Competing for a Contract with Ford Models
By Zosia Bielski
I am 5 feet 3 inches tall, a woman most often described by her exes as "cute," despite an abundance of acne scars and a body almost entirely covered with stubborn, fine black hairs. So the prospect of covering a Ford Model search as an "embedded reporter" fills me with understandable dread but also vague curiosity. I have never seen a model up close, but will now spend two days alongside some of the country's finest specimens, six girls vying to represent Canada in the Ford Models Supermodel of the World finals in January. Models from Ford agencies in some 50 countries will compete for a contract worth $250,000 and an opportunity to work in New York City - plus, of course, get massive exposure. My assignment is to experience everything that the real models do - hair, makeup, the long strut down the catwalk. In other words, I will face the same physical scrutiny as those who make a living off their looks. A day before the assignment, I visit my local manicurist to get my ragged reporter's nails looking presentable - sanded down and covered with a toxic sheet of acrylic. I tell her to file the claws short and paint them pale: no porno nails for Ford.
Getting dressed the next morning, I go for safe: dark jeans and a plain black T-shirt. Will the models I meet today have the innate fashion sense of, say, Kate Moss and, if so, what will they make of my ratty Joe Fresh ballet flats? I arrive at the Redken Exchange, the Toronto training facility for the company's stylists (Ford employs Redken staff to do its models' hair). The girls are already holed up getting their hair prepped for the following day's fashion show and finale, and I join them at the sinks in an enormous white cube of a room. From the slew of stylists and PR people, I pick out the six girls, and I'm surprised to discover that's exactly what they are: Most are between 14 and 16 years old and some are studying for high school exams while they're getting their hair and makeup done. With their long, thin, muscle-free limbs and bored faces popping out from their hairdressers' smocks, the girls look like they could be on a school field trip. As their hair is dyed and straightened - in many cases, for the first time - it becomes apparent they have little previous experience in fashion. Few can name favourite designers or models, and although several have put on heels, most look like they've stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad in their short plaid shorts, tights, sneakers and bulky hoodies. Which is exactly what you would expect 14-year-old girls to wear.
There is tiny hockey-playing Ali, 14, and blond; horseback rider Arielle, 15, from Calgary; a confident brunette named Erin, 16, from Halifax; ballet-dancing Shelby, 15, from Toronto; a snowboarding Laetitia Casta-look-alike named Cassandra, 14; and the eldest, 20-year-old Nadia from Montreal. Diane Lang, Ford's Canadian co-director, requests that their last names be withheld for safety reasons, because the girls are so young. Jarrett Plyley, a Ford scout, says that all six girls approached Ford to compete in these finals, but that often he finds his best models by chance. He says he's had great luck on the Toronto subway and "by the side of the 400" - places like Barrie, Ont., and Canada's Wonderland. He also goes with his models to their school track-and-field meets in hopes of spotting other contenders. "These are wholesome, healthy Canadian girls, good homegrown ladies, the all-Canadian girl next door," says Redken vice-president Doriane Dalati, who flutters like a doting mom around the studio where the glamour music has just come on - remixed Fleetwood Mac, Daft Punk and other ageing club tracks.
It's my turn at the sink. Redken's director of education, Terry Ritcey, assures me I have "great hair," but too much of it - he "texturizes" half of it on to the floor, and streamlines my bangs so I can enjoy peripheral vision again. I'm also showing roots and an unintentional red sheen in my hair because of the ammonia from a previous dye job. Ritcey mixes what looks like raspberry jam for my colour. He's been doing hair for 25 years, most recently for Prada, Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan at New York's Fashion Week. The next day, he is to fly out to Calgary to style Ben Affleck's mop. Ritcey tells me that despite new stars like Agyness Deyn - the British model who arrived on the scene with shaved, bleached blond hair and thick black eyebrows, blithely crediting skinheads for her fashion sense - the Ford look is more about "classic beauty." Long hair that is one colour is the goal here, he says. "No one at Ford is encouraging the girls to cut their hair." While chiselled models with square jaw lines and plump lips - think Monika Schnarre - made it big in the 1980s, the look now, he says, is "balanced, refined and perfectly symmetrical." Just like Nadia, who takes a seat beside me. With her tiny white teeth, cupid-bow lips, a button nose pierced with a small stud, enormous doe eyes and flawless caramel skin, I find it hard to concentrate on what she is saying.
Now 20, she did her first year in biochemistry at the University of Montreal, but it was not to her liking. Now she is trying modelling in the hope that it will launch her into acting: "Modelling is a form of acting where you cannot speak," she says. I ask her who her favourite actress is: It's Charlotte Gainsbourg. Tomiko Fraser, the American model and one of the faces of Maybelline cosmetics, weaves between the sinks interviewing the girls. She is hosting a Citytv special on the girls (it ran earlier this month). She asks Nadia to name her favourite designer. Chanel, Nadia says. Fraser then asks her what her hair was like before she had it straightened. "I got an Afro," she says, laughing. And finally: Would she shave her head for Karl Lagerfeld? Yes, Nadia replies.
"That's the right answer," Fraser says. Nearly a decade ago, Fraser went from hostessing at a Manhattan restaurant, where she was discovered, to modelling couture for Chanel on a conveyor-belt runway in Paris. Lagerfeld called her "a little chocolate doll." She is now mentoring the girls for Ford. "They have no idea what they're getting into. It takes an empowered woman to get into this business. They probably don't even understand what empowered even means yet." For the shrewdest of the girls, the exposure that could come from this competition could very well be parlayed into a career spanning the next 40 years, Fraser says.
Makeup artist Shanon Stewart tells me she's toured with Avril Lavigne, and recently became enamoured of Sting while doing his makeup during the singer's Toronto pit stop at Downward Dog studio for some pre-show yoga. Now it's my turn. Stewart applies layer upon layer of foundation, several coats of blush, eyeliner, mascara and bright pink lipstick. I feel like I'm wearing a kabuki mask. Having taken a "before" shot in the morning, my photographer shoots me after my makeover. Directing my gaze up and down, left to right, he takes shot after shot.
"Demure!" he instructs. I realize I have no idea what demure looks like. The girls sit nearby but don't register my half-assed attempts to posture like a model. They're too busy playing a card game that involves snatching up objects they've pulled from their purses and laid out on a chair - a tube of mascara, lip balm, moisturizing cream and a hair elastic. I join their circle and suddenly experience the cliché of "radiant beauty": The girls literally glow. I lose two hands of the game twice and realize that behind the perfect smiles and Ford's absolute ban on cattiness, these girls are competitive. The next day is show time at Toronto's Distillery District. That morning, Jarrett Plyley, the scout, teaches the girls how to walk: Shoulders back and hips forward, he tells them. They teeter in three-inch heels, holding Plyley's hand. But by afternoon, the girls - who now have their makeup on and their hair in rollers - have perfected the runway turn.
I, too, am wearing three-inch heels, which I'd picked out at the Eaton Centre: cheap black pumps designed by JLO. I get my best friend, Sarah Jay, who is a stylist, to borrow them for me because, realistically, I will not be wearing three-inch heels again. She teases me about my conservative choice, and we tape off the bottoms so she can return them after my walk. For my walk, I wear another black T-shirt and a caboose-accentuating pencil skirt. Stewart's mascara is still shellacked to my eyes from the day before. Plyley gives the standard tutorial: Shoulders rolled back, hips forward, I feel like I'm horseback riding. Plyley says I'm "a natural" and the girls applaud. The runway turn proves more difficult. Something about kicking out one leg and turning in the direction you're heading befuddles me. I start to glaze over. I'm a reporter, not a model.
The ante is upped during dress rehearsal, when a commanding German man sporting a headset barks instructions at the girls as they slip and slide on the runway - it has been taped over with brown paper so it doesn't get scratched before the finale. "Walk in the centre of the runway. It's about you. Work it. Chin up. Relax your arms. Good girl," says Hans Koechling, the veteran show producer. Dance music booms and everyone eyes the models, including a small man who wears an ascot and winces through his spectacles, appraising the girls as if they were racehorses. What are their prospects realistically, I wonder. Plyley tells me that a "14-year-old girl working full-time internationally" is not realistic. However, now that these girls have been groomed, they could start working for local designers to develop their confidence. Two of the girls wear braces. Is that a problem? "They don't have to smile on the runway," Plyley responds. In the evening, the girls join more senior models on the catwalk. Their walks are still stiff, and their blasé expressions can't hide eyes that are terrified. After days of grooming and being fussed over, the end seems abrupt. Shelby is the winner. The 15-year-old had walked the runway with perfect posture, her face porcelain and focused above crimson lips. Trained as a ballet dancer, she is 5 feet 10 and still growing. After she learns that she is the model who will represent Canada, she makes her way down the catwalk again: Her braces gleam under the blinding runway lights as she smiles. The other girls seem stunned, maybe because they never saw Shelby as the winner, maybe because it's over so suddenly. Judge Aaron Newbill - head of scouting for Ford in North America - had looked on approvingly from the front row, and later explained why he picked Shelby. "There was something about Shelby that seemed to convey more confidence in her beauty, and that's very important for any new girl. We thought we were seeing a really classic beauty, but with a bit of a twist. The career that she'll have is basically up to her." But, he added, Shelby's success will probably bubble slowly, after the braces come off: "She's a young girl. It's just about growing into her beauty. She should just take it as it comes: Finish school, do the things that a young girl does, look forward to the contest and then be available full-time." Modelling was not what Sandra, a Toronto-based life coach, had in mind for her daughter but admits she was impressed when Shelby walked the catwalk: "It almost feels like I wasn't watching my daughter but someone already in a great authority of herself." Now her only question is whether Shelby will go to summer camp like other 15-year-olds or stay home and prepare for a shot at being the next supermodel of the world.
I am 5 feet 3 inches tall, a woman most often described by her exes as "cute," despite an abundance of acne scars and a body almost entirely covered with stubborn, fine black hairs. So the prospect of covering a Ford Model search as an "embedded reporter" fills me with understandable dread but also vague curiosity. I have never seen a model up close, but will now spend two days alongside some of the country's finest specimens, six girls vying to represent Canada in the Ford Models Supermodel of the World finals in January. Models from Ford agencies in some 50 countries will compete for a contract worth $250,000 and an opportunity to work in New York City - plus, of course, get massive exposure. My assignment is to experience everything that the real models do - hair, makeup, the long strut down the catwalk. In other words, I will face the same physical scrutiny as those who make a living off their looks. A day before the assignment, I visit my local manicurist to get my ragged reporter's nails looking presentable - sanded down and covered with a toxic sheet of acrylic. I tell her to file the claws short and paint them pale: no porno nails for Ford.
Getting dressed the next morning, I go for safe: dark jeans and a plain black T-shirt. Will the models I meet today have the innate fashion sense of, say, Kate Moss and, if so, what will they make of my ratty Joe Fresh ballet flats? I arrive at the Redken Exchange, the Toronto training facility for the company's stylists (Ford employs Redken staff to do its models' hair). The girls are already holed up getting their hair prepped for the following day's fashion show and finale, and I join them at the sinks in an enormous white cube of a room. From the slew of stylists and PR people, I pick out the six girls, and I'm surprised to discover that's exactly what they are: Most are between 14 and 16 years old and some are studying for high school exams while they're getting their hair and makeup done. With their long, thin, muscle-free limbs and bored faces popping out from their hairdressers' smocks, the girls look like they could be on a school field trip. As their hair is dyed and straightened - in many cases, for the first time - it becomes apparent they have little previous experience in fashion. Few can name favourite designers or models, and although several have put on heels, most look like they've stepped out of an Abercrombie & Fitch ad in their short plaid shorts, tights, sneakers and bulky hoodies. Which is exactly what you would expect 14-year-old girls to wear.
There is tiny hockey-playing Ali, 14, and blond; horseback rider Arielle, 15, from Calgary; a confident brunette named Erin, 16, from Halifax; ballet-dancing Shelby, 15, from Toronto; a snowboarding Laetitia Casta-look-alike named Cassandra, 14; and the eldest, 20-year-old Nadia from Montreal. Diane Lang, Ford's Canadian co-director, requests that their last names be withheld for safety reasons, because the girls are so young. Jarrett Plyley, a Ford scout, says that all six girls approached Ford to compete in these finals, but that often he finds his best models by chance. He says he's had great luck on the Toronto subway and "by the side of the 400" - places like Barrie, Ont., and Canada's Wonderland. He also goes with his models to their school track-and-field meets in hopes of spotting other contenders. "These are wholesome, healthy Canadian girls, good homegrown ladies, the all-Canadian girl next door," says Redken vice-president Doriane Dalati, who flutters like a doting mom around the studio where the glamour music has just come on - remixed Fleetwood Mac, Daft Punk and other ageing club tracks.
It's my turn at the sink. Redken's director of education, Terry Ritcey, assures me I have "great hair," but too much of it - he "texturizes" half of it on to the floor, and streamlines my bangs so I can enjoy peripheral vision again. I'm also showing roots and an unintentional red sheen in my hair because of the ammonia from a previous dye job. Ritcey mixes what looks like raspberry jam for my colour. He's been doing hair for 25 years, most recently for Prada, Marc Jacobs and Donna Karan at New York's Fashion Week. The next day, he is to fly out to Calgary to style Ben Affleck's mop. Ritcey tells me that despite new stars like Agyness Deyn - the British model who arrived on the scene with shaved, bleached blond hair and thick black eyebrows, blithely crediting skinheads for her fashion sense - the Ford look is more about "classic beauty." Long hair that is one colour is the goal here, he says. "No one at Ford is encouraging the girls to cut their hair." While chiselled models with square jaw lines and plump lips - think Monika Schnarre - made it big in the 1980s, the look now, he says, is "balanced, refined and perfectly symmetrical." Just like Nadia, who takes a seat beside me. With her tiny white teeth, cupid-bow lips, a button nose pierced with a small stud, enormous doe eyes and flawless caramel skin, I find it hard to concentrate on what she is saying.
Now 20, she did her first year in biochemistry at the University of Montreal, but it was not to her liking. Now she is trying modelling in the hope that it will launch her into acting: "Modelling is a form of acting where you cannot speak," she says. I ask her who her favourite actress is: It's Charlotte Gainsbourg. Tomiko Fraser, the American model and one of the faces of Maybelline cosmetics, weaves between the sinks interviewing the girls. She is hosting a Citytv special on the girls (it ran earlier this month). She asks Nadia to name her favourite designer. Chanel, Nadia says. Fraser then asks her what her hair was like before she had it straightened. "I got an Afro," she says, laughing. And finally: Would she shave her head for Karl Lagerfeld? Yes, Nadia replies.
"That's the right answer," Fraser says. Nearly a decade ago, Fraser went from hostessing at a Manhattan restaurant, where she was discovered, to modelling couture for Chanel on a conveyor-belt runway in Paris. Lagerfeld called her "a little chocolate doll." She is now mentoring the girls for Ford. "They have no idea what they're getting into. It takes an empowered woman to get into this business. They probably don't even understand what empowered even means yet." For the shrewdest of the girls, the exposure that could come from this competition could very well be parlayed into a career spanning the next 40 years, Fraser says.
Makeup artist Shanon Stewart tells me she's toured with Avril Lavigne, and recently became enamoured of Sting while doing his makeup during the singer's Toronto pit stop at Downward Dog studio for some pre-show yoga. Now it's my turn. Stewart applies layer upon layer of foundation, several coats of blush, eyeliner, mascara and bright pink lipstick. I feel like I'm wearing a kabuki mask. Having taken a "before" shot in the morning, my photographer shoots me after my makeover. Directing my gaze up and down, left to right, he takes shot after shot.
"Demure!" he instructs. I realize I have no idea what demure looks like. The girls sit nearby but don't register my half-assed attempts to posture like a model. They're too busy playing a card game that involves snatching up objects they've pulled from their purses and laid out on a chair - a tube of mascara, lip balm, moisturizing cream and a hair elastic. I join their circle and suddenly experience the cliché of "radiant beauty": The girls literally glow. I lose two hands of the game twice and realize that behind the perfect smiles and Ford's absolute ban on cattiness, these girls are competitive. The next day is show time at Toronto's Distillery District. That morning, Jarrett Plyley, the scout, teaches the girls how to walk: Shoulders back and hips forward, he tells them. They teeter in three-inch heels, holding Plyley's hand. But by afternoon, the girls - who now have their makeup on and their hair in rollers - have perfected the runway turn.
I, too, am wearing three-inch heels, which I'd picked out at the Eaton Centre: cheap black pumps designed by JLO. I get my best friend, Sarah Jay, who is a stylist, to borrow them for me because, realistically, I will not be wearing three-inch heels again. She teases me about my conservative choice, and we tape off the bottoms so she can return them after my walk. For my walk, I wear another black T-shirt and a caboose-accentuating pencil skirt. Stewart's mascara is still shellacked to my eyes from the day before. Plyley gives the standard tutorial: Shoulders rolled back, hips forward, I feel like I'm horseback riding. Plyley says I'm "a natural" and the girls applaud. The runway turn proves more difficult. Something about kicking out one leg and turning in the direction you're heading befuddles me. I start to glaze over. I'm a reporter, not a model.
The ante is upped during dress rehearsal, when a commanding German man sporting a headset barks instructions at the girls as they slip and slide on the runway - it has been taped over with brown paper so it doesn't get scratched before the finale. "Walk in the centre of the runway. It's about you. Work it. Chin up. Relax your arms. Good girl," says Hans Koechling, the veteran show producer. Dance music booms and everyone eyes the models, including a small man who wears an ascot and winces through his spectacles, appraising the girls as if they were racehorses. What are their prospects realistically, I wonder. Plyley tells me that a "14-year-old girl working full-time internationally" is not realistic. However, now that these girls have been groomed, they could start working for local designers to develop their confidence. Two of the girls wear braces. Is that a problem? "They don't have to smile on the runway," Plyley responds. In the evening, the girls join more senior models on the catwalk. Their walks are still stiff, and their blasé expressions can't hide eyes that are terrified. After days of grooming and being fussed over, the end seems abrupt. Shelby is the winner. The 15-year-old had walked the runway with perfect posture, her face porcelain and focused above crimson lips. Trained as a ballet dancer, she is 5 feet 10 and still growing. After she learns that she is the model who will represent Canada, she makes her way down the catwalk again: Her braces gleam under the blinding runway lights as she smiles. The other girls seem stunned, maybe because they never saw Shelby as the winner, maybe because it's over so suddenly. Judge Aaron Newbill - head of scouting for Ford in North America - had looked on approvingly from the front row, and later explained why he picked Shelby. "There was something about Shelby that seemed to convey more confidence in her beauty, and that's very important for any new girl. We thought we were seeing a really classic beauty, but with a bit of a twist. The career that she'll have is basically up to her." But, he added, Shelby's success will probably bubble slowly, after the braces come off: "She's a young girl. It's just about growing into her beauty. She should just take it as it comes: Finish school, do the things that a young girl does, look forward to the contest and then be available full-time." Modelling was not what Sandra, a Toronto-based life coach, had in mind for her daughter but admits she was impressed when Shelby walked the catwalk: "It almost feels like I wasn't watching my daughter but someone already in a great authority of herself." Now her only question is whether Shelby will go to summer camp like other 15-year-olds or stay home and prepare for a shot at being the next supermodel of the world.
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