I think that in many of these cases, the designers aren't booking them, we always knew that the overwhelming majority of models careers don't last much beyond a couple of years. Several of the "big" girls walked in small shows, so I doubt if the models and agents are being that selective; it would be dumb for a model to put the message out there that if you cannot pay my rate for your runway show, then I am going to stay home, because the obvious response from the designer would be, "well guess what, I cut my campaign budget too, so I guess that I can't afford you for my campaign either." As far as other commitments are concerned, who the heck else is booking models during fashion week? Maryna said that she had another commitment on the last day of NYFW, and that is believable because she does VS and major catalogs, Coco had a launch of a project that she is doing with Saks, but if a model is firmly entrenched in high fashion, then she should be a fixture during fashion week, sure she can be selective, but selective is what models like Lily and Natasha* have done, and even in their cases I think that they still have walked in over ten shows by now. The only models that I see as big enough to be very, very selective (by very, very selective I mean walk in 0-5 shows) are Raquel, Lily, Natasha, and Stam, and guess what, Lily and Natasha have been out there hustling. Now I am surprised about the lack of Tanya because she is such a good walker, and I won't rule out there being a surprise that will be revealed at some later point in the season regarding one or two MIAs, but too many of them are missing for me to believe that there will be a surprise twist coming up for all of them. BTW, I am liking what I see on the runway in terms of ethnic diversity (still could be better in Europe) and body type, less so about the number of "little girls playing dress up" that I am seeing.
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* Sasha perhaps, I haven't made up my mind yet.
(or are they just waiting to suddenly emerge)
this is turning into a big misunderstanding...I was not asking why ALL top girls are MIA, but asking why all the top girls that are MIA are actually MIA.
Just doing selective booking I guess, Raquel should probably pop up in Milan one of these days and hopefully Stam and Anja too. I hope Sigrid and Anna J just missed NYC, sometimes girls get booked for other jobs during fashion weeks and I'm hoping that's the case.
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