling attracts more contenders than it should, creating a flooded market characterized by a taxing elimination tournament, similar to prizefighting.

The very few winners to emerge from the screening process can count their luck twice: once to enter the contest and again to win the prize. On average, most modeling careers last less than five years.

We now have the picture of a market that is highly volatile and tur- bulent, marked by uncertainty, imitation, inequality, and high turnover. Models attempt to embody the look, bookers scramble to find it, and clients chase the prestige of choosing it first. They are all vulnerable to losses as quick and enormous as their winnings, this is especially so for models. What determines if one model will rise to the top or settle at the bottom with the majority?

Put another way, how do the goods in this market—the looks—attain value? Fashion models get a lot of attention. We read about them in popular presses, sensational journalism, historical accounts, and cultural and me- dia studies. They are frequently critiqued as symbols of systemic gender, race, class, and sexual oppression.

Yet for all the concern over their many meanings, fashion models have yet to be taken seriously as workers and as cultural commodities. This book traces the production of value in the modeling market in four stages. Chapter 2 lays out the history and architecture of the model- ing market, with its crucial distinctions between the editorial and com- mercial circuits.

Chapter 3 examines the work that models do in their various and often feeble attempts to become winners. We turn in Chapter 4 to the tastemakers, those bookers and clients who together negotiate which looks are valuable. Finally, in Chapters 5 and 6, we will see how cultural ideas about race and gender more broadly shape which bodies are perceived as worthy.

Working It It takes work to model. Models do to the extreme what we all do at our jobs and in almost every facet of our social interactions: they work it. Chapter 3 examines how models put their best faces forward, project an idealized version of their selves, and succeed or fail depending on their arbitrary appeal to dozens of potential employers. But unlike most workers, models do this without the guidance of a boss or the security of a safety net. Though it has cultural cache, modeling is freelance work, meaning it is insecure and unstable.

It is also, on the whole, low-wage work. Front stage of fashion figure 1. Brokering Culture Having observed models up close in their work spaces—from their foot- steps on the catwalk to their relentless diets—the next chapters zoom out to the cultural intermediaries who sell and buy looks. Chapter 4 examines how bookers and clients price models, a process that translates shared sets of cultural values into objective price value.

These are not marginal or frivolous sectors but are, in fact, huge engines of urban and, indeed, global economies. They play a crucial, if often an invisible, role in shaping the terrain of pop cul- ture, from advertising designers, magazine editors, pop music producers, fashion designers and buyers, and art dealers. But just how do they know which models to filter in and out? What do they imagine consumers want?

Their acts of valuation are inescapably rooted in preexisting social categories of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Representing Bodies Fashion produces powerful representations of idealized class, gender, race, and sexual identities. Chapters 5 and 6 examine how cultural values of race and gender set the terms for seeing some bodies as being worth more than others, for producers do not come to their jobs as blank slates but come seeped in culture.

They draw upon and reproduce entrenched racist and sexist tropes of difference, but they do so unwittingly as they follow institutionalized production routines. Models do much more than promote the sale of fashion. The model look promotes and disseminates ideas about how women and men should look. Fashion images are prescriptions for masculinity and femi- ninity. But it leaves out the production processes behind those images.

If you were to look at an advertisement for designer clothes, you would not see how little the male model earns relative to the woman posing next to him.

When watching a runway show you would miss the age-old tropes of sexual- ity that designers consider as they dismiss black women for their cat- walks.

The perfect image on the page of a magazine captures but a sin- gle moment in time, effacing the work and the inequalities that lie beyond the frame. If modeling is the professionalization of gender per- formance, then it is a prime site to see the construction of masculinity and femininity, as well as race, sexuality, and class. Markets are not very social, however, in orthodox economic theory.

According to neoclassical economics, markets are made up of self- interested, rational individuals who follow the forces of supply and de- mand. Rather, there are just different types of markets that are organized around particular sets of social relations. Those economists who are breaking away from neoclassical orthodoxy, such as behavioral economists, are making gains in connecting economic decision-making to human and group psychological processes.

This book ultimately is about the contested negotiation and social relationships that underlie markets—not just fashion markets or culture industry markets but all markets. I arrived at a. There was already a small gathering of young people—nine teenage girls and three boys and a few of their parents—and when Todd arrived in a raincoat holding a Starbucks cup, we eagerly stood around him in a semi-circle to hear his welcoming remarks.

I heard it as nervous laughter to offset their growing anxiety over what was beginning to sound like a hard day ahead. Todd arranged meetings with several different modeling agencies, and, among them, the bookers at Metro were the friendliest and most sympathetic at least initially regarding my school schedule.