Why the Fashion World Needs to Commit to an 18+ Modeling Standard
Pasha Harulia was fifteen when strangers began reaching out to her on Instagram, asking if she was interested in modeling. She wasn’t—but at her mother’s urging, she agreed to give it a shot. Weeks after signing with an agency in her native Kiev, the then-sixteen-year-old was en route to Paris, booked for the Balenciaga show. “I didn’t even know what Balenciaga was,” says Harulia, who is now nineteen. “People told me it was good.”
After Paris came Tokyo, where Harulia shared a models’ apartment with several Russian girls, the youngest of whom was thirteen. It was an intense few months, much of the time spent in a van that shuttled the young models to castings. “I had some fun,” she says. “But mostly I was thinking about the money.” Guangzhou, China, was different. Modeling for e-commerce sites, she says she’d sometimes shoot up to 100 looks a day. “It was like, how do you say it—like someone wiped the floor with me,” Harulia recalls. “And then threw me away.”
How did we get here? How did the fashion industry become so reliant on the labor of teenagers? What’s striking about Harulia’s story is how typical it is. Cara Taylor began modeling at fourteen. Imaan Hammam was thirteen when she was spotted near an Amsterdam train station. Andreea Diaconu was an unusually tall eleven-year-old when scouts started circling. These girls are a few of the lucky ones; resilient Harulia signed with blue chip agencies in New York and Paris and walked for Miu Miu in March for the fall 2018 collection, but many of the roommates with whom she shared flats in unfamiliar cities were discarded or burned themselves out—“broken from the inside,” as she puts it.
Fashion has long valorized youth. But the churn of “new faces,” as rookie models are known, has become relentless. Vast numbers of them cycle through the industry at hyperspeed. “It’s not like all these kids are destined to become stars,” notes Angus Munro, a casting director who works with designers including Rick Owens and Isabel Marant. “It’s more that the business model has become, Let’s throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, and maybe one noodle sticks and books the Prada show.”
No one designed the system to work this way. But can we change it?
Early this year, in the wake of #MeToo revelations, Condé Nast, the publisher of this and many other magazines, issued a new global vendor code of conduct. Responding to stories about models both male and female being inappropriately touched, pressured for sexual favors, and even assaulted, Condé Nast established provisions aimed to ensure that all its editorial shoots are safe working spaces—harassment-free zones with private dressing rooms and allowances for model approval of both poses and clothing. Another set of provisions addresses the age of models: In recognition of the unique vulnerability of minors thrown into a career where they have little control and where abuse has been all too commonplace, the vendor code of conduct stipulates that no model under the age of eighteen will be photographed for editorial (unless he or she is the subject of an article, in which case the model will be both chaperoned and styled in an age-appropriate manner).
This is partly the result of an internal reckoning. Vogue, along with a number of other publications, has played a role in making it routine for children—since that’s what they are—to be dressed and marketed as glamorous adults. When Brooke Shields, then fourteen, graced the February 1980 cover of Vogue, she was an outlier. Since then, models in their mid-teens have appeared in many of our fashion editorials. No more: It’s not right for us, it’s not right for our readers, and it’s not right for the young models competing to appear in these pages. While we can’t rewrite the past, we can commit to a better future.
Will the rest of the fashion industry follow suit? The Council of Fashion Designers of America is on board: As its president and CEO, Steven Kolb, explains, the CFDA has witnessed positive changes since establishing a sixteen-plus standard on the runway eleven years ago. “The brave men and women who have come forward to talk about a culture of sexual harassment in certain parts of the fashion industry have made us reevaluate,” he says. “Young models are still developing. There can be a lack of the confidence, strength, experience, and maturity it takes to deal with the pressures of this work. The CFDA supports the recommendation of raising the minimum age—we want young models to have the time to come into their own so they feel safe and in charge in the workplace.”
A small ask, you might think. How hard can it be to commit to working with models old enough to vote?
Consider Naomi Campbell. The ne plus ultra of supermodels, Campbell was just shy of sixteen when she launched her career in the mid-1980s, when there were but a handful of twice-yearly fashion shows—a model could stay in school if she wished. Agencies signed very few names and invested in their long-term success by being selective with their bookings. Thus Naomi and her peers were sought-after. They developed close working relationships with designers, who would rigorously fit the variety of looks handpicked for them to wear on the runway. “It used to be, the fittings would take forever,” remembers David Bonnouvrier, cofounder and CEO of DNA Model Management in New York. “Now the girls are cast to fit the dress.”
“It’s a numbers game,” agrees Chris Gay, co-CEO of Elite World Group; it includes The Society Management, which represents Kendall Jenner, among others. “Brands want 40, 50 girls in a show, leaving less opportunity for designers to spend time with each talent. There’s no time for long fittings. But you know who fits those tiny samples?” Gay shakes his head ruefully. “Teenagers—girls who haven’t finished growing yet.”
Starting this month, DNA Models and The Society Management will no longer be submitting new models under the age of eighteen for show consideration in North America. (For DNA Models, one exception is models who previously participated in Fashion Week and are under eighteen.) Bonnouvrier and Gay are hopeful that other agencies here and abroad will join them—and that designers and casting directors will embrace the change as well. “Let’s get back to believing in models and developing them,” Bonnouvrier says. “Let’s get back to a model being a muse and not a coat hanger.”
If you want to understand why very young models became the runway norm, you have to look at the evolution Gay and Bonnouvrier have observed—from show samples’ being fitted to variously proportioned young women to young women’s being matched to size 0 samples. And to understand why the fix isn’t as simple as, say, cutting larger samples, you have to tease out the other factors at play, from the rise of the internet to the fall of the Iron Curtain. It’s a systemic problem. Its causes are diffuse.
Around the time Naomi Campbell locked arms with fellow supers Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, and Cindy Crawford to sing along to George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” on Versace’s runway, tectonic social and political changes were afoot. Sir Tim Berners-Lee had just built the first World Wide Web browser; NAFTA negotiations had commenced, jump-starting globalization; celebrities were beginning to displace models on the covers of fashion magazines; and the breakup of the Soviet Union had left millions of people scrambling for a foothold in the emerging New World Order. The desperate poverty throughout the Eastern Bloc, as the fashion industry would soon delight in discovering, meant there was a seemingly endless supply of tall, high-cheekboned, often undernourished girls who saw modeling as their ticket out of chaos.
“That was a turning point,” admits Angela Missoni of the influx of models from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. “You know, the fashion sketch—it was always about elongation, exaggeration of the silhouette. Suddenly there were all these girls who looked like the sketches. If I think back,” she says, “that’s probably when the sample size dropped. It wasn’t that we wanted to make them smaller—it was just that the girls showing up at castings were smaller. So we adapted.”
Sample sizes weren’t the only thing that shrank: Paychecks did, too. In economic terms, models from the East—and later, Brazil—flooded the market. Designers no longer needed to shell out thousands of dollars to the women walking in their shows, so instead of hiring a few to quick-change in and out of several looks, it became standard to cast dozens, who would each wear one. That suited stylists: As veteran casting director James Scully notes, when celebrities came to dominate magazine covers, “shows became the primary creative outlet for models; that’s when you see the emergence of the superstylist. The girls became more interchangeable, and the show was all about the proposition, the big look.” The catwalk’s uniform army was born.
Their ranks served another purpose. With Condé Nast’s launch of Style.com (now Vogue Runway) in 2000 and the advent of runway images posted to the internet, designers found themselves speaking directly to consumers. This was a sea change. Previously, shows were for editors and buyers, whose job it was to interpret designers’ ideas. Now those ideas needed to be communicated directly. A strong, singular look—reiterated many times—got the point across. Shows became more “editorial,” in the industry vernacular, the styling punchier and the clothes more ornate. The aim was to underline the uniqueness of a brand at a moment when great numbers of them were hopping on the fashion-show bandwagon. And why wouldn’t they? With the market globalized and runway models to be had on the cheap, what better way to stake a claim on potential shoppers’ attention than by staging an advertising campaign that would be broadcast, via the internet, instantly and worldwide?
“First it was more shows; now it’s shows all the time,” says Ashley Brokaw, the casting director for brands including Prada and Chloé. “If I look at my calendar, there are three months out of the year where I don’t have a fashion show, but I’m casting all year. It’s become a supply-and-demand issue: Everyone needs bodies—more girls, more boys. Agents and scouts have to supply those bodies to meet their clients’ demands,” she continues. “It’s not like the old days, when Linda and Christy and Naomi could do everything.”
Countless teens daydream about becoming models. It’s an appealing fantasy: Someone plucks you out of the crowd at Coachella, tells you you’re gorgeous, asks if you’ve ever modeled before, et voilà: Goodbye, teenage angst; hello, jet-setting around the globe with your new squad of cool, beautiful friends.
Jeff and Mary Clarke are the kinds of people who discover girls at summer music festivals. The proprietors of St. Louis–based Mother Model Management, the Clarkes talent-spotted future stars Karlie Kloss and Grace Hartzel. And they’ve dispelled a lot of teenage fantasies. “This is a tough business,” says Mary. “We’re very up front about that with our models. We tell them there are no guarantees—you’re going to face a lot of rejection and a lot of criticism, and you have to know how to deal with that and not let it crush you.”
“And that,” adds Jeff, “is why the development process is key.”
The Clarkes do more than scout: They’re “mother agents.” Mother agencies train models and break them into the industry’s primary markets of New York and Paris. Of course, this isn’t the only way models enter the business. Competitions like Elite Model Look are another pipeline, and these days models can be plucked from Instagram by scouts from all over the world, who pitch them straight to casting directors. When the Clarkes develop a new face like Mallory Veith, seventeen, one of their most promising signees, they bring her to their home studio to do test shoots with trusted photographers. They teach her how to pose, how to walk, and nudge her into paid work—booking, say, shoots in St. Louis, a few hours from the small city where Mallory lives. Then they’ll advance her to larger cities. Over the past year, Veith spent a month each in Tokyo, Los Angeles, and Mexico City, experiences she describes as like “getting to go to college early.” She’s made friends on those trips, ones who make up for the friends she’s lost touch with since deciding to finish her studies online.
“Mallory’s an old soul,” explains her actual mother, Krista Veith. “She was over the gossip and drama of high school by the end of her freshman year.”
Mallory believes she’s ready to try her luck in New York; the Clarkes agree. And Krista takes comfort in the fact that when Mallory embarks on her first round of show castings, Jeff and Mary will be there for her. But not all mother agents are so, well, motherly. As casting director Munro notes, “There’s no book of ethics” for agents. Some are good; some are unscrupulous; some don’t believe they have any particular duty of care when it comes to the young models on whom their paychecks depend. Andreea Diaconu recalls, for instance, that when she developed a painful dental abscess in London early in her career, her former agent “couldn’t even be bothered to get an ibuprofen.
“I am beyond grateful for everything this job has given me,” says Diaconu, now 27. “Yes, I missed out on languid summer days with friends. I went from being one of the best students in my class to barely passing my math exams. But I traveled, I learned languages, and now I’ve been accepted to Columbia University—and I’m pretty sure no scholarship in Bucharest would have brought me there.”
That said, Diaconu’s early experiences in the fashion industry illustrate its perils for young models. “When I was fourteen, I’d have photographers asking me to go topless. There would be 20-hour days, taking green tea pills for stamina. Once, when I was about sixteen,” she says, “I had a booker tell me I had to socialize and go to clubs. It still makes me uncomfortable when I see models dressed as exotic parrots, hanging out at bottle service.”
Diaconu tossed the drugs and drinks she was handed on those nights out. Other teen models aren’t as savvy—nor should we expect them to be.
“Look, it’s not just girls,” says Jeff Clarke. “There’s a boy from Racine, Wisconsin, we’re working with. He’s never had a job. I mean, just think about all the changes you go through between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, all the first-time experiences you have. There’s no way this kid’s first job should be working as a model in New York. That’s completely overwhelming.”
“These are children trying to understand and fit into an adult world,” observes Maria Bruce, LMHC, a New York–based licensed psychotherapist who specializes in working with high-achieving adolescents and adults, including athletes, dancers, and actors. Bruce says that the models she’s counseled struggle to navigate the mixed signals they get on the job. “They’re told to ‘grow up’ if they complain that they’re tired,” she says, “and yet in other ways they’re already treated as grown-ups.” This confusion, she says, leads teen models to feel too uncertain of their own authority to say no when they encounter dicey situations. Some muster the courage to speak up; most shut down.
“The teenage brain is sensitive to overload,” Bruce explains. “And some of the possible psychological consequences of dealing with these stressors include low self-esteem, obsessive-compulsive disorders, anxiety, and depression.”
Issues with body image form their own special subcategory of model ailment. Despite efforts throughout the fashion industry to address the problem, eating disorders such as anorexia remain pervasive. Models are most vulnerable, Bruce notes, as they cross the threshold out of puberty and find that size 0 samples no longer fit. It’s a moment Karen Elson remembers well.
“I was a late bloomer, and at the same time went on birth control to control my acne,” recalls Elson, the flame-haired beauty who led the wave of idiosyncratic faces that crested in the late 1990s. “They say it’s a myth that you gain weight, but my breasts got bigger, my hips got bigger. I’d hear comments. One of my reps told me he’d give me $20 for every pound I lost.”
In 1998, the same year she was honored at the VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards as Model of the Year, nineteen year-old Elson turned up at Milan Fashion Week ten pounds heavier than usual. Elson recalls that she was canceled from a major show and wound up sitting out the rest of the season. “Somehow that leaked to the press,” she says with a sigh. “It was on the news—that I was too fat to walk in Milan. I mean . . . that’s just wrong.”
Myriad young models are flushed out of the industry when their adult curves emerge. Others continue to work but don’t do shows. Imaan Hammam is one of fashion’s current superstars, and she has the kind of healthy, toned body many women aspire to—but says she exceeds what some say is the regulation 34-inch hip and so is rarely spotted on a catwalk. “So many times I’d do fittings for shows and then they’d cut me at the last minute,” she says. “I tried to work out, eat healthy—but at a certain point, I had to say, Enough. This is who I am.”
Watch Versace’s Spring 2018 Ready-to-Wear Show:
The epic finale of Versace’s spring 2018 show featured Claudia Schiffer, Carla Bruni, Helena Christensen, Campbell, and Crawford—women whose ages hover around 50 and who began their careers before the cult of extreme thinness took hold. Their return to the catwalk served as a riposte to the idea that high fashion only looks good on gaunt teens.
“Sometimes I look at shows and think, Who are we talking to?” comments Chris Gay. “These clothes are for adults—grown women. Are we trying to project an image they can relate to, or are we, as an industry, just entertaining ourselves here?”
Attitudes are starting to shift at some established European houses: When Natacha Ramsay-Levi debuted her first collection at Chloé last year, she caused a minor stir by opening her show with model Sophie Koella. The nineteen-year-old was willowy, to be sure, but she also boasted noticeable curves.
“Sophie’s the perfect natural beauty, which is the whole idea of Chloé,” Ramsay-Levi says. “But with her proportions, you have to build the clothes for her. You can do that with a few looks, but you don’t have time to do that with 50. So I don’t know—maybe we need smaller shows. Maybe we need to create space in the show calendar so that designers have time to do proper fittings.”
Ramsay-Levi makes an essential point: Unless and until the underlying dynamics of the fashion-show economy change, the conditions they’ve created will remain in place. Modeling will go on being a commodity business, with one new face easily replaced by the next. There will be exceptions, of course—Gigi, Kendall—but as Gay notes, “You can’t make policy around the exception.” The eighteen-plus runway initiative has the opposite aim: Jam the gears of the machine so it’s forced to rebuild itself.
Women’s fashion—at least the part where models are concerned—is at a fork in the road. Go one way, casting director Munro says, and we’ll wind up looking like men’s fashion—a place, in his view, where “models have generally been treated as disposable.” The other path is lit by the “personality” models—women with large social-media followings who are staking a claim on the runway not by fitting a size but by being themselves. Their distinctiveness gives them power. It also allows fashion to reenter the business of vaulting stars into the celebrity firmament.
Balmain designer Olivier Rousteing has been at the forefront of fashion casting with an eye toward pop culture, and he attributes much of his success at the house to the fact that, as he puts it, “women can recognize themselves in the Balmain vision. The women on the runway have to be there for a reason—and the reason is that they’re relevant to the women looking at the show. Fashion isn’t about ‘reality,’ ” Rousteing adds, “but its dreams have to come from reality. That’s the only way it can be modern.”
Virgil Abloh extends that logic. Seeing reality, for the Off-White and Louis Vuitton menswear designer, is about seeing humanity. A self-described fashion outsider who worked as an architect, a gallery owner, and then as Kanye West’s creative director before embarking on a career in design, Abloh says he was struck, when he started casting his shows in 2015, by the “namelessness” of models. No other aspect of his creative life worked that way.
“Anyone I collaborate with, I want to have a conversation,” Abloh explains. “What are your dreams? What do you have to say? The way I see it, the people on my runway should be people first, models second. I want artists, musicians, charismatic characters in my shows. And that’s why it’s important to diversify this industry. Not just in terms of black, white, brown, but in terms of point of view. When you have people with new ideas working in the atelier, and in upper management, that’s when you’re going to see the old codes break down.”
The generational shift Abloh alludes to is already under way. Millennials are demanding a culture of openness from brands, and so the trend is toward a runway that welcomes all colors, creeds, ages, and shapes. Streetwise labels such as Hood by Air and Vetements ignited fashion’s street-casting movement, and many other brands have followed suit, exalting the individuality of models by casting from their own communities for their shows and campaigns.
New codes are materializing. They’re updating behind the scenes, too. New York–based Model Alliance recently announced its Respect Program, an initiative to create industry-wide standards for models’ working conditions. Expanding on the principles outlined in the Condé Nast vendor code of conduct, it also includes complaint and enforcement mechanisms to assure those standards are upheld. The aim, says Model Alliance founder and executive director (and model) Sara Ziff, is to dignify models as workers, people doing a job, who have basic needs and who deserve basic rights and protections. This may seem obvious until you consider the tenuous employment status of so many models, who often work for free or for “trade”—for goods from the brands that hire them.
“We need to inject a labor consciousness into fashion,” says Ziff. “Models are not the people you picture when you think of workers’ rights, but the fact is we are doing a job and deserve to be treated fairly—just like anyone else who works for a living.”
“The age of models is just one component of a big conversation,” agrees Stella McCartney. “If you have a business that employs people, you have to be mindful of their conditions of employment—period. There’s no reason fashion should think it’s above that.”
McCartney goes further. Viewing the fashion industry through the lens of sustainability, she sees it as one piece of a very large puzzle. “We live in a disposable culture,” she says. “With so much on offer, what’s even desirable anymore? Something new is always coming through: new models, new clothes, new TV shows, new stuff of all kinds. How do we hit the pause button?”
A shift to using models eighteen and older on the runway won’t solve every problem for models or for fashion or for the world that’s helped mold the industry into its current shape. Promising teens will continue to be signed, no doubt, but agencies will need to invest more time and resources in their models’ development, particularly as they adapt to the demands of video and social media. “That’s changing the game,” says Chris Gay, who points out that the qualities these new modeling platforms reward are ones that tend to come with maturity. “A model needs to be dynamic, someone you want to have a conversation with.” The ability to communicate, Gay likes to say, is the new hip size.
“What’s great about the eighteen-plus initiative is that it’s going to make everyone take stock, look at the big picture, and say, ‘You know what? We could do this better. Or that better,’ ” says Mother Model Management’s Mary Clarke. “What I’d like to see is a fashion world that the women I know here in St. Louis can look to for inspiration.”
Karlie Kloss believes that world is emerging even as we speak. “I’m optimistic about this industry,” she says, “because everything I’m seeing points toward more inclusivity and more opportunities for models to have their own voice.
“When I started modeling at fifteen, maybe I was mature for my age—but still, I was fifteen,” she says. “Over the ten years I’ve been in the industry, I’ve changed—my body’s developed, as any woman’s does, and my mind has developed, too.” And that, Kloss says, makes her a better model than she was in her teens. “It’s not about fitting a bill; it’s about what you bring to the table, what kind of image you project to the world. It’s not just being seen—it’s being heard.”
