From New York runways to Paris catwalks, a 21-year-old from Louisiana is making strides in the fashion world
Posted by Susan Langenhennig, Fashion writer, The Times-Picayune October 07, 2008 5:00AM
Categories:
Living: Fashion
NEW YORK -- Ariel Meredith sat on a concrete bench at the 39th Street ferry terminal, nibbling on peanut butter crackers and waiting to catch the boat back to her apartment in New Jersey.
The day was sunny and cool, with an early fall crispness. She shivered a bit and hugged her long legs up to her chest, sinking into the bench. Dressed in a T-shirt, gray workout pants and a fedora perched low over her eyes, she had not a bit of makeup on her face.
"This is me when I'm off. I'm casual -- baseball cap, T-shirt," she said, a tiny dimple buttoning her flawless cheek.
A day later, Meredith strode down designer L'Wren Scott's runway in diamond- encrusted shoes during New York fashion week. Sarah Jessica Parker and Mick Jagger, the designer's longtime boyfriend, watched from the front row.
"It was amazing," Meredith said, a buttery Southern lilt in her voice. "I was like, wow."
These days, those wow moments come fast and furious for the 5-foot-10½-inch, size-2 model from Shreveport.
For the spring 2009 collections in early September, Meredith walked for 11 designers in New York, including Vera Wang, Charles Nolan, Milly and Nicole Miller.
Once the catwalks came down there, the 21-year-old was off to Europe. Her first stop was Milan, where she modeled in eight shows, including heavy hitters Dolce & Gabbana.
Then it was on to Paris.
At the Junya Watanabe presentation last week, Meredith, with an enormous African basket balanced on her head, was the first to appear, a sign her star is rising. The opening and closing spots on the runway are reserved for the most buzzed-about bodies.
This whirling carousel of fabric and photography is Meredith's first show season, and the exposure has been huge, getting her almond eyes and mocha skin in front of top magazine editors, designers and casting agents.
Her jobs have been particularly noteworthy, considering that opportunities are limited for black models at the upper echelons of the industry. Many designers reserve only one or two spots for dark-skinned beauties in shows that have a dozen or more models.
Lately, the lack of diversity on the runway has become a hot topic. Bethann Hardison, a former model and modeling agency owner, has organized forums in New York to air the issue, and last summer, Italian Vogue took the groundbreaking step of dedicating its entire July issue exclusively to black models, making a statement about discrimination in the industry.
For Meredith, getting to this high point in her career has been about as easy as sprinting in stilettos.
She was discovered at a Dallas modeling expo when she was a freshman in high school. Already tall and thin with exotic features, she had star potential that literally stood out.
She got 32 call-backs. In between studying algebra and writing term papers at Huntington High School in Shreveport, she would jaunt off to Miami, Dallas and Germany to walk and pose.
While it's not unusual to see models in their early teens quit school to focus on their careers, Meredith's parents, David and Marjorie Meredith encouraged their only child to keep perspective while pursuing her dream.
"I knew I wanted to finish high school, go to prom," Meredith said, "have a normal life."
One month after graduation, though, she was on a plane to New York. And in America's fashion capital, the beautiful business is played by a much more severe set of rules.
A svelte size 4/5 at the time, Meredith was "big by modeling standards," she said. "You know, Louisiana girls are curvy. I had a chest. I didn't care that I had some meat on my bones."
She posed in Lucky and Cosmopolitan magazines and appeared in the Victoria's Secret catalog. But top-flight designers, whose sample sizes hover between 0 and 2, wouldn't consider her.
"It was really discouraging," she said. "I knew I wasn't getting the kind of work I wanted. Then my agency called me in."
The news wasn't good: If she wanted to continue to work, the agency said, she needed to lose weight, get a trainer and consider having breast-reduction surgery.
Meredith refused. Surgery was out of the question. The agency, which she did not name, dropped her.
"Girls get dropped by agencies all the time," she said. "But it was still really hard.
"I realized I'd been in New York for too long not to get to the next level, and I realized that no one was going to do it for me. I had to do it myself."
With her parents' guidance and financial support, Meredith decided to take a year off and focus on getting in shape. She worked out daily and dieted, but not severely.
"I basically did portion control and exercise. I like to eat. I'm not going to starve myself to walk down someone's runway," she said. "And I'm not going in for a nip and tuck either. That's not me. I'm going to work with what God gave me."
After a year of intense focus, Meredith whittled down to a size 2 and signed with Ford Models.
The pace of her work then hit the accelerator. Her face was splashed on Target billboards; she appeared in a Macy's commercial; she posed in British Cosmopolitan, modeled for Gap Body, The Limited, Sephora and Levis campaigns; she flew to Spain to shoot the H&M catalog; and she landed, finally, at New York Fashion Week.
Even though Meredith has been modeling for years now, her mom still gets the occasional surprise of seeing her daughter's image up on a billboard or in a store ad.
"I'm walking through the bra section at Kohl's and I'm like, oh, there's Ariel," Marjorie Meredith said by phone from Shreveport. "It's still so much fun."
Back in New York during Fashion Week, Meredith flew out a back entrance after the Milly show. "It's been a real journey," she said, glancing back at America's biggest fashion stage. "I wanted to be here, and I'm here."
Her smile then turned to a yawn. Models get little sleep during show season, and it had been a grueling few days.
The day she would walk for Vera Wang, Meredith was up at 6 a.m. She swallowed a quick breakfast of fruit, raisin bread and espresso before taking her beloved Yorkies, Hershey and Rocky, for a walk and then running out the door.
Arriving backstage, she popped in her iPod ear buds and cranked up Nina Simone and Lil' Wayne.
The music relaxes her in the high-intensity zone of flying flat-irons and swirling makeup brushes.
"When I step out there, I'm just thinking, God, please don't let me fall," she said.
After the show -- and no, she didn't fall -- it was off to more casting calls, then home early, where she and her roommate, fellow model Wakeema Hollis, kick back and try to unwind.
"We don't hang out with a lot of other models or get caught up in the club scene," Meredith said. "We have fun at home, turning up the iPod and mixing up some strawberry daiquiris."
The final show of her exhausting New York schedule was Baby Phat. An hour before curtain, Meredith squeezed into a tight space in front of a table piled high with bobby pins, blow dryers and styling gels. Two hairdressers buzzed like wasps, clipping in her hair extensions.
"Ariel, look here," said a roaming photographer, snapping pre-show photos. Meredith turned on her mega-watt smile. This may be work, but she was having a ball.
After a makeup artist brushed the last swipe of rosy color on her cheeks, Meredith scurried around the corner. She shimmied out of her skinny jeans and Converse All Stars and into a pale blue pant suit, moving gently so as not to break off one of the white press-on finger nails that the manicurist had just attached.
A stylist then took over, adjusting her belt, tying a bandanna in her hair. Meredith's face was blank, an oh-this-again expression, as the woman began buttoning her pants. Take away the cramped quarters and the general backstage chaos, and it was a storybook scene, a princess dressed by her attendants.
As showtime neared, the lights went down on the other side of the curtain. The music cranked up. Meredith, in the lineup, walked out on the runway.
Fashion writer Susan Langenhennig can be reached at
[email protected] or at 504.826.3379.
