my life in the limelight

 

This is a true story. My experience in the fashion world is not one everyone has been through. It was what feels like many years ago, although it can only have been a year and I no longer recognize myself from the pictures in the magazines. I still can’t decide if it was a good or bad experience, because once you get a taste of something that cuts as deep into this strange fantasy world, where your survival depends on your waist measurement, its hard being normal again. People at school are still glancing at me as if I’m something special. I think I feel both good and bad intensely.

 

I’ve been in a few magazines, my first was teen vogue. My god, did it really happen? They sent me and my mum on a plane to New York for a shoot, that’s what they do you see, give you a taste of something that sweet, then once you’ve fallen for the bait you can’t back out because everyone in your class knows and they keep asking you what your doing next. I miss school and music lessons but I don’t really care because all I want is that little thrill again. I never liked the popularity it earned me. A girl in my year, pregnant at fifteen, came up to me and

 started an uncomfortable conversation. I’m sure she’s a very nice person, but I know we’ll never be friends if that’s the reason she is talking to me.

 

I’m not a very talkative person especially with people I’ve just met. That’s probably why I never made it big time. Everybody else was so skinny and chatty and pretty and I didn’t look like them, I didn’t feel like them.

 

The head of the modeling agency spotted me. She was doing a BBC documentary on her agency, and she said I was the best she’d seen all day. We were at the Birmingham fashion show and I was pretty ill that day and had sat down on the floor, piled with my friends’ coats while they went to the bathroom. When I got up with a groan and shook off the coats covering me she looked up sharply and asked me what size I was. I said I was a UK 8/10 which isn’t big, but it isn’t model size I know. She said later on at the agency while measuring my waist that I could be a big thing, and that she was sending me to the guy who casts Prada.

 

I looked up at the big posters with skeletal sex on legs staring at me and just wondered.

I can’t walk in high heels. I can pretend, but I never wear them at home or shopping because I’m too tall. One time they made me dress up in a see-through shift and a pair of heels, and with three onlookers watching me stomp around the room criticizing me in French, I think one of them said something like she iz too clumzy, and fat as well’ but then again I did get a C in French GCSE. (by the way I am not a dumb blond and I have very good GCSE grades, although I am a blond)Also, that had to be the day where a giant zit had appeared on my chin.

 

I got gym membership by saying I was 16, which worked because I look way older. I was determined to lose weight and become a catwalk model, which I practiced on the treadmills when no one was looking, with sucked in cheeks and everything. Another time, I met with

 Mario Testino (very famous photographer), who is very nice, and has lots of yummy Italian assistants. I can act chatty and smiley if I want to, I was told he only picked lively models, so I stuck on a grin, and wore my loud Issa dress, and that month I was included in vogue, wearing a very uncomfortable combinati

on of leotard and army trench coat.

 

The theme was young London’ and people doing the shoot weren’t wearing very much, never the less they braved some really cold weather on top of a tall building and I’m just glad I got the coat! Well I didn’t really tell anyone about this one as I learned from previous experience, but my omnipotent textiles teacher knew, and she seemed to hold me at arms length in class, whether from pride that I got spotted on her trip and hope that she would be one of my privileged friends(joke), or fear that one of her students, at only fifteen had dug deeper into the fashion world than she was ever going to.

 

Everyone I know thinks that modeling means Kate moss and being rich and famous and glamorous, but all the models I have spoken to at the agency and on shoots are bone broke, encouraged only by that elusive prize of supermodel status.

One day me and the rest of the newbies had to make a video to show potential clients, so we went of to the park and were told we were going to dance for the camera. Oh yay! Lets make a fool of myself in front of everyone by saying she can’t dance with no music, of course you can! When you’re a model, they ask and you do it without question. That’s the way it’s always worked.

 

I did have fun, when I wasn’t trekking round London with my mum in tow, or queuing in an ally way with fifty other girls, waiting to see three dragons in a basement, their mothers waiting outside wearing smug expressions. My mum was very supportive through that time. She was highly critical of everyone we met and finally my eyes were free of that glossy gauze I saw it all through. That was the last time I ever want to a casting, and I’m glad of it, although I can’t truly say that I don’t regret quitting. Who could?

 

Fame and riches. But then the agency phoned up and said we owed them three hundred pounds.