A meander through a pretty-people purgatory, The Model is a four-part series of pieces written by an anonymous ex-male model. Over the coming weeks, installments will explore social media, body image, and what it’s like chasing success in an industry always hungrily in pursuit of the new. Stay tuned.

Soon after I signed to my mother agency, they took me into the basement and taught me how to walk. Having been bipedal for close to 20 years, I had thought that this was knowledge I already possessed, but evidently, I did not. I watched videos of French model Clement Chabernaud on my booker’s phone and then tried to walk like him. Apparently, he had a very strong walk. I walked back and forth down a small corridor in the windowless basement. After 45 minutes, she shrugged and said she had to get back to work. Keep practising and you’ll get it, she said. 

There tend to be two types of modelling stories. There are the miracles – girls plucked from obscurity to become household names, and then there are the horror stories that we hear less often but that still circulate in the culture; sexual assaults, models falling into spiralling debt to their agencies, developing eating disorders, and entering years of therapy. But what about the thousands of models in-between? Models, by their very nature, end up two-dimensional simulacrums of themselves, so it makes sense that in a world that craves salacious stories we flatten out the complexity of their lives. In doing so, the only ones given a platform to speak are those whose stories fit into our preconceived dichotomy: made it, or didn’t.

If the only tales we hear are either psalms to the divine power of beauty (they’re called Victoria’s Secret Angels for a reason) or hellish accounts of misery (tinged with a certain schadenfreude) then I’d offer my story as a meander through a pretty-people purgatory. 

Most models fall into modelling – they’re scouted, or they turn up to an open-call not really believing they’ll get it and somehow get selected amongst highly unfavourable odds. Very few seriously prepare for it, and despite the existence of shady ‘modelling academies’ in places like China and Nigeria, it’s not really something you can plan for in a meaningful way. Once represented, models hustle themselves around for a few years before they age out of the profession or realise they aren’t going to make it and decide to take the money they’ve earned, if any, and invest it back into something they see as having a future. One of the guys I modelled with was a mycologist (he studied mushrooms) and he’s now getting a master’s degree. Another qualified as a personal trainer. One is now a successful photographer. 

The people who are the most mentally stable and ‘successful’ in modelling tend to be the ones who see it for what is; slightly absurd, occasionally lucrative, and just a stage you pass through on the way to something entirely different. The ones who flame out spectacularly are the ones who chase the ephemeral thing itself; a constantly unattainable level of security at the top of a subjective industry defined by its insatiable desire for what’s next. 

“The people who are the most mentally stable and ‘successful’ in modelling tend to be the ones who see it for what is; slightly absurd, occasionally lucrative, and just a stage you pass through on the way to something entirely different”

I was scouted by a magazine editor when I was DJing at a sparsely attended party in Hong Kong. I shot some editorials and then did nothing about it, until a few years later when I was a bit lost and wanted to find a flexible job that might still give me time to write and figure out what I actually wanted to do. The editorials and a few freelance things I’d done here and there were enough to build a rudimentary book and sign with a decent agency. I then went through the typical grind of building a more rounded book by doing test-shoots with up and coming photographers and taking those shots to go-sees and castings. 

I never blew up as a model, but I did make some money – which if you Google ‘modelling’ and ‘debt’ you’ll see is an achievement. I saw myself on a billboard, I shot with a Victoria’s Secret model and I booked two international campaigns, but I was a lightyear away from being a household name. I was a working model, with castings as my 9-5. 

That I didn’t ‘make it’ doesn’t invalidate the experience – I’d argue it gave me a unique insight into the nuts and bolts of the industry, stripped away from the dominant narratives that often come to define the way we talk about it. 

For me, modelling was a window into the liminal state of ambition. Modelling is to be in pursuit of a life that doesn’t really exist, one of easy fame and easy fortune, predicated on nothing more than a winning smile and a body that responds well to conditioning and diet. Fame and fortune don’t come easily unless you happen to be one of the new crop of today’s supermodels which, thanks to social media, include Kim Kardashian’s sister, Stephen Baldwin’s daughter, Johnny Depp’s daughter, Cindy Crawford’s daughter, Cindy Crawford’s son, Lionel Richie’s daughter, Lenny Kravitz’s daughter – and so on. Even then they don’t come easily as such, because they were already there.

And let’s not forget that success now requires the constant attention and management demanded by the logics of a 24/7 digital marketplace. Considering the progeny of the rich and famous are numerous and well connected, they are in direct competition with eachother, and therefore still struggle along like the rest of us (kind of). For those models who did somehow claw their way to the top without being nepotised there off the back of a falling star, they tend to find themselves at the height of their careers with many of the same anxieties as those just starting out – albeit with less debt and more Instagram followers. 

Modelling was to always be in pursuit of a gilded dream from casting to casting, all the while navigating a world that was extremely harsh and unforgiving. One time at a casting in New York I saw a model asked to take his top off to take a polaroid. He was covered in little red welts. The casting director, in front of 20 other models, asked him why he hadn’t done anything about them. They’re mosquito bites, the model said. They’re bed bugs, the casting director corrected him. Burn your sheets, burn your clothes and never come to one of my castings again because otherwise I’ll have to burn the collection. The model lived in an apartment he rented, above market-rate, from his agency. 

And so it was – the constant striving punctuated by the niggling reminders of the reality around you. But it had its moments; modelling is absurd, hilarious and bizarre and if you don’t take yourself too seriously then ending up posing for a lookbook in a shirt made entirely of hundreds of sleeves is actually not such a bad way to scrape a living. It beats watercooler chats with Brenda from accounts. 

There is also something to be said for being told no to your face hundreds of times or being entirely ignored by a casting director you’ve waited over an hour in line to see, as a way to very quickly bring you back down to earth and to grow a significantly tougher skin. It also, in the harshest way possible, taught me self acceptance. Over the course of two years I had every part of my appearance critiqued – hair too long, hair too short, eyebrows too thick, eyebrows too thin, nose too pointy, nose too wide – to the point that it came full circle and I realised that if everything was wrong, then maybe nothing was too. 

“Over the course of two years I had every part of my appearance critiqued – hair too long, hair too short, eyebrows too thick, eyebrows too thin, nose too pointy, nose too wide – to the point that it came full circle and I realised that if everything was wrong, then maybe nothing was too”

And so, over the next few weeks, I’ll offer up some stories from modelling that I think provide a different window into three issues that I feel every model faces today – social media, weight, and defining success. I also picked these topics because they are issues of our particular moment that transcend modelling, ones that I guess we’re all trying to work through. 

I choose to stay anonymous because the people in my stories didn’t know they would one day come to be written about, and I’m not here to call anyone out (and also because D&G never got me a proper Chinese work visa – thanks Stefano). 

I also think that in a world where everyone is accessible on social media and life is so heavily curated for the purposes of a personal brand, it might be nice to read something less tethered to a particular individual. It doesn’t really matter who I am; this is just some stuff I’ve seen. 

Instead, I think of this as a love letter to the dreamers I met, the people who put themselves out there and grasped for something that was always, for the vast majority, just out of reach. 

That something is out of reach doesn’t invalidate the pursuit. I met A– on a job in Shanghai. He told me he’d been working at Tesco when a fellow cashier had told him to go to Oxford Street because there would be modelling scouts there and A–, in possession of cheekbones and standing at 190cm with no body fat, was a shoo-in to get picked. A– scoffed, but the next time the two had a day off that overlapped the other cashier dragged him to central London. 

And, yeah, A– laughed, guess what, outside of Topshop I ended up scouted by an agent from Milan. He looked around at the giant shopping mall we’d found ourselves in – all glistening Chinese technofuture – and smiled, and said, and now look where I am.