La perla lingerie ad.

A witch in swan lake make up ran conducted the torturious routine we had established during the past five hours. I swallowed my shame as she called out in sinaporean slang “body forward, stick your ass up” and forgot my dignity as she passed comments on my rather curvatious stomach. Ok, so I wouldn’t have picked me for a lingerie shoot either, but I had blindly accepted the challenge two days earlier and was only now realising that a great picture could not be achived through determination or intelligent posing. You simply had to have a great body when you were a clothes horse for frightening and elaborate designs using material thinner than their tissue paper wrappings. 

My worst fears about my body were confirmed and confirmed again as I repeated poses in one set after another. Full length, midlength, close up bra, back of bra, close up bra detail, leg and pant shot, mid lenth pant shot, close up panties, reverse panties. In that order it went on and on. The photographer now limited each pose to one shot only and we exchanged long suffering glances as she pushed us to fit in as many as possible before 6pm, although she obviously didn’t care that we got a ten minute break for a lunch of cereal bar and that my feet were sticky and scabbed from unstable and ill fitting vintage gold heels belonging to my mother which I had brought along to wear.

Tips for posing. For the legs, the old tried and tested poses work. Think maralyn Monroe with her legs crossed at the ankle. In undies you don’t want to send out the wrong message. Potential woman customers are going to see them and they don’t want to feel seduced by you; they want to think they will look the same way or better  in their new La Perla set.

Which brings me to the designers of the underwear. Why, honestly, bring out so many variations of the same thing? It was a lot of hard work for me and I’m sure these people aren’t going to bother looking at some stranger and go “oh yes, the extra line of stitching on the bra really makes it stand out… I’ll buy that one!”

 

Seriously though. i’m not even sure if they will bother using my pictures. My body is so unconventional- totally pear shaped. Though they did seem to be on a rather miserly budget. They were trying to shoot their entire collection in a single day, and to top it, all of their mismatched bits of random sized lingerie (I am an A cup and I had to try to show off a C cup more than a few times.) still had their price tags on. Although they had enough money to hire a spotty teenage assistant solely to cut off the tags and then re attatch them after with plastic thread. I wonder if anyone else had worn them before me. I hope I don’t catch any diseases. I would just like to reassure everyone now that I personally don’t have anything like that.

 

My pure motivation for doing this is not self belief or a pressing vanity that my body and face needs to be seen, it is just for the money. $200 of it today, which will last about one day in the UK, or buy me one set of sailing clothes. It is worth it for this small piece of independence, my wages feeding or clothing me for a few days anyway. My mobile bad been buzzing all day collecting messages, and I got home exhausted and starving to find that the graduation showcase was tomorrow. I am not sure what it was either, but I had visited a university and had to try on 20 students outfits, where I then squeezed out of them after they had pinned and tucked me in. and so after missing the alarm and wasting five dollars on a taxi, I arrived sweaty and dirty with yesterdays make up. The only way it was bearable staying till 5pm that day was another model, Lyze. She was from tennassee and has an outrageous personality, her impressions of people she had met were unaffected and endearing, and we laughed uncontrollably most of the time. 

Another model was very beautiful, but also explained in slurred monotone speech that she was deaf from birth. I was absolutely amazed that she could lip read almost every word I said. When she didn’t understand, she told me, because everybody speaks differently, she asked me to draw the letters on her hand. That way I showed her my name and told her I worked I n a Jazz bar as a waitress. she loved that. I am quite sure she comes from a very distinguished family because of her good looks and her education which includes hip hop dance and I feel like we’re all in this together. The last model, called Niki, is from Russia. She wanted to study art in Singapore but they said her English is not good enough yet so she has to wait another year. She was very reserved, telling the bare minimum with me initiating all the conversations. Usually I am the one who plays that role but I suddenly became the chatterbox.

 At 5.10 me and Niki left to visit the agency and another casting. I hadn’t seen her eat anything all day except two Coke zeros, and don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t scary thin, about the same weight as me though her waist was much slimmer, but she told me she was on a new diet ever since joining Imodels a month ago. We collected com cards and I showed her my apartment through the massive agency windows that overlooked central Singapore

 My new found role of being the more experienced one, and the more talkative one allowed me to float through the motions dreamily we arrived at the Levi Ladies shop milling with customers and spiked with people who were here to judge the girls who came for the casting. My new confidence allowed me to demonstrate my runway walk without so much as a tremble although it caught up with me in the changing rooms as I changed out of the Levi’s jeans I had been modelling. I had been bouncy, pushed my chest out and generally been what I thought a runway model should be although my equally bouncy thighs are not the best for showing off jeans on.

Niki did the walk I did when I was less experienced. Slow and careful, nervous about the poses she held when she got to the end of the shop where people had gathered to stare at what we were doing in this very public place. My first time was for all the main designers of Burberry on Oxford Street to look at my nervous walk. Niki was lucky in that respect. I was caught out looking at her face when they were taking pictures for reference. She looked- well- really fierce. I suppose there was something about her harshly blond short hair and little lightning tattoos behind her ears but there was something fantastic about her. A few hours later it was confirmed that their nodding and approving lookes at both of us had been translated correctly, me and Niki had the job. I have to go to a fitting today at 1pm. I am not nervous any more, I don’t have enough time to be nervous. 

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.