BlackBook

'Tintin' star Jamie Bell has an eclectic taste in music. Here, here proves it. Presenting his ultimate playlist.

"We found ourselves on our own, and I think we kind of like that."

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but after a year of modeling full-time, the mask has started to eat away at the face. What was once a part-time job to support myself through college, has now become a full-time identity, one that I am still trying to navigate. On some days, that is very difficult to do.

During a shoot last week, I overheard the photographer discussing what he looks for when casting a model. “Ears,” he said. “I love it when a girl has big ears that stick out.” Fashion photographers always focus on striking and unique facial features—but ears? This was new. It almost sounded as though he was claiming ears—not even on the face—as the next frontier of fetishized body parts. Still curious days later, I asked him to elaborate.

Nudity is to fashion what the banana is to the Nutella crepe: Unnecessary, superfluous to the main event, and innocuously edgy. And, like banana slices stuck to gooey chocolate, so too are tits and ass inextricable from the visual culture of fashion. It’s obvious that nudity, ranging from the subtle to the blatant, is everywhere in the industry, and arguments about the cultural significance of nudie pics -- what the photos represent, how they make people feel, what they say about gender roles – continue with the release of each new flesh-baring fashion spread. As a participant in the making of these images, I thought it might be interesting to consider the politics behind posing nude from a model’s perspective.

BBC 4 has launched a new show called The Model Agency, a seven-episode, fly-on-the-wall documentary about the goings-on at the offices of Premier agency in London. So far, nobody seems to like it. The show, only two episodes in, has received almost only bad reviews, though some are based on the characters, rather than the show itself. I heard about it from my London agency, which is better than rival Premier. While taking new Polaroids, my booker turned to me and asked: “Have you heard about this reality show that BBC 4 is doing with Premier? It’s baa-a-a-d. Everyone here was shocked.”

One aspect of modeling that's both exhilarating and terrifying, surreal and dangerous, is its suspension of reality -- the participation in illusory or fantasy worlds that are created solely for the purpose of the photograph. For each photoshoot, the photographer, working alone or with the client or art director, creates a specific narrative with its own mise-en-scene, characters, and meanings embedded in the photos. My job is to help create -- along with the hair, makeup, and stylist team -- that story by acting it out.

If you thought fashion week made New York chaotic, Paris is that much crazier for couture. All the ‘couture’ models (the particularly giant, emaciated ones) are in town, running around to castings like urban giraffes; museums are suddenly not for tourists, but for shows; and American celebs visit this rainy city, striking poses themselves outside the shows. I don’t get booked for shows for two reasons: one, I'm not that gangly-alien kind of tall, and two – more importantly - no matter how hard I try, I cannot learn how to walk the runway.

Hello from Paris, where agencies always take half your money and castings sometimes take all day. Here in the City of Light, men’s shows have begun, the couture shows are about to start, and prêt-a-porter is the first week in March -- shit’s getting busy. If I had it my way, I’d avoid anything show-related, but my agency has already forewarned me that I’ve some important show castings that they insist I attend. I know from experience that these will be extremely embarrassing, so I’ll be sure to keep you posted. At first I didn’t want to come back to Paris. I don’t know many people here, I am charged a heavy foreigner’s tax, and that's not to mention having to confront my crippling macaron addiction (cf. embarrassing castings). But there’s a comfort in the eternal return. It feels as though I’m visiting a part of myself that exists in Paris alone. Work is also very busy: 24 castings in 3 and a half days and a shoot for La Prairie with Satoshi Sakusa. It’s been great. Well, except for when I found out that the fashion editor of a certain magazine decided to ban me from ever working for said magazine again.

Modeling is not a profession that does much social good. It can be for supermodels, who use their fame and wealth to promote various causes (like Coco’s media awareness campaign or Daria’s charity), but having neither fame nor wealth, I've not had many opportunities to use modeling as way to benefit others or contribute to the common good. So I try to find other ways, however minor, to use modeling in order to help people out; not only for their benefit, but also as a way of making my job feel more substantial and productive, instead of being all about making money.