two women who shared the no-bullshit gene and who both struggled with the part of their jobs that dictated that models had to be slender as reeds, it had seemed such an obvious choice.
Five months ago – pre-Joe – they’d been sharing lunch on the fire escape of Perfect-NY’s West Side brownstone, talking about a model from another agency who’d ended up in rehab because of her heroin addiction.
She weighed ninety pounds, was six feet tall and was still in demand for work at the time.
‘It’s a freaking tragedy, isn’t it?’ Carla sighed as she munched on her lunch. ‘How destructive is that? Telling these kids they’re just not right even when they’re stop-traffic beautiful. Where is it going to end? Who gets to decide what’s beautiful any more, if the really beautiful girls aren’t beautiful enough?’
Izzie shook her head. She didn’t know the answer. In the ten years she’d been working in the industry, she’d seen the perfect model shape change from all-American athletic and strong, although slim, to tall, stick-like and disturbingly skinny. It scared everyone in Perfect-NY and the other reputable agencies.
‘It’s going to reach a point where kids will need surgery before they get on any agency’s books because the look of the season is too weird for actual human beings,’ she said. ‘What does that say about the fashion industry, Carla?’
‘Don’t ask me.’
‘And we’re the fashion industry,’ Izzie added glumly. If they weren’t part of the solution, then they were part of the problem. Surely they could change things from the inside?
‘You know,’ she added thoughtfully, ‘if I had my own agency, I really don’t think I’d work with ordinary models. If they’re not screwed up when they start, they’ll be screwed up by the time they’re finished.’ She took a bite of her chicken wrap. ‘The designers want them younger and younger. Our client list will be nothing but twelve-year-olds soon.’
‘Which means that we, as women of nearly forty –’ Carla made the sign of the cross with her fingers to ward off this apocalyptic birthday ‘– are geriatric.’
‘Geriatric and requiring clothes in double-digit sizes in my case,’ Izzie reminded her.
‘Hey, you’re a Wo-man, not a boy child,’ said Carla.
‘Point taken and thank you, but still, I am an anomaly. And the thing is, women like you and me, we’re the ones with the money to buy the damn clothes in the first place.’
‘You said it.’
‘Teenagers can’t shell out eight hundred dollars for a fashion-forward dress that’s probably dry-clean-only and will be out of date in six months.’
‘Six? Make that four,’ said Carla. ‘Between cruise lines and the mid-season looks, there are four collections every year. By the time you get it out of the tissue paper, it’s out of fashion.’
‘True,’ agreed Izzie. ‘Great for making money for design houses, though. But that’s not what really annoys me. It is the bloody chasm between the target market and the models.’
‘Grown-up clothes on little girls?’ Carla said knowingly.
‘Exactly,’ agreed Izzie.
As a single career woman living in her own apartment in New York, she had to look after herself, doing everything from unblocking her own sink to sorting out her taxes and then being able to play hardball with the huge conglomerates for whom her models were just pawns.
Yet when the conglomerates showed off clothes aimed at career women like Izzie, they chose to do it with fragile child-women.
The message from the sleek, exquisite clothes was: I’m your equal, Mister, and don’t you forget it.
The message coming from a model with a glistening pink pout and knees fatter than her thighs, was: Take care of me, Daddy.
‘It’s a screwed-up world,’ she said. ‘I love our girls, but they’re so young. They need mothers, not bookers.’
She paused. Lots of people said bookers were part-mother/ part-manager. For some reason, this bothered her lately. She’d never minded what she was called before, but now she felt uncomfortable being described as an eighteen-year-old’s mother. She wasn’t a mother, and it came as a shock that she was old enough to be considered mother to another grown-up. Why did it bother her now? Was it the age thing? Or something else?
‘Yeah.’ Carla abandoned her lunch and started on her coffee. ‘Wouldn’t it be great to work with women who’ve had a chance to grow up before they’re shoved down the catwalk?’
‘God, yes,’ Izzie said fervently. ‘And who aren’t made to starve themselves so the garment hangs off their shoulder blades.’
‘You’re talking about plus-sized models…’ said Carla slowly, looking at her friend.
Izzie stopped mid-bite. It was exactly what she was always thinking. How much nicer it would be to work with women who were allowed to look like women and weren’t whipped into a certain-shaped box. The skinny-no-boobs-no-belly-and-no-bum box.
Carla wrapped both hands around her coffee cup thoughtfully. The familiar noises of their fire-escape perch – the hum of the traffic and the building’s giant aircon machine on the roof that groaned and wheezed like a rocket about to take off – faded into nothingness.
‘We could –’
‘– start our own agency –’
‘– for plus-sized models –’
They caught each other’s hands and screamed like children.
‘Do you think we could do it?’ asked Izzie earnestly.
‘There’s definitely a market for plus-sized models now,’ Carla said. ‘You remember years ago, nobody ever wanted bigger girls, but now, how often are we asked do we have any plus-sized girls? All the time. The days of plus girls being used just for catalogues and knitting patterns are over. And with lots of the big-money design houses making larger lines, they want more realistic models. No, there’s a market, all right. It’s niche, but it’s growing.’
‘Niche: yes, that sums it up,’ Izzie agreed. ‘I like niche. It’s special, elite, different.’
She was fed up working for Perfect-NY and having daily corporate battles with the three partners who’d long ago gone over to the dark, money-making side. The agency’s Dark Side Corporates didn’t care about people, be it employees or models. Any day now, time spent in the women’s room would involve a clocking-in timecard and a machine that doled out a requisite number of toilet-paper sheets.
Besides, she’d given ten years to the company and she felt at a crossroads in her life. Forty loomed. Life had run on and – it hit Izzie suddenly what was wrong with her, why she’d been feeling odd lately – she felt left behind.
She had all the things she’d wanted: independence, her own apartment, wonderful friends, marvellous holidays, a jam-packed social life. And yet there was a sense of something missing, a flaw like a crack in the wall that didn’t
