A brunette with knife-edge cheekbones, Tonya sat on a cabana chair, giraffe legs sprawled in Gap skinny jeans, and took a first drag on a newly lit cigarette as if her life depended on it. From any angle, she was pure photographic magic.
And yet despite the almond-shaped eyes and bee-stung lips destined to make millions of women yearn to look like her, Izzie decided that there was something tragic about Tonya.
The girl was beautiful, slender as a lily stem and one hundred per cent messed up. But Izzie knew that most people wouldn’t be able to see it. All they’d see was the effortless beauty, blissfully unaware that the person behind it was a scared teenager from a tiny Nebraska town who’d won the looks lottery but whose inner self hadn’t caught up.
As part of the Perfect-NY team, Izzie Silver’s job was seeing the scared kid behind the carefully applied make-up. Her stock-in-trade was a line of nineteen-year-olds with Ralph Lauren futures, trailer-trash backgrounds and lots of disastrous choices in between.
Officially, Izzie’s job was to manage her models’ careers and find them jobs. Unofficially, she looked after them like a big sister. She’d worked in the modelling world for ten years and not a week went by when she didn’t meet someone who made her feel that modelling ought to include free therapy.
‘Why do people believe that beauty is everything?’ she and Carla, her best friend and fellow booker, wondered at least once a week. It was a rhetorical question in a world where a very specific type of physical beauty was prized.
‘’Cos they don’t see what we do,’ Carla inevitably replied. ‘Models doing drugs to keep skinny, doing drugs to keep their skin clear and doing drugs to cope.’
Like a lot of bookers, Carla had been a model herself. Half Hispanic, half African-American, she was tall, coffee-skinned and preferred life on the other side of the camera where the rejection wasn’t as brutal.
‘When the tenth person of the week talks about you as though you’re not there and says your legs are too fat, your ass is too big, or your whole look is totally last season, then you start to believe them,’ Carla had told Izzie once.
She rarely talked about her own modelling days now. Instead, she and Izzie – who’d bonded after starting at the agency at the same time and finding they were the same age – talked about setting up their own company, where they’d do things differently.
Nobody was going to tell the models of the Silverwebb Agency – the name had leaped out at them: Izzie Silver, Carla Webb – they were too fat. Because the sort of models they were going to represent were plus-sized: beautiful and big. Women with curves, with bodies that screamed ‘goddess’ and with skin that was genuinely velvety instead of being air-brushed velvety because the model was underweight and acned from a bad lifestyle.
For 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