Fashion Models Feel the Squeeze
Perhaps your heart didn't bleed much when magazines like Vogue and Elle got skinnier and skinnier—it's all part of the Darwinian decline of print, right? The news that $2,000 dresses are no longer exactly flying off the racks? You can rest assured that truly talented designers will weather the storm. And if you were one of the many people to be cut from Marc Jacobs's guest list this coming Fashion Week, that's a blow, of course, but there's always next season. But you'd have to be made of stone to be unaffected by the plight of the six-foot, preternaturally beautiful young models from Eastern Europe and South America whose fees have been halved as budgets for ad campaigns and shows are cut to the bone.
"Half price! It's half-price everywhere, in Milan, even in New York," laments 23-year-old Anna Chyzh from Kiev, while Georgina Stojiljkovic, a 19-year-old Serbian modeling at the Christian Lacroix couture show, says: "I'm having some doubt now because of this situation. We all do it for the money so if there is no more money, maybe I should go back and focus on my studies."
We know: young women forced to get an education instead of being objectified and chewed up by the fashion industry is one of the more dreadful repercussions of the recession. But according to Models 1 director Karen Diamond, we haven't even seen the worst of it, since ad budgets and shows are planned far in advance. She also thinks that "[c]lients will go with established models rather than giving new faces a break, and it'll be tough for new girls." In other words, if you thought Agyness Deyn had reached a saturation point of over-exposure and relief was nigh, you may be disappointed.
