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Picture Me: A Model's Diary
Rating: 8/10
Cast: Sara Ziff, Karl Lagerfeld, Nicole Miller
Director: Ole Schell, Sara Ziff
Guest review by Michiko Hylands, TVNZ's style director
This was a really insightful, interesting doco-style film about the life of a top international model, 23 year old American Sara Ziff.
Blessed with natural, all-American good looks, Sara spends her life jetting between New York, Paris and Milan modelling on the catwalks for all fashion week. She also does various editorial and advertising campaigns for major labels such as Tommy Hilfiger and Hussein Chalayan.
Sara treats the hand-held camera in front of her, as a video diary recording her highs and lows of everyday life. Her (unemployed?) cameraman boyfriend tags along with her, recording her every move.
The footage is quite raw and unpolished but adds to the film's quirky appeal.
We rapidly begin to realise that it's not all glamour and jet-setting fun times for models that basically just live in a world that is based in fantasy where "nothing comes without a catch.."
In this industry, money can be made very quickly and if you make it to the big time in modelling you can be set for life. "You get to make money in a way you could never imagine"
Some of models become quite complacent about how much they earn on a job and just come to expect multiple zeros at the end of a pay cheque. Money suddenly loses its appeal when it seems so easy to obtain.
Remember when 90s super model, Linda Evangelista uttered the infamous line "I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day"?
Some of the girls aren't so lucky and get into debt to their agencies if they don't get booked enough for jobs. Food, clothes, travel, getting copies of their books made up and even having a driver: all are noted by modelling agencies as a debt that needs to be repaid.
We also heard about the dark underbelly of the modelling world that no-one really wants to talk about. We hear repulsive stories of young, naive girls (who are still basically only children) getting completely taken advantage of by predators and put into compromising situations.
Stories such as the sleazy, naked photographer in a hot tub, fondling a young model that is unsure of herself. They are still children and children don't know how to complain yet. Or the tale about the very famous and the very naked photographer asking for sexual favours a la the old casting couch technique.
The model's world is not as glam as it appears. Girls start to crack under their hectic lifestyles. If you are doing five shows a day and jetting between all the major fashion capitals of the world, having late night fittings with designers and then early morning shoots on the next day for a whole month, of course it's all going to have to end in tears at some stage.
Girls become exhausted by their terrible diets of coffee and cigarettes and generally just not taking care of their bodies. Their faces break out in pimples thanks to jet-lag, lack of sleep and the constant make up applications.
Young models can also get into abusing drugs to give them some "false energy" so they can continue with the relentless pace. They become like Zombies.
They feel like they are pieces of meat, getting naked backstage with salacious photographers ogling the girls and taking pictures of them. The models feel like they are treated like robots and not like real human beings. They feel like a powdered shell of themselves and in shows get burnt (by hot straightening irons) pushed and yanked around.
However, once the music and lights of a catwalk show come on, the models transform and feel like they are part of something great, transferring the designer's vision on to the runway.
It was interesting to see behind the scenes footage of the pandemonium backstage. You realise just how many people are actually working behind the scenes from hairdressers and make up artists to organisers, dressers and photographers.
We particularly loved the footage of the Chanel show and we wished we were there too (in the front row of course!)
The models are like living dolls, used to all the attention. They are under constant scrutiny, always judged by their physical appearance and over critical about themselves.
Body image and the use of young pre-pubescent models on the runway are also discussed. Tall, young girls that don't have hips or breasts yet make the clothes hang flat and straight and designers love this fact. Does it seem sane to dress up a 12 year girl in a highly provocative outfit when minutes before a show she was still colouring in her colouring-in book?
Some models get called "fat" at castings and naturally, anorexia and bulimia are rife within the industry. Images of actresses and models help perpetuate the idea that this is what successful women should look like.
Modelling does have a has a shelf life though and what was once exciting can become empty and boring...the novelty wears off. Sara asks "Why be a prop in someone else's story rather than being one in your own?"
The modelling world is also very fickle and disposable with the constant search for the next best thing, the new not the "yesterday". Each year a crop of new girls are thrust into the scene and the turn-over rate is high. One day you're in and the next day you're "out".
If you are a model that is still in demand, the carrot keeps dangling and they can't stop taking on the next job.
It's always the transition phase is always the most traumatic. i.e what to do after modelling? In the end, Sara decides to go to University and step away from the industry of illusion "where the premium on youth and skinniness is a harmful ideal"
We thoroughly recommend you see this movie as it's well worth the watch.
See you all next week!
xoxo Style Blog
Get all the goss and watch the highlights of shows from New Zealand Fashion Week 2010 here!
