While it’s highly likely for many of us that our school photos – feat. desperately embarrassing hairstyles and questionable make-up choices – are hidden in the back of drawers, as we pray to the risen lord above that our parents won’t drag them out at some wholly inopportune moment, the models signed to New York’s No Agency feel slightly different about things.
As part of a new collab between the talent reps and cult Kim Gordon-founded label X-girl, not only will their ‘Class of 2020’ photo see the light of day, it’s also been splashed all over a bunch of limited edition t-shirts. Poignantly, since Miss Rona showed up earlier this year, all proceeds from the t-shirts are set to be donated to the Boys and Girls Club of America’s COVID-19 relief fund to aid vulnerable families with food and emergency childcare amid the crisis.
Enlisting NY Cool For School photographer Larry Bercow to go behind the camera and capture the agency’s rising models, the shoot took place back in December in the Lower East Side’s Manny Cantor Center. In celebration of the diverse faces that make up the No Agency’s books, the class photo follows in the footsteps of its 2019 show package, which saw its signees take a theatre class and star in a series of dramatic portraits, and 2018’s, in which the models turned the lens on each other. The final, fuzzy, soft-focus shot shows the models lined up in rows, smiling down the lens of Bercow’s camera.
With many of those featured celebrating their IRL graduations this summer, like countless others around the world, No Agency’s young faces have had to adapt to our strange new world. “Graduating on Zoom was so weird!” says Taylor Jeanne. “I’m the first person in my family to graduate college, and my family had been saving to come to New York to see it happen. Instead, I put my free cap and gown over my undies and talked to my mom as we watched the ceremony online. Then, I put my mask on and went for a victory walk.”
Check out a gallery of behind-the-scenes images above, and get your hands on your own No Agency x X-Girl tee when it's released on Friday here, and donate to the Boys and Girls Club of America here).