"Like it." Flash.
High above the July chaos of Bangkok on a Sunday evening, I lean forward, squint my eyes, and scowl at the camera best I can. A bath of white light, and then I shift.
The photographer: "Like it." Flash. "Like it." Flash.
A stylist rushes in to brush my face a bit, then scurries out. Scowl.
"Like it." Flash.
A couple of months ago, while finishing up my research in rural India, I couldn't have guessed that I would be modeling male makeup for a Scandinavian company. I had never modeled before, and though I had always been vaguely aware that there exist a living, breathing population of people that are in ads, it just never seemed like something real people did. That was for "other" people: the genetically lucky, the beautiful people destined for lives of glamour and fame.
"Like it." Flash.
But then came that one fateful night at a dance club in Bangkok.
I had been living in monasteries at the time in Malaysia and Myanmar, and was in transit to a monastery in Southern Thailand. A small lady-boy with dyed blonde dreadlocks had come up to me while dancing to offer me a sip of beer. Happy for a "cultural experience", I bent over for a sip. Minutes later, I realized that my wallet was missing.
Panicked, I searched the club for her. The CCTV had captured a dreadlocked egress but little else.
"Look, I know you're afraid, but don't be worried," David Dacondo had said, a tall and darkly handsome Spanish man who had helped me search. "Please, feel free to stay at my place. I have a big bed and a couch, and you may stay as long you like."
Grateful, I accepted his offer, excited to see Bangkok from an expat's perspective. Over the next few days, I ordered all the appropriate card replacements to his Sukhumvit apartment.
Turned out that David was one of the most famous makeup artists working in the region. He had done makeup his whole life, winning numerous competitions and doing the makeup for many companies and competitive models. As such, he was deeply involved in the modeling scene in Bangkok, and took me to some photoshoots. At one, an extra male model was needed, and that was how it all started for me.
"Like it." Flash.
If I had to group the experiences I had while abroad, fashion modeling would have to get its own category. It was just so different. It was a dip into a world whose surface, so wildly glamorized, was an exterior on something far more complex and, at times, dangerous. I had several main insights from my experience.
"Like it". Flash.
The first was a positive insight: so much of what we consider beautiful is a technique rather than an inherent state of being.
It surprised me to learn that a good deal of the beauty that is modeled is learned. Models practice poses in front of the mirror, research other fashionable positions, and work hard to stay up to date. They internalize a list of general rules - lean forward, clench the jaw and squint subtly, turtle-neck slightly to emphasize the neck. Women need to keep the hand hidden or horizontal if possible to hide the complexity of the fingers.
Realizing this was empowering at a pretty deep level. It made beauty seem a bit more meritocratic -- something not to long for, but to see as the product of sustained effort. This realization also makes it easier to reject societal beauty; the decision to reject now originates from lack of desire to attain the ideal rather than the inability to attain it.
Indeed, it was challenging stuff! I often came out of photoshoots with aching muscles, having to hold poses for minutes at a time, tightening abs, deepening scowls. Each photographer had a different style, and to create a good partnership was each time a new exercise in creativity, communication, and, ultimately, surrender.
Models surrender quite often: I quickly found that models are tips of a veritable iceberg of decision making. There are wardrobe stylists, make-up artists, directors, post processors via photoshop, and more that I haven't met. Even in the modeling world, there is not a single unifying beauty image. The same crowd of models that travels from audition to audition will have different luck at each one.
In addition, what I realized was this: models are human. Although it sounds kind of naive, I had seen so many large billboards featuring enormous, symmetrical faces that I had sort of internalized the notion that these people are indeed very large; larger and more beautiful than life. It was easy to think of them as qualitatively different than normal people because they simply were not normal people. But hanging out at the "model bars" that David took me to shattered this. These were models, yet they were also people--normal sized--who laughed, drank, cliqued, danced, and had their share of insecurities, desires, generosities, and whims. Whenever I see an inhumanly beautiful ad, I'll now think of Nastya, the quiet girl I met in David's gym's pool who remotely studied real estate at a Russian university, or of Ella, the brown haired girl I went to the bakery with who particularly liked Thai lassi, or Sergio, the muscular Colombian guy who trained us in Crossfit. They were surprisingly nice, sweet people with a strange mix of easy confidence and pleasant approval-seeking.
"Like it." Flash .
The second insight was rather negative: I got a unique view of an industry that ultimately was quite exploitative.
The major exploitative element I saw was the departure from normal life that models underwent. Most of the models I met were Eastern European women with doll-like faces who were well below the age of 25; several I met at my first "model bar" informed me, conspiratorially, that they were 15. Many were on multi-year contracts from agencies that housed and transported them on advances from future photoshoots. They earned more than they could have at home, but they were taken away from their families at an early age and mostly missed out on any chance to get a college education, and aged out early, usually by 27. I felt as though the agencies were robbing them of huge amounts of future earnings. Indeed, when I asked David what many of the women do after they're too old, he responded with a shrug,
"Marry rich."
While the women lived abroad, they're locked in a strange sort of alternative reality - in bubble of other models, with models' expectations. Most agencies would house four women together in each apartment, which engendered a social pressure for daily alcohol and drug use. Nastya confided in me her relief once when her three rommates took a trip to the Thai islands, as she was finally able to spend one night sober without vodka. Body dysmorphia seemed omnipresent: once I accidentally brushed against Ella's wispy arm at a "model's pool party", and she turned, alarmed, and exclaimed,
"I'm so sorry, I'm so fat!"
Their diets were carefully regulated; I heard rumors of French agencies going so far as to illegally check the apartment's garbage for "unsanctioned" food consumption. Indeed, most of the women ate so little that they did not quite develop breasts. I asked David about this too, and he responded in kind,
"They'll get those from their rich husbands."
The alternate reality was not complete without a weird set of perks. Namely, different bars across town would sponsor "models' nights", "models' dinners", "models' parties", etc., where models would receive free dinner (most chose salad) or drinks (mostly vodka sodas) merely for being present. The establishment benefited from having very fashionable people present, drawing large crowds of Bangkok's most elite locals. The women models David and I ran into had an almost codified knowledge of the nightly offerings, and traveled en masse from restaurant to bar to bar to club; a different itinerary each day.
At first, I relished the free meals and entertainment, and the guaranteed familiar faces. As my stay progressed, though, I grew increasingly wary of this Circean cornucopia of alcohol and food. It seemed to infantilize the models in a strange, commercialist way; it removed the need to provide for oneself, created a groupthink by "herding" the models, and developed a false sense of deserving. Worse, it was too easy to overlook the economic reason companies provided food, which has roots in objectification and external profit.
There were definitely negatives to the model's world.
"Like it." Flash
The stylist comes out to fix my makeup and adjust my outfit. I strike another pose. Meanwhile, the camera's eye is a strange, cyclopean ball of unwavering surprise: staring, evaluating, judging. I've never quite come to terms with the paradox of it's coldly non-human appearance and its utterly human, emotion-filled output.
"Like it." Flash .
Cameras always seemed a way to distance ourselves from others through manicured, flashy representations of ourselves. If we weren't careful, which would become more important, the reality or the simulation?
Flash. "Like it. I like all of it. We got some wonderful shots. Let's go home for the day."
I collected my pay, washed my face, and stepped out into the teeming streets of Bangkok, anonymous once more.