ASHLEY BROKAW is as familiar with skull shapes as a comparative zoologist, and knows the female gait as a jockey does the gallop of his racehorse. She can glance at a teenage girl and correctly guess her height, hip measurement and shoe size. She can divine what shadows a cheekbone will cast upon a jaw; how a hue of ash blond might contrast with patent leather; whether a girl’s look is sufficiently Edwardian.
If you flip through a magazine, stare up at a billboard or scroll through the thumbnail images of last season’s fashion shows, chances are high that you will be looking at the faces and figures of models Brokaw has discovered and groomed. Her clients include Miuccia Prada, Nicolas Ghesquière and Jonathan Anderson. She has cast shows for Miu Miu, Balenciaga and Tommy Hilfiger; chosen models for print ads for Calvin Klein, Harry Winston, Chloé and Armani, along with campaigns for more mass brands like H&M, Gap and Zara. She collaborates on shoots with Steven Meisel and Patrick Demarchelier.
As the fashion industry’s leading casting director, Brokaw, 41, is arguably the person most singularly responsible for what — or, more accurately, who — we think is beautiful. “She has a foresight. She has a stamp of approval,” says Anderson, creative director of Loewe and J. W. Anderson. “She finds faces, and she takes risks on faces. All the faces that we see today are passed through Ashley.” Proenza Schouler’s Lazaro Hernandez agrees. “If you want to be a working model,” he says, “get on Ashley’s radar.” Her decisions affect not only the models’ careers but also our own sense of self: Each season she tweaks what we long to be by changing who she puts in front of us.
Today, that person is less conventional and arguably odder-looking than ever before. Brokaw favors the kind of model more memorable than she is pretty. What fashion editors have long euphemistically called jolie-laide, she calls “strong.” The faces she chooses are sometimes merely a bit off-kilter but often undeniably weird and in some cases visibly asymmetrical. In print, they can seem outright radical, especially when compared to the burnished Brazilian goddesses and feline Russians of the recent past. Such idiosyncratic stars include Jamie Bochert, with her moody, ghoulish aspect; the Shelley Duvallesque Sabrina Ioffreda; the pinched and elfin Hanne Gaby Odiele; Lily McMenamy and her Novocained jaw. “You wouldn’t know most of the girls that are on the runway today were models,” Brokaw says. “They could all be sitting here and you probably wouldn’t recognize them, wouldn’t necessarily guess they were models at all.”
And yet even the new, seemingly more inclusive beauty standards might themselves be an expression of a certain strain of exclusivity. The fetishism of unusual facial features could be read as a trickle-down effect of our contemporary notion of one-of-a-kind luxury, a resistance to the ubiquity of mass merchandising. From a designer’s point of view, personifying a collection with a not obviously gorgeous model can imbue the clothes with an artisanal, avant-garde edge. As Brokaw herself concedes, “There’s a fine line between fashion and beauty being democratic and an anything-goes mentality. Fashion should be rarefied.”
Brokaw embodies the more sober aspects of the job. When we met last winter, she wore no jewelry, makeup or nail polish. Her face was slightly ski-chapped, and she spoke half-burrowed in the folds of a worn cowl-neck sweater. She looks like someone more likely to garden vegetables than prance around Paris. (Indeed, according to Instagram, she has recently planted, among other things, jewel beets, butter lettuce and lacinato kale.) She lives with her husband and two sons in an 18th-century farmhouse in rural Connecticut, and only comes into Manhattan when work demands it. It’s ironic but unsurprising that one of the fashion industry’s most influential figures seems to exist entirely glamour-adjacent.
Casting is a mostly ignored art outside the world of fashion. Each designer has their own preference about when to bring Brokaw into the creative process; some have her over the minute they finish sketching the collection; others like to provide her with a reference: “the 1980s girl with Madonna in the nightclub” or “vacation in Marrakesh.” The model who opens the show and the model who closes the show are traditionally considered the stars, but Brokaw’s job is more than just filling the minutes in between. A short skirt calls for a girl with exceptionally long legs; flats are of course preferable on taller models. Gray tends to look better on a blonde or redhead than it does on a brunette. Sometimes a designer wants a section of looks — outerwear with brown fur collars, say — to be worn by a group of similar-looking models, maybe a procession of pale, raven-haired girls. Clothes that a designer knows will be heavily photographed are typically matched with the most famous models or those with the most eye-catching walks. Brokaw completes the New York-London-Milan-Paris fashion-week cycle, often making adjustments to a show’s lineup with only a couple of hours up to call-time. (“In those moment when you’re most exhausted, she’s still on, ” says Anderson. “And she’s so calm!”)
Brokaw sees 300 to 400 models per season. She is, she says, interested in the girls who “grow on you.” She refers to them as “slow burns,” the models who work for a long time before they’re suddenly accepted by the public as beautiful. “Maybe she started in a Givenchy campaign and everyone thought, ‘Oh gosh, who is that? It’s too strong; it’s too much; I don’t get it,’ ” Brokaw says, pantomiming horror. “And then you get desensitized to it, and then all of a sudden she is in an H&M campaign, or a Zara campaign, and it’s a bit more palatable.” Brokaw is also known, and respected, for her ability to “bring a girl back” or to recontextualize her years after she first debuted, whether convincing Gemma Ward, who stopped modeling seven years ago and had a baby, to open Prada’s spring 2015 show, or suggesting Adriana Lima, one of the “Angels” of the mass label Victoria’s Secret, as the face of the high fashion brand Miu Miu in 2013. “She’s a fearless hunter,” says Ghesquière, the creative director of the house of Louis Vuitton, who has worked with Brokaw for over 10 years.
BROKAW GREW UP in England, attended boarding school in Connecticut and interned after 11th grade with Woody Allen’s casting director Juliet Taylor. Before her formal training in the fashion industry — doing casting for Bruce Weber’s Abercrombie & Fitch shoots — she studied international law at Georgetown. Much of her job, serving as buffer between artist and (often moody) adolescent model, looks quite a bit like statecraft. “I always say to the girls, ‘If you have a problem, come to me. Don’t go to the designer, don’t go to the stylist, don’t complain to anybody, come complain to me.’ ” Her job requires mastery of seemingly oppositional skill sets: the ability to perceive the human form with an almost cruel objectivity and the simultaneous capacity for maternal tenderness. For all her artistic vision, Brokaw often plays the role of high school guidance counselor. She has sent girls home from castings and shows for being too thin or obviously on drugs. Other forms of coaching are achieved discreetly in conversations with agents. “Sometimes I will say, ‘Get her teeth fixed.’ Sometimes I will say, ‘She needs to get her skin cleared up; she needs to drink more water.’ ” Brokaw recommends dance and yoga to the less coordinated girls, and lots of practice walking in heels to the fawnlike girls whose “legs just aren’t strong enough to hold the weight of their body.”
Since January, Brokaw has been to Milan three times and to Paris and London four times. Also: Amsterdam, Germany, Tokyo, California, Slovakia, Copenhagen and Brussels. On the off-season, she likes to meet with regional scouts who introduce her to girls she wouldn’t otherwise have the time to discover. Rather than searching for porcelain-skinned, Nordic blondes or bronzed volleyball players from São Paulo, she is enticed by countries like Denmark, places that “have really good genetic mixes and that aren’t so . . . stereotypical?” Speaking like a viticulturalist or someone tasked with sourcing rare coffee beans, she continues, “I’m always interested in those kind of hybrid girls that are ethnically ambiguous. I like mixtures. I like combinations. You know, that a girl has some Asian and some European and some American Indian.” For Brokaw, diversity isn’t a political goal so much as it is a matter of natural preferences that happen to be progressive. The most ideal model-producing places, she surmises, have lots of interracial marriage, a high G.D.P. (predictive of good teeth) and protein-rich diets (good for turning out tall but trim citizens). Australia, she says, would be a great source, if it weren’t for all the sun exposure: Beachgoing has ruined many a modeling career.
Looking for new models on the street, she explains, is not ideal. Inclement weather is an obstacle (outerwear engorges even the trimmest of physiques), as are certain modes of transportation. “It’s difficult to do in Amsterdam, because they’re all on bicycles,” she says. “I’ve stopped girls on bicycles that are beautiful, and they get off the bicycle and” — here Brokaw sticks out her fingers two feet above the floor — “they’re this big.” Brokaw likes to meet parents — to assess their level of support but also, if the girl is not yet post-pubescent, to get a sense of how tall she might end up.
LIKE ANY MAJOR shift in taste, the new tolerance to stranger models can be attributed in part to practical, even economic, factors. Over the 20 years she’s been doing it, Brokaw’s job has become both harder and far more interesting. In the past decade, the number of fall shows at New York Fashion Week has doubled, and with the rise of e-commerce and photo-documentation (Instagram, street-style blogs, backstage slide shows), the demand for modeled content is greater than ever before.
“It used to be that maybe five years ago, if a girl would come in and she didn’t fit roughly a height parameter and a hip parameter, and an overall mood or feeling, I could say, ‘O.K., so she’s somebody I won’t use,’ ” she says. “But now it’s kind of ‘The sky’s the limit!’ I mean, I have to really look at every single girl.” Season by season, Brokaw’s achievement is a paradoxical one: It’s her traditional understanding of fashion and faces that allows her to advance a more broad-minded understanding of beauty.
Meanwhile, the very idea of what a model is has expanded as well. “It used to be that you could kind of get away with just going down a runway. If you could fake it for the 45 seconds you needed to walk, that was good enough,” Brokaw says. “But there are so many other jobs now. Think about it: Almost every campaign has a video component, and video is very, very different than still photographs.” Increasingly, Brokaw is being asked about models’ personalities. Social media surely plays a role here. Thumbing out clever captions about your acne, having fun in public and knowing to display your most irreverently inexpensive possessions are contemporary skills whose value cannot be exaggerated. “I like somebody who could be your best friend’s sister. You know, the girl who’s not on the cheerleading squad.”
While she isn’t at all nostalgic for high-school-style prettiness — the past era of remote, traffic-stopping beauties — Brokaw does wonder whether the progress made in pushing the boundaries of what is attractive may be ephemeral: whether the industry, so famous for its antic, pendulum-like movements, isn’t poised for a return to “a very normal beauty aesthetic . . . the girl who walks in and who everyone agrees is beautiful, not the one where you have to convince everyone she’s beautiful.” But isn’t that always the threat, the pretty girl who returns and forces everybody to forget the interesting one?
Vogue France December 2024/January 2025 : Loli Bahia by Mert Alas & Marcus Piggott (10 Viewers)