Another Round of Writing About Modelling

Last September I went to a model casting. It was my first in years. For various reasons I’d taken the decision to leave my second modeling agency two months prior, and had, at least for a little while, assumed I wouldn’t be having much to do with that particular side of fashion.

Then I got an email asking whether I might attend a casting for a show at LFW. I shot one back explaining that I wasn’t sample size, but would happily come along. That was fine, they said. They were looking to cast a diverse array of women.

Spoiler: they weren’t. At least not when it came to body types. At least not when it came to anything above a size 8-10.

When I was eventually ushered into the room to try on various garments, I realised I’d made a mistake. The clothes were stunningly beautiful, but some didn’t even do up on me - while others that I could just about wriggle into obviously didn't suit, given the way the fabric was straining at the hips. When I came out in the first outfit, I knew I’d been rendered invisible – no longer of interest as everyone’s eyes slid over me in the direction of the next potential model.

I re-dressed, said “thank you,” grabbed my bag, and had a quick cry in the toilets before I left the building.  

The main moral of the story here is that I probably would have made a dreadful full-time model. Castings are, by their nature, impersonally brutal: a process of continually vying with others, not to mention being assessed on plenty of factors and aesthetic decisions entirely beyond one’s own control. In this instance my look – whether or not that involved my body shape - wasn’t what the team wanted. And that’s just the way it was.

The other, obviously linked, moral is that I’m no longer really used to feeling invisible, or existing in professional spaces where the surface is the only thing that matters. Spending most of my time as a writer, it was somewhat jarring to be flung back into a world where my ability to string a sentence together didn’t matter a jot.

Back at home after that casting I scrolled through my Instagram and did something I hadn’t done in ages: bombarding myself with image after image of actors, models, singers, influencers, and online ‘it’ girls. All slender. All outwardly successful. My brain immediately switched back into that tiresome, screeching register so many are familiar with: exercise more, eat less, whittle down the amount of space I take up, and then oh then oh then….

Luckily, I quickly shook it away – and went for a bracing outdoor swim. But as with every (now rather rare) time my head takes a nosedive back into the realms of you’re-not-enough-as-you-are, I surfaced feeling frustrated. Not so much for myself – other than the obvious initial bruising of ego – but, once again, at all the ways the fashion industry seems to spend more time making women feel less than, rather than uplifted, by the ways they are represented and catered to.

In amongst that little round of self-destructive scrolling, one thing had helped. I’d finished by looking at Charli Howard’s account, taking solace in seeing a body that wasn’t all taut angles. A body with stretch marks. One that functioned, and was gorgeous, and SHOULDN’T IN ANY WAY be considered radical, given that it still fits all sorts of normative ideals, but did feel important to see that particular day.

I remembered this recently when I finished reading Charli’s book Misfit: a frank, moving, often darkly funny account of mental health, modelling, and her decade’s struggle with eating disorders. Our experiences in fashion are very, very different. All I’ve ever really had from agencies is indifference, rather than the truly atrocious comments and expectations she dealt with. But I still recognised the world she described. One that claims to peddle fantasy, yet continues to make plenty of people feel pretty shit.

Charli also makes some important points about fashion’s frustrating categorisation of body types. It’s not even worth going into the clusterfuck of implications found in those loaded words ‘plus’ and ‘sample’, because that’s a whole other piece, but, like her, I also want to see more women who exist  somewhere between those two weirdly rigid points. As Charli points out here (and I wrote about a few years back), those of us who are a size 10-12 still linger rather awkwardly in the middle.

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Modelling is a very complicated thing to talk about, not least because I’ve recently begun to question this strange, continued need I seem to have to visit and revisit my experiences in writing. It’s been an ongoing topic over the last five years: from initial reflections aged seventeen for All Walks Beyond the Catwalk, through to an essay for Buzzfeed last summer wrangling with the consequences of having been celebrated for my looks long before I’d developed an adult body shape, let alone a clear sense of self.

Along the way I’ve talked numerous times – in articles, in my book, in interviews – about the need for ever more plurality when it comes to size, skin colour, age, and physicality (on a related note, I recently re-watched Sinéad Burke’s brilliant TED talk on navigating the world as a little person, and how design should cater for everyone – it’s brilliant. Go watch it.) I’ve also tried, where I can, to shout about all of the brilliant campaigns, individuals and designers who are doing fucking fabulous, exciting, goal-post changing things - and producing wonderful imagery in the process. 

So why am I here, writing about it again? Is it just the ultimate form of narcissism – a near half-decade’s worth of quite articulate frustration at this industry because I’m still aggrieved that it never properly wanted me? (Even if, as with the ‘cool girls’ group at secondary school, I didn’t really want to be a part of it anyway…) A way of making sense of things in words? Just Good Content for a Blog Post?

Maybe this time round it’s because I’ve been thinking again about how deciding to leave my model agency – shifting from being able to describe myself as ‘a model’ (noun) to being someone who ‘occasionally models’ (verb) – felt like another chapter in that exploration. A pretty crucial one.

It took a few months, and that strange casting, to realise that doing so really had clicked a switch. It meant I’d stopped feeling – at a very low, almost indiscernible level - apologetic and inadequate and weirdly convinced that the work, and crucially, the money (hey guys! Guess what? Writing really isn’t that lucrative! But I’m working on it!) would just start rolling in if I stopped eating bread, started doing squats, and spent more time talking to hollow people at hollow parties. Actively removing myself from that was a relief. It meant I no longer checked my emails continually, wondering whether I was ever going to get another shoot, and berating myself as though this were somehow my fault.

Underneath all that though, I have to be honest. I think I carry on writing about modelling because I still love it - not to mention plenty of the more fantastic aspects of fashion. There are days when there’s nothing I’d like to be doing more than wearing outrageous clothes and a face full of make-up, or flitting around the Scottish coast in a series of brightly coloured gowns, or enjoying knowing how to work the right angle for a studio portrait. Maybe it’s just a classic case of grass being greener (it's especially seductive imagining the heady power of transformation when I’m still here, in my dressing gown, bashing out sentences on a laptop). But it’s a skill I continue to value. One I’ve often relished developing over the near last decade.

This shoot for Pippa Small Jewellery above seems the perfect example of that. It’s one of my favourite modelling jobs ever: a week last August in a painted caravan in the woods, each day spent disporting myself around stone circles, hilltops, lakes, and orchards, draped in a rainbow array of jewels (and very little clothing). Along the way there were wild ponies, an owl, and a domed dacha that I’ve been dreaming about living in ever since.

It was wonderful not only because of the setting - my beloved Shropshire hills! -  but also for the glorious sense of creative collaboration. I’ve worked with my friend Susannah Baker-Smith on various shoots before, and her photos of me are ones I’ll always treasure. In this instance, there was a particular kind of alchemy between the place, the jewellery (Pippa is a genius with stones, and I was often reluctant to relinquish my decadent strings of crystals), and the work taking place both in front of and behind the camera.

We were a small team of three - me, Susannah, and the lovely India from Pippa Small – dashing out of the car between rain squalls, or finding the best patches of light among the trees for me to sprawl in. It was a tiring week, but one that felt good for being tiring. The fact that I then got to write poems for the catalogue (see here and here) was the cherry on top of a deeply joyful job.

Looking back at these photos, I also like the fact that in every one I’m fully inhabiting my body: actively and inventively (such a lot of strictly held contortion for ‘natural’ looking poses, not to mention having to pretend the weather was easy and breezy rather than liable to cause dramatic shivering!) Here I am: windswept, sun-lit, glittering with jewels, and fully visible.

The stunningly talented Susannah's work is also currently being exhibited at Festival Circulations. If you're in Paris, definitely pop along - and see if you can spot my spinal surgery scar making a cameo.. 

Land of Reinvention

The dress was scrunched up in the bottom of a bargain basket - the kind where everything is 50p, and the vast majority of items are very creased, very ugly, or very suspiciously stained. And yet, there it was. An intriguing ball of pink shimmer: somewhere between Barbie and Betty Draper (not a massive leap, given), with extra-added tawdry glitz. 

I pulled it out, sized up the slightly uneven straps and lining peeping out from the hem, and decided to take a chance. How could I not when the colour and cut immediately made me think of sixties parties, strained conversation, one too many glasses of wine, and the thrill of flitting down streets in bare legs and a thick coat? It was cheaply glamorous, and probably entirely, completely uncomfortable to wear…

It’s funny, isn't it – trying to articulate those half-flickering images we conjure up while shopping? But it’s what we so often do with clothes, especially before they're on our body. We look at them, and project onto that shape, that design, that particular silhouette, the person we might just be if we only put that garment on…

Maybe this person is you, but more practical in a robust-looking pair of Levi’s, or slightly sexier in a dress with a keyhole over the cleavage, or ready to stare down the scariest of meetings in killer ankle boots. Perhaps it’s another person altogether, embodied in a gown that suggests a palatial house, rich spouse and two ugly, tiny, yapping dogs, or a boxy black velvet jacket with military frogging and all the trappings of a goth princess who wanted to appear unapproachable but actually ended up looking like she got stuck in Camden in 2009. (Actually, neither of those sound especially appealing. Oops.)

I do this all the time when browsing. It’s registered almost without me being aware of it: this fluttering sense of abundance, of all the possible versions of myself – for better and worse - on the rail (or spread out on a sheet on the ground, or found in a 50p basket). If I choose the tailored pencil skirt and pair it with a white shirt with a stiff, ruffled collar, I’ll be a slightly different individual to the one who goes for the sweeping seventies dress with sleeves large enough to smuggle a sleeping kitten in.

See, although the ultimate aim with shopping, usually, is the locate the items that work – the ones brilliant enough to be carried home – half the pleasure can be found in this question of what-if and just-imagine. In this kingdom of the hypothetical, anything could happen. You’re fragmented into a thousand and one potential reflections. Hall of mirrors. Land of reinvention. You could be a flower child, seductress, king, airily cool minimalist, or the kind of art gallery owner you’ve never met but know must exist because you’ve seen them featured in ‘real women’ shoots in glossy magazines.

I like to think of it as the inverse Bluebeard’s closet: a space bursting with life, with all the shapes of all the women yet to be, the women who could wear them, live in them, move in them.

Of course, that’s also how we get suckered into buying so much. The whole shopping experience is geared towards tugging not only at our imagination, but our aspiration – and sense that happiness/ confidence/ beauty/ status/ power might just lie in the acquisition of an especially expensive handbag or new dress. A well-curated mannequin suggests an enhanced self, an ideal self, a projected self, a possible self that could be brought (or bought) into existence if you only had the right clothes.

But I’m still invested in the idler, more inventive side of all that imaginative potential; the chance to briefly think of clothes as costume, each offering its own accompanying character or mood. Without that chattering internal monologue, I probably wouldn’t have bought this shiny confection and ended up running around the rhododendrons last summer: briefly echoing each overwhelmingly brilliant explosion of pink. Of course, there I felt less like Betty Draper than some weird, well-attired wood nymph bemoaning the tightness of her skirt when it came to clambering up trees. Somehow though, that was even more perfect.

Dreaming of Green

I blame Sally Bowles. Back before Christmas I re-watched Cabaret, agog at its brilliant, highly disquieting skewering of the 1930s Weimar Republic. Alongside the increasingly disturbing contrasts - and parallels drawn - between the glitz of the cabaret and the horrifying, unstoppable surge of nationalism sweeping the country, I ended up caught on a rather more superficial detail: Liza Minelli’s glittery green nails. With each new flourish of her hands, I was mesmerized.

For days after I couldn’t stop thinking about them. I wrote about them for AnOther (alongside some other delectable details, including Carol’s fur coats and Elio’s sublime Matisse-shirt-over-polo-neck combination in Call Me By Your Name). Then I went in search – a woman possessed as I dropped in and out of branches of Boots and Superdrug in pursuit of all things fern, emerald and bottle green.

Turns out green nail varnish is quite hard to find.

But I succeeded: finally painting my nails in a particularly lurid, slightly chalky Rimmel shade well-suited to sixties crockery. Something dark and sparkly followed. Then a lighter-toned green, the exact colour of the foil wrapper of a mini easter-egg. Now I’ve got a small flock of greens, all lined up on my dresser. There’s something incredibly pleasing in the sight.

Although I umm and aah over this regularly, I think I’ve accepted that green probably qualifies as my best-loved colour. That much would seem apparent if you opened my wardrobe and took stock of the green skirts in suede (short) and satin (long), the green silk shirts, the various shades of green blazers and coats, the green costume jewellery earrings and necklaces, green high-waisted trousers, green striped polo-neck, green leaf-print dress, and four – four! – varieties of seventies green synthetic gown. The latter is another point of mild obsession. Point me in the direction of a verdant-looking, highly flammable fabric with a sweeping skirt and some kind of interesting sleeve detail, and I’m hooked.

In Derek Jarman’s Chroma, he writes of how “we feel green has more shades than any other colour, as the buds break the winter dun in the hedges. Hallucinatory summer days.” It seems an especially apposite observation today, when the sun outside feels like the first sweeping in of Spring – and I’m sitting here, in my living room, in a green kimono flecked with pink flowers, dreaming of the summer yet to come.

Yesterday, with an hour to kill in Oxford, I went to the Botanic Gardens. When I was studying there and the bitter grey winter air threatened to overwhelm, I’d often head to the Gardens – slipping into one of the greenhouses to breath in the tangy, damp warmth of ferns, and dry comfort of the cactus room. There, enclosed in glass, winter didn’t feel quite so endless. It had the exact same effect yesterday, with the added bonus of clumps of white snow-drops and lilac crocuses nosing up through the soil outside.

Jarman’s point about green’s many shades is mirrored in its number of symbolic associations. Green is hope. It’s renewal and flourishing and new beginnings. It’s envy. It’s jealousy. It’s sickness. It’s fertility. It’s ‘nature’: that huge, all-encompassing word. It’s absinthe and arsenic (as I’ve written before for Broadly, arsenic was once used as a dye for clothes). It’s thirties satin glamour and seventies earth-mother layers. In Helena Fitzgerald’s sharp and gorgeous essay Green to Me, it’s money, secret gardens, stretching spaces, the defiant chorus of Lorde’s ‘Green Light’, and “desperate optimism, an aching hope of escape.”

Of course, every colour has this complex web. Maggie Nelson writes in bright, brilliant fragments about the resonance of blue in Bluets. Sinead Gleeson tackles pain, fairytales and Frida Kahlo in Your Chroma: a searing examination of red. Derek Jarman’s Chroma, referenced above, rattles through the whole scope of the rainbow – violets, yellows, greys, greens and more scrutinized, cracked open, held up to the light.

But green’s still queen for me, for now. When I talk about returning to my family, I blithely refer to it as “going home to the green” (and those huge, tumbling blue-green hills are the one thing I desperately miss when in London). Here, I escape to Hampstead Heath whenever I can – stomping over mud in winter, seeking the cool, green promise of the ladies’ ponds in warmer weather. I (now) gleefully paint my nails green, flit around in those synthetic seventies dresses, and spend plenty of mornings refusing to get out of my jeweled green velvet dressing gown. And, as someone observed to me a little while ago, my eyes are actually green - a detail I had half-forgotten, and was strangely, sweetly glad to be reminded of once again...

These photos were taken over the summer by my top pal Holly when we spent a week over the summer staying in a caravan and running around the woods in all manner of ridiculous garments: quite a few of them, unsurprisingly, green.