Scary beauty

I saw a documentary a few months ago about two model scouts who went looking for fresh young model material in deepest, remotest Russia. Their quest was to find the next big thing, someone new and different who would stand out from the crowd, sign to their agency, and make them a lot of money. They went from city to city, turned up in a venue full to bursting with young girls walking about in their underwear, selected a few, and ultimately took a handful back to America to start their modelling careers. The model scouts made the trip every year, and if a prospect was too young one year to start modelling yet (say, under 16), they kept an eye on them the next year, and so on, until they were ready to start.

The scouts emphasised that, of course, although their looks were very important the girls also had to have a good strong personality, some spoken English, a level of independence and a a real ambition to be a good, hardworking model. So far, so good. I don’t really have a problem with the way they ran their business, they did genuinely seem to care about the girls they chose, and were careful to edit out any that were clearly to young, stupid, vulnerable or immature to cope with relocating to a completely foreign land and being shunted about like a piece of meat for the next five years.

I wasn’t even overly bothered with the need for the models be thin, or pretty or have nice skin, this is to be expected. The thing that really struck me was that the girls they chose were practically aliens, they were so odd looking. Lined up next to each other, their strangeness was not too apparant, but standing next to the hordes of “ordinary” girls who did not make the cut, the contrast was stark. Their necks were swan like in length, barely able to hold heads that were outlandishly large compared to their twiggy bodies, and which bobbled about above razor sharp clavicles. Long gangly legs and arms seemed to float through the air, such was their frailty, and strangely large eyes, framed in Bambi-like lashes, completed a package of Roswell like proportions.

When I was in my teens, the eighties supermodels were in ascendance. Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, Cristy Turlington – they were all familiar faces I could recognise in a nano-second, they were the shapes we all looked up to and wanted to emulate. Magazines regualarly ran interview with them, in which they defensively stated that they “just looked like this naturally”, did no exercise except the odd run or hike in the woods, ate whatever they liked, and were just “blessed”. And they always finished with the line that, as children, they looked like freaks. Classmates said they were too tall, too thin, their lips and eyes too big.

And eventually, I realised that although the bit about eating whatever they liked and doing no exercise was a little hard to swallow (after all, didn’t models exist on diets of cigarettes and lettuce leaves?), they were probably right on the last thing – as children, they did look like freaks. They were the odd ones out, with their exceptional height, symmetrical faces, and highly photogenic proportions.

So twenty years ago the models held up as an example of how to look, used to push everything from clothes, shoes, bags, banks, supermarkets, alcohol and cars, were the slightly unusual girls from middle America, Germany and Croyden. Sitting next to each other, as with the Russian dolls of the documentary, they looked beautiful but not bizarre. Compared to the average New Zealand woman they were physically perfect, but not frighteningly so. Now, the fashion industry has such a demented view of what a beautiful woman is, of the ideal frame on which to show their clothes, that they have to search the most remote parts of the globe to find the world’s next top model. 

I probably wouldn’t mind if I didn’t have two daughters of my own.  I used to think Cindy Crawford and Elle MacPhearson had the ideal womanly shape, and really, compared to the starved 15 year olds who grace the front covers of fashion magazines now, that shape is a pretty good one.  Somehow, I’m going to have to raise my girls to view the new models with perspective and hopefully the realisation that the fashion industry is completely dislocated from reality, and maybe, completely mad.