“Ashley Mears is a talented ethnographer, a first-rate sociological thinker and an artful writer. 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!” ―Judith Stacey, author Unhitched: Love, Marriage and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China

“Mears’s winning formula: combine deep inside knowledge of the fashion business, based on intensive observation, with useful sociological ideas, and present the result in readable, witty and incisive prose. I learned a lot and you will too.” ―Howard S. Becker, author of Art Worlds

“Ashley Mears shows us beauty is not in the eyes of the beholder but in the complex ensemble of organizational imperatives, social networking, and critical timing. 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.” ―Harvey Molotch, Professor of Metropolitan Studies, New York University

“Pricing Beauty is a a courageous and provocative book. 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.” ―Sudhir Venkatesh, author of Gang Leader for a Day

“This book is a pleasure to read―an entertaining, well-written and sophisticated analysis. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the intersection of aesthetics, gender, and labor.” ―Debra Gimlin, author of Body Work

Ashley Mears is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University

Pricing Beauty

The Making of a Fashion Model

By Ashley Mears

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-27076-3

Contents

List of Illustrations, ix,
Acknowledgments, xi,
1. Entry, 1,
2. Economics of the Catwalk, 27,
3. Becoming a Look, 71,
4. The Tastemakers, 121,
5. Size Zero High-End Ethnic, 170,
6. Runway to Gender, 209,
7. Exit, 249,
Appendix: The Precarious Labor of Ethnography, 263,
Notes, 267,
Bibliography, 283,
Index, 297,

CHAPTER 1

Entry

You’ve got a great look.

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.

While waiting in line for my coffee I overheard a man, flanked by two pretty young women at a nearby table, talking loudly about what it’s like to work in the fashion modeling industry. He was in his forties, tan and balding; his two companions, who were listening to him intently, looked about twenty years younger. I took him to be a modeling agent out with two of his models, and I listened with feigned disinterest, having packed away my own modeling portfolio into my mom’s attic just six months ago, content to start a new career in academia after what had been five years in the business, at first part time in college, mostly small stuff for local department stores in my hometown of Atlanta. Later, school vacations would be spent modeling in Milan, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. 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’m not with an agency, I told him. I quit modeling six months ago to become a full-time graduate student. He seemed to not hear me—”You’re not with an agency? 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.” As an undergrad studying sociology, I had fantasized about studying the modeling world from the inside, to determine how the industry arrives at such injurious beauty ideals. It’s been a long tradition in the sociology of work and organizations to learn the ropes of an industry by working in it. 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. And yet here was this pushy scout, dangling a way for me to get my foot back in the industry’s door.

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…. I’m super-selective…. You need outlets, can’t study all the time. You can be a full-time student and full-time model. My top girls make $10,000 a day.”

And, finally, there was his tantalizing promise: “I can make it all happen for you in a few hours.”

Well that all sounded very good, but when looked at sociologically, Todd’s world began to open up questions I had never considered asking. What is a “look,” and how is someone like Todd able to see value in it?

MEET SASHA AND LIZ

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.

Only it won’t work out this way for the majority of women and men who enter the fashion modeling market. Consider two young women—I’ll call them Sasha and Liz—making their way through modeling auditions in two fashion capitals, London and New York.

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. Once in Tokyo she grew up fast, learning how to cook for herself, to budget her money, and to communicate in English, of which she could at first barely speak a word: “I remember standing outside the car asking my driver, `Are you go me home?’ He was like, ‘What?’” She returned home with $5,000 in cash, “big money,” she says now with a sarcastic smile, to the surprise of her friends and family, who put the money toward home improvements.

About the time Sasha was making her first $1,000, halfway around the world another teenager I’ll call Liz was serving a plate of pasta to a couple of regular customers in an Italian restaurant in Pleasantville, New Jersey. 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. She began to talk more and more frequently about moving to Los Angeles, a place, she’s been told, where models can “cash out” on lucrative television commercial work.

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. After high school she attended a premier Russian university, only to drop out after one semester too enticed by the world’s possibilities to sit still in a classroom. She made money too, as much as $50,000 one year, enough to support herself and to send substantial remittances home to her family in Vladivostok. However, when I met her in London at an audition for a cosmetics billboard, she was, in her words, “poor as a little mouse,” renting a room in a photographer’s flat in East London at £120 a week and scraping the bottom of her bank account. 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. They have similarly lanky 5’9″ size 2 bodies. 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 have probably walked past each other in line at casting auditions in New York, though one doesn’t know the other. 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. How, among the thousands of contenders worldwide, is any young woman like Sasha or Liz able to rise from the pack to become a winning commodity? What makes one model’s “look” more valuable than the thousands of similar contestants? 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. There is little intrinsic value in a model’s physique that would set her apart from any number of other similarly built teens. 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. As glamour is cast upon the model’s look, all of her work—and the work of her agents, clients, their assistants, and their whole social world—gets juggled out of sight. 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. We usually can’t see it, but there is an entire world of work that goes into producing that which appears to be a natural state: a model’s “look.”This is its story.

THE LOOK

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. Both describe themselves not as pretty but, to use a term that comes up often in the industry, “edgy.”

The first designers to use live models in the early twentieth century noted that an ephemeral quality was the mark of a good model. French courtier Patou noted in the 1930s that his favorite model, Lola, was not necessarily beautiful. She sold clothes, Patou thought, because of her “great chic”—a seemingly spiritual quality.

This ineffable quality is known as a model’s “look.” It is a special type of human capital—what sociologist Loïc Wacquant, in his study of boxers, calls “bodily capital.” Models sell this bodily capital to fashion clients, such as photographers, casting directors, stylists, and designers. Modeling agents, known as “bookers,” broker the sale.

The term “look” seems to describe a fixed set of physical attributes, such as how a person actually looks. It’s true that models conform to basic Western standards of attractiveness, for instance, youthfulness, clear skin, healthy teeth, and symmetrical features. Within this frame, they adhere to narrow height and weight specifications. The female model is typically at least 5’9″ with body measurements close to a 34″ bust, a 24″ waist, and 34″ hips. The male model is typically 6′ to 6’3″ with a 32″ waist and a 39″ to 40″ chest. This framework is, as one stylist explained to me, a “good ol’ formula” for a model.

But this formula does not, by itself, constitute a look. Beyond this basic physique, small and subtle differences lead clients to prefer one model over another. Models, bookers, and clients refer to these differences as a model’s “look.”

Talking about the look proves exceptionally difficult for fashion insiders. Bookers and clients often grapple for the right words when asked to define a look. They struggle to explain that a look is a reference point, a theme, a feeling, an era, or even an “essence.” A look is decidedly not the equivalent of beauty or sexual attractiveness. While bookers and clients talk about some looks as “beautiful” and “gorgeous,” they are just as likely to value others they describe as “strange,” “grungy,” and “almost ugly.” Bookers stressed the difference between people who are “just hot,” that is, sexually attractive, and people who are appropriate as models, though the precise qualities that distinguish one from the other could best be described as “something special” or “something else.”

Part of this “something else” is in the model’s personality. Most models, bookers, and clients explain that a look is much more than the sum of a model’s physical parts. It is the “whole package” of a model’s being, including personality, reputation, on-the-job performance (including how one photographs), and appearance. In an industry predicated on appearances, personality is a surprisingly important factor for success. Alas, looks really can be deceiving.

I think of a look as a model’s unique appearance and personality that will appeal to a particular client at a particular time, depending on the product being sold. To see the value of any given model’s look, one may not simply lay eyes on the model, for a look is not a visible or an objectively identifiable quality inherent in a person. The look is in fact a system of meanings, such as a language or a code, tied to a social evaluation system. People learn to read and decipher this code in order to see distinctions between one model and the next, as well as their positions within the bigger fashion picture. It represents not just a person or an individual beauty but also a whole system of knowledge and relations among people and positions connected within an industry.

Looks are a type of commodity circulating in what sociologists call the “creative” economy, also called the “aesthetic” and “cultural” economy. The cultural economy includes those sectors that cater to consumer demands for ornamentation, amusement, self-affirmation, and social display. Products coming out of the cultural economy are inscribed with high levels of aesthetic or semiotic content in conscious attempts to generate desire for them among consumers. They provide social status and identity over and above their utility functions, hence their value is fluid and unpredictable. Lots of goods make up the cultural economy, such as art, music, television and film, and fashion.

Models’ looks are a prime example of cultural products. They are pure aesthetic content and are subject to wild, rapid fluctuations in value, which means that the people working in the modeling market face a high degree of ambiguity. Given all of this uncertainty, how does a person become a marketable look, as models try to do in the modeling market? How do bookers and clients determine their worth? And, finally, how do broader cultural understandings of value influence the worth of any particular look?

MODEL WORLDS

An investigation into the production of a look leads us into a social universe that usually goes unseen. It is a universe where intimate social ties guide economic transactions, where the poorest-paid jobs are worth more than thousands of dollars, where deception is integral to getting things done, and where mundane, taken-for-granted assumptions have enormous ramifications for pop culture and its mediascape of runways, commercials, billboards, and magazines.

The first step to understanding this world involves a little reverse magic to bring invisible actors into light. While models reap plenty of attention as pop culture icons, no model gets far without the campaigning efforts of a booker and a few key clients. Networks of agents, scouts, assistants, editors, stylists, photographers, and designers constitute a production world that links models to fashion consumers. Scouts and agents “discover” raw bodily capital and then filter it to clients—photographers, designers, art and casting directors, stylists, and catalog houses. These clients “rent” models for short periods of time, maybe a few hours, days, or weeks, during which time they deploy this capital to appear in media outlets such as catalogs, showrooms, advertisements, magazines, catwalks, showrooms, and “look books,” which are booklets that feature a designer’s new clothing collection. In these media outlets, models’ images serve to entice store buyers and, ultimately, to seduce fashion shoppers, the final consumers of the look, into making a purchase, as shown in Figure 1.1.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Pricing Beauty by Ashley Mears. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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