'We might need to see you without your bra, he told me. I was 14. I didn't even have breasts yet'
Sunday 7 June 2009
As a top teen model, Sara Ziff was earning the kind of money her school friends could only dream of. But there was a price to pay. She tells Louise France why she has made a documentary about what really happens behind the cameras.
A beautiful woman sits in front of a video camera. Her name is Sena Cech and she is a
fashion model. Her tone is matter-of-fact, as though what she's about to describe is commonplace in the industry in which she works. The scene: a casting with a photographer, one of the top names in his profession. Halfway through the meeting Cech is asked to strip. She does as instructed and takes off her clothes. Then the photographer starts undressing as well. "Baby - can you do something a little sexy," he tells her. The photographer's assistant, who is watching, eggs her on. What's supposed to be the casting for a high-end fashion shoot turns into something more like an audition for a top-shelf magazine. The famous photographer demands to be touched sexually. "Sena - can you grab his **** and twist it real hard," his assistant tells her. "He likes it when you squeeze it real hard and twist it."
"I did it," she shrugs, looking into the video camera. "But later I didn't feel good about it." The following day she hears that the job is hers if she wants it. She turns it down. "I didn't like the way the casting had gone. If the casting was that sexual I was sure the job would be really sexual and gross." The photographer never offered her work again.
This is the ugly, sleazy side of the modelling industry, the side few insiders like to talk about. It's one of the most secretive businesses in the world, which is ironic when you consider that it is also one of the most pervasive. Its stars are some of the most recognised icons of our time, household names whose bodies are frequently emblazoned across 40ft-high billboards, yet apart from the occasional flurry of publicity about anorexia or drug-taking, outsiders know surprisingly little about the multimillion-pound business which profits from some of world's most beautiful women.
Models rarely give interviews, and if they do they're as studiedly anodyne and vague as Premiership footballers quizzed outside the changing room after a match.
Sena Cech is one of a handful of models who has decided to talk publicly about the seedy, unglamorous and, on occasion, abusive side to her profession for a new documentary, Picture Me. The woman behind the film is Sara Ziff, a catwalk model turned documentary maker.
Ziff makes an unusual whistleblower. She's made hundreds of thousands of dollars from the modelling business. Her motivation for speaking out has nothing to do with revenge or failure (when I ask her what it's like to be rejected for a job because of the way you look, it's clear this has not happened to her very often). She's been the face of brands like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Stella McCartney, Dolce & Gabbana and Gap. Her long limbs and angular cheekbones, almond-shaped blue eyes and blonde hair have adorned hoardings in Times Square and beyond. She's strutted down the catwalk, eyes blank, unsmiling, for all the top designers from Marc Jacobs to Louis Vuitton, Gucci to Chanel.
Picture Me began as a quirky homespun video diary. Ziff's former boyfriend and co-director Ole Schell would often accompany her on jobs, and because he was a film-school graduate it seemed natural to take along the camera equipment in order to make sense of the surreal, insular world in which they found themselves. The earlier parts of the film reflect the lighter side of the industry such as the camaraderie among the models and the buzz of a catwalk show. Schell would also document their private moments: arguments about money because Ziff was earning Monopoly amounts and he could not compete; Ziff in the bath after a long day at a shoot.
The process might simply have highlighted an industry as fake and frothy as a bowl of Angel Delight, but what emerged over the course of five years of filming and hundreds of hours of footage was something darker, more subversive. They started giving the camera to fellow models, putting them on the other side of the lens and giving them a chance to speak. Gradually the couple became less like innocent home-movie makers and more like undercover reporters.
They sit in Ziff's minimalist apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and recall the years of filming. They broke up during the editing process but they still seem to be good friends. Ziff is tall, skinny, though she says she weighs more than she ever has done before. There's something instantly arresting about the way she looks, even though she's unmade-up and dressed down, in black leggings, white shirt.
"I was at work, being paid to do a job, be social, effortlessly cheery," Ziff recalls. "Meanwhile I was sneaking in Ole so that he could film without other people realising it." It didn't always go to plan. Schell describes being routinely thrown out of shows by notoriously publicity-shy design houses. At a private Gucci show at the Los Angeles home of the restaurateur Mr Chow, he came to the attention of the armed guards and was escorted to a holding cell in the house, his camera confiscated.
Shooting on a shoestring budget, editing in Schell's apartment, they end up with one of the best films about the world of modelling and an honest portrayal of an industry built on artifice. The final film, which premiered in New York and is already picking up awards on the film festival circuit, is at times a rare and unsettling look at what must be one of the few unregulated industries in the western world.
A 16-year-old model is on a photo shoot in Paris. She has very little experience of modelling and is unaccompanied by her agency or parents. She leaves the studio to go to the bathroom and meets the photographer - "a very, very famous photographer, probably one of the world's top names", according to Ziff - in the hallway. He starts fiddling with her clothes. "But you're used to this," says Ziff. "People touch you all the time. Your collar, or your breasts. It's not strange to be handled like that." Then suddenly he puts his hands between her legs and sexually assaults her. "She has no experience of boys, she hasn't even been kissed," says Ziff. "She was so shocked she just stood there and didn't say anything. He just looked at her and walked away and they did the rest of the shoot. And she never told anyone."
This interview didn't make the final version of Picture Me. The model had agreed to be included but the day before the premiere in New York she changed her mind and became frightened about the repercussions. She begged Ziff and Schell not to use the material. Ziff was disappointed but she didn't feel comfortable betraying a friend in an industry where women, she believes, are betrayed all the time. "There is a lot of shame in telling a story like that, but it is really widespread," says Ziff. "It doesn't happen in front of anyone. It happens in the dark recesses. Pretty much every girl I have talked to has a story like it, but no one talks about it. It's all under the radar because people are embarrassed and because the people in the industry who are doing these things are much more powerful, and the model is totally disposable. She could be gone in two years."
Ziff is not naive. She has benefited in all kinds of ways from the business in which she's worked for 13 years. She has earned the kind of money other twentysomethings can only dream of and travelled all around the world. She also knows that fashion plays with ideas around fantasy and sex. It's an industry that is as much about undressing as dressing up, as much about what's underneath as what's on top. The model's job is to look into the camera lens and make a woolly, oversize cardigan look sexy. It was ever thus.
Go back to the black-and-white images of models in the 50s - all New Look nipped-in waistlines and prim below-the-knee hemlines - and there's still a sexual undercurrent.
The industry has always had a predatory side. Anyone approached in the street by a middle-aged man and asked if they'd like to be a model would think twice about giving him their details (which is the reason model scouts are generally women). There is something inherently intimate about the whole business of fashion photography - the all-seeing lens, the exposed subject, the powerful photographer. What's shocking, listening to Ziff, is how prevalent, and how far up the fashion food chain, sexual exploitation goes. "Vulnerable girls are being put into a potentially predatory environment," says Ziff. "What's in the agency's interest is not always best for the girl, and if she's in a compromising situation, she doesn't necessarily have anyone to turn to."
A union, she believes, could provide some protection. She is part of a small coterie of models who are beginning to speak out about the industry and break the mafia-like silence. A few have started blogs on which they talk frankly about their lives beyond the next fitting. Eighteen months ago, two models based in Britain, Victoria Keon-Cohen and Dunja Knezevic, sought advice from Equity and set up their own union. It campaigns for better working conditions, holiday and sickness pay, protection in case of injury.
What alarms Ziff is that there's an expectation that models are comfortable using their sexuality. Often they can feel under pressure to conform, not least because they're being paid a great deal of money. On occasion, Ziff says, she has earned as much as $150,000 a day. "I've done shoots naked, totally naked. They sell it to you as: 'Here's this great artist and he wants to take your portrait.' I had to switch off the voice in my head that said: 'Do you really want to do this?' When you're being paid a lot of money and you want to appear cool you really don't want to show any resistance to going with it.
"But at the end of the day I used to wonder: what's the difference between doing a shoot in your underwear for Calvin Klein and being a stripper? Obviously you are compromising yourself. How far am I willing to go? How much am I willing to show for a big fat cheque?"
The industry has become increasingly sexualised, and the lines between what is acceptable and what isn't have become more blurred. Naked models inside the pages of a magazine or on a billboard are ubiquitous. Add to this the fact that in their bid to find models that have the "ideal" model shape - flat chests, boyish hips - some agencies are hiring younger and younger girls. Ziff recalls one model sitting backstage at the shows playing with a colouring book. "It is an inherently unbalanced and hierarchical relationship when you pair a 15-year-old girl with a 45-year-old man who is trying to create a sexualised image. You are asking for trouble."
The sexual side of the industry can go beyond the shoots, says Ziff. "When you are working at a higher level there is no separation between life and work. You are expected to go to certain parties and schmooze. There is a pressure to have a drink with someone with an ulterior motive and not offend them because they may book you for a $100,000 campaign. They have the power."
In the past, she has found herself in compromising situations that she wishes she'd dealt with differently. She tells the story of a 16-year-old model who complained when a 45-year-old photographer made a pass at her. "Her agency said she should have slept with him."
"Imagine being an eastern European model from Latvia," says Ole, "who can barely speak English and is supporting a family back home. Imagine how compromised they are."
