The Business of Magazines

The Daily Mail reports on life after the axe:

Dumped! Ex-magazine editor Louise Chunn didn't just lose her job - she lost her pride and self-esteem too

02nd June 2009

As I peered at my face in the mirror I knew that, objectively, it didn't look any different to the way it had for the past few years. But in my eyes, I was no longer the same person. My face, my body, my self had all changed indelibly on the day, last winter, when I lost my job.

One minute I had 40-odd souls under my sway and was partly responsible for many millions of pounds profit, the next I was walking up Oxford Street like a zombie, my office life waiting to be packed into boxes by my PA and taxied to my home. Of course, I am only one among tens of thousands suffering similar fates as the economic downturn hits this country, but still, I have to tell you, it felt really bad.

I had spent more than 25 years in magazine and newspaper journalism in London, but I liked to think I had always kept the Bigger Picture in mind. Interesting work was always more important to me than money or title; status-mongering colleagues who insisted on special treatment struck me as faintly ludicrous. I was the down-to-earth one of whom one boss had written 'she is not troubled by ego'. I had won awards and was head-hunted from one job to the next - but I genuinely believed that I had also kept it all in perspective.

Hah! The past few months have taught me that you don't really know how you value yourself until the carpet is pulled from under your feet and you can imagine the whole world talking about your pratfall. I had lost a job before - it happens in the senior echelons of the media - but I was completely unprepared for this one.

Being at home with my husband, children, even Snowy the incredible moulting cat, was a definite improvement on what had become a grinding way to earn a living. But still, I found daily life without the structure of work simply bizarre. I cleared out the basement in the first week, baked batches of cookies in the second, then couldn't think what to do with the third.

People who I didn't know terribly well but had at some point in their careers suffered a similar fate all got in touch, took me for a drink or a slap-up lunch. Most importantly, they told me that I mustn't allow myself to feel a failure. I nodded sagely, but I couldn't even breathe properly, let alone come out with a beaming smile. I wondered if, at the age of 52, I would ever learn to cope with the humiliation.

But never mind how I felt - as the days and weeks passed, I began to realise that losing my job was having a dramatic impact on how I looked, too. Strangely, at first it seemed to have a rather good effect, in the way that the adrenaline rush of a tumultuous love affair can leave a woman looking fabulous when actually she resides in hell. It didn't matter whether I was makeup-less and dress-down-every-day at the school gates or swanked up for a meeting in the West End, everybody went on about my 'radiance'.

That was not a word that had been used about me in a while. The stress of the previous months' mounting tension had, on particularly bad days, manifested itself in bags under my eyes, hunched shoulders, and a general lack of fizz, so there must have been an improvement.

I lapped up my friends' compliments and resolved to spend more time - now that I had it - on my appearance. I rushed to book facials and massages to help me look 'better' (ie younger). They made no discernible difference. I've had a personal trainer twice a week for some years - we run around the local park together and do various other exercises - but had always pined to find the 'me time' to really get into yoga.

But, even so, I couldn't just switch gears from being an institutionalised corporate beast to a free agent, with all the flexibility that entailed. I think I was so overwhelmed by the fear of an uncertain future that I couldn't relax. Given so much more spare time, I put it to often ludicrous use, fussing over my appearance. I even started to doubt the wisdom of my signature hairstyle - short and silver-blonde, swept over the forehead in a vain attempt at Agyness Deyn funkiness.

My long-time hairdresser Richard supported my decision to ditch the obvious 'anti-ageing' formula of caramel and blond chunks. Instead we let my grey (which had been encroaching since my early 20s) come through with just a little peroxide. But while it was all very well to imagine I was channelling Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, that kind of hauteur only worked so long as I had a grand job, too.

When you leave the house not to run a magazine but drop an eight-year-old at school then come back home and unload the dishwasher, looking soignee isn't required or desired. Was the new, kicked-in-the-teeth me more like 'geography teacher grey' than 'glamorous grey'? I determined to discuss a solution with Richard, when I turned up for my next appointment, a couple of weeks after the axe had fallen. We've known each other for 20 years and can easily spend an hour talking and laughing about life. But, in my free-fall, I couldn't even open my mouth. He smiled gently, and said: 'So are you going to tell me?' He'd heard - everyone had heard! - but he never thought that job was good enough for me anyway. As for my 'youthifying' my hair colour, he batted away my neurotic twitterings. 'It suits you like this, doesn't matter what job you do, or don't.'

I felt quite a lot better after that little pep talk. And then there was the issue of clothes. Because I have worked in and around the fashion end of the media for 25 years, I have over time built up a rather nice wardrobe. I shouldn't brag, but I do I have four Prada dresses, two Alexander McQueen jackets, and a beautiful white leather Burberry trench.

Especially in the job before last, when I headed up a purely fashion magazine, it was considered essential that I walk the fashion walk, representing the title and my team. These weren't just clothes, they were the mandatory uniform of a person whose job it was to get other people to believe in their product. For a fashion magazine editor to look less than fashionable would have been like a dentist having rotten teeth. But when you do not have a job, you do not need such things. In fact, they look ridiculous. You may have a wardrobe of beautiful, high-end, designer stuff, but you have nothing that works for daily life.

I might have wanted to wear my chic cream satin Prada coat - but I would have felt a phoney if I had. Who did I think I was? I started to wear a much smaller number of clothes and the only new piece of clothing was a denim skirt from Jigsaw. It's perfectly nice, but also quite dull and I knew it wouldn't do much for my ego.

Two things did help in that area - and they went very well with my denim skirt, actually. The first were a pair of flat black patent Prada boots that I had bought the previous winter. Everywhere I went, they went - and they really worked a treat. From the woman in Sainsbury's who leaned across the screaming tots in the double buggy to say 'Killer boots, lady!, to the men at a publishing party, my boots won me plaudits. Internally, they built me up, made me feel like the original me, without marking me out as too try-hard.

Interestingly, high heels usually had the opposite effect: I felt I couldn't carry them off, didn't have the walk or the presence to justify them under the current circumstances. Hopefully that will pass, as the Rupert Sanderson red patents with the peep-toe and little buttoned strap are just too lovely to be consigned to the back of the wardrobe. But I have started to notice how often women in heels look more worried about getting to their destination without mishap than actually feeling fabulous, so perhaps I'll get along without so many heels anyway.

My other saviour was a bright blue Dries Van Noten coat I had splashed out on in Selfridges in September. A large chunk of me wanted to hide away until I could burst forth into the world with a new identity, but there was still enough of the fighter left in me to want to court some attention. This coat said 'The bastards have not ground me down' and I believed it. As the weeks then months passed, I grew to rather enjoy the sartorial freedom. I can finally get some variety into what I wear and now that I'm used to it, it's a relief, frankly. All that tailoring can start to look a little unwomanly and sexless if you don't watch out.

I also adjusted to my more home-based life. There is no doubt that every last member of my family has benefited from the fact that I do not currently have a full-on, full-time job. Leaving early, arriving home late and tired, trying to catch up with chores, phone calls and emails between a never-ending round of often repetitive and tedious meetings, I wasn't around at all in daylight hours. It's obvious that an eight-year-old would love to see more of Mum (though, good little feminist that she is, she says she does not want me to be a stay-at-home mother for ever); but my older two, who no longer live at home, can always reach me now, and I'm able to help with lifts or advice or a proper meal when they need it, which they still do.

I refuse to feel guilty about the past, but I do have warm and fuzzy feelings about my family (including my parents and brothers in New Zealand, with whom I'm in much more frequent contact) that I cannot consciously remember previously. As my journalist husband works from home, having me there, too, was not initially an easy change for him. He was used to blissful peace and solitude once our daughter and I had left for the day. Now he had a wife who was not only in his sphere - sitting in the room next door - but discombobulated by the implosion of the careerist ideal. I imagine I was something of a nightmare in the bleak, early days, but he never showed it and he always supported me.

I am now carving out a new career as an editorial consultant/ freelance journalist. Who knows how long it will be before I return to the corporate coalface - maybe never, counsel my freelance friends. But I do think my relationships with family and friends should be a little better because I have had more time and energy for them. And, hand on heart, I have got more pleasure from that than any balance sheet.

Probably the worst aspect of being at home is the dreaded middle-aged spread. An obvious effect of not having a job with a strict schedule is that I am perilously close to my kitchen and it is all too easy to self-medicate with comfort cuisine. I have since lost the weight I initially put on, but I don't plan to cut back on lunch with friends. Food is social glue and now that I have more time, I genuinely love seeing people, and especially cooking for them.

So how have I fared in the post-job world? I would say pretty well under the circumstances. Initially I felt very angry and hurt, but not quite devastated. My world was unsteady, but I soon realised that there were; a) a lot of people out there in the same situation, and b) worse things can happen - this was only a job.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/a...ust-lose-job--lost-pride-self-esteem-too.html
 
Some news from Media Guardian:

Kate Moss threatens legal action against Now magazine

Wednesday 3 June 2009

Lawyers acting for Kate Moss have contacted magazine publisher IPC Media and threatened to sue it over what they say are false reports that she is pregnant.

Moss is threatening legal action over a piece in Now magazine about the size of the model's stomach. The story speculated about whether or not she was pregnant. The model has consistently denied speculation in numerous publications this year that she might be pregnant.

In March, the News of the World published an apology to Moss after running a story falsely claiming that she is expecting her second child.

A spokesperson for IPC said: "We can confirm that we have been contacted by Kate Moss's legal representatives, and will not be commenting further until the matter is resolved."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/03/kate-moss-now-ipc
 
Same source:

Magazines and newspapers face 'lethal threat' from advertising downturn

Wednesday 3 June 2009

Dozens of magazines and newspapers that are household names are under "lethal threat" and could disappear by the end of the year as advertising revenue continues to fall away during the summer, a new report warns.

In the report, WPP-owned media-buying operation Group M has significantly revised down its previous ad revenue forecasts for the newspaper and magazine sectors this year and is expecting a major shakeout before the end of the year as smaller players are cut from a share of dwindling ad budgets.

This bleak forecast for the UK newspaper and magazine industry scotches recent tentative hopes that the ad recession might bottom out after a dire first half of 2009.
Group M has forecast that the newspaper industry will see ad revenue fall by 26% year-on-year across 2009 – a significant downward revision from its forecast in March of a 20% decline and, back in December, of a 15% slide.

National newspapers are expected to be down 18.6% year-on-year for 2009 and the regional newspaper industry a massive 32%. Group M predicts that the consumer magazine ad market will be down 20% year-on-year for 2009, a revision down from 16% in March and 9% in December.

Group M also has concerns about some players in the TV market, such as Channel Five, which suffered ad revenue decline of close to 30% year-on-year in the first quarter.
But overall the media buyer has maintained its forecast for the total UK TV market steady from its March prediction of a 14% decline across 2009.

"No previous ad recession has put household media names at risk like this one has, from local newspapers to high-street magazines to national TV channels," said the Group M futures director, Adam Smith. "Advertiser demand is set to remain weak this summer so it is possible mergers, restructures and closures will accelerate as we move into the fourth quarter," he added.

In the national newspaper market, Group M argues that the stronger groups, such as the Sun and Times publisher News International, will continue to pressurise smaller players.
"Weaker titles have greater need of cash today than yield tomorrow, so these are the ones making the greatest concessions," said the report. "Weaker titles are less able to deal with other adversity like paper prices (up about a quarter since sterling's slide), amortising plant investment, and to finance digital diversity. The strong, therefore, get stronger. In national newspapers, this means News International and Associated [Newspapers]. Both have circled their wagons by consolidating their sales forces to negotiate harder."

In the consumer magazine market, the report has identified a range of secondary and tertiary media brands that will struggle, leading to "decision time on viability for the weakest" in the final three months of 2009.

Group M forecasts that magazine sub-sectors under threat include paid-for monthlies with expensive editorial content such as luxury photo shoots and circulation of less than 100,000 sales; these, it says, are at "potentially fatal risk". "Secondary titles may not have enough cash or the time for prevention [and] tertiary titles certainly do not," said the report. "Summer will be a test. The fourth quarter will be decision time on viability for the weakest."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jun/03/group-m-magazines-newspapers-lethal-threat
 
When does the next issue of LOVE come out? I'm curious about it. It's not late, it is?

I would ask in the publication dates thread, but it's closed to comments.
 
Because We have seen S/S issue in the last month of the Winter IMO we'll see next in August.
 
Love Issue No. 2 On-Sale Date AUTUMN/WINTER 2009 24/08/2009
from publisher
 
MULTIMEDIA: Belgian designer Kris Van Assche, who designs Dior Homme plus signature collections for women and men, has donned another hat. On Tuesday night in Paris, he unveiled a new large-format flyer-cum-magazine called Londerzeel. Part literary, part visual (and highlighting works by artist Andrea Mastrovito, for instance), Van Assche served as its art director. Barbara Polla was editor in chief and Martin Venet oversaw graphic design. Londerzeel had an initial print run of 1,000 and is expected to come out three times yearly, with distribution where Van Assche’s clothes are sold.

The current copy contains four of five Mastrovito drawings Van Assche hopes will run as advertising for his signature line in five magazines this September. “I quite like the freedom of an artist just expressing his vision,” said Van Assche. Meanwhile, the designer is also the subject of “Kris Van Assche, Mor O Muerte,” a book written in French by Polla and illustrated by Mastrovito. “It’s really like the story of someone I admire deeply and someone I love,” said Polla, adding the book doesn’t quite fit into any established literary genre. It’s published by L’Age d’Homme, and available in France and Switzerland for about $25.

source WWD
 
From Popbitch:

Rumours are circulating that The Face magazine is to
be resurrected.

Never before have I needed more information that just one sentence :P
 
^there is an article about that on one of the previous pages. :flower:
 
what's the culmative damage as it stands then?
i-D - six issues a year (I've head rumoured to be the last :s)
Muse- Bi Annual
Lula- Folded
Arena- Folded
Haven't seen noi.se in a while..expect that's gone under?

Struggling to think of anything else, help me out!
 
Did LULO fold? That's terrible news!
 
That's what I've been told, and if it is true is really is shame :(

Amelia's Magazine is another one to add to the list.
 
Just in case anyone has missed hearing about Sara Ziff's "Picture Me", The Observer has run an article about it today:

'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."
 
The article continued... (same source:(

Sara Ziff was 14 when she first began modelling. Her third casting was in the East Village in New York. "We had to go in one by one. The photographer said he wanted to see me without my shirt on. Then he told me that it was still hard to imagine me for the story so could I take my trousers off. I was standing there in a pair of Mickey Mouse knickers and a sports bra. I didn't even have breasts yet. 'We might need to see you without your bra,' he told me. It was like he was a shark circling me, walking around and around, looking me up and down without saying anything. I did what he told me to. I was just eager to be liked and get the job. I didn't know any better." Teenage girls, she says, are being persuaded to pose in a sexual way when they don't even know what it means yet. She recalls being a "virginal teenager" and posing innocently when she didn't feel remotely sexy. "The images came out and they were practically p*rn*gr*ph*c. What the photographer saw was not what I felt. It had nothing to do with that 14-year-old and what she was feeling and everything to do with what the person behind the camera projected onto her."

For all her success as a model - she was out-earning her father, a university neurobiologist, by the time she was 20 - Ziff was probably always an outsider in the industry. Put it this way, she's the first model I've met who quotes Joan Didion. Her parents are academics who never approved of her career and it's possible she thought too much about the wider significance of what she was doing to really enjoy it herself (she was taking courses in women's studies while at the same time modelling couture). For once, being beautiful and brainy doesn't seem such an enviable combination.

Modelling wasn't a profession she sought for herself. She was scouted in New York near Union Square by a female photographer when she was walking home from school. "It had happened to me before but I had never followed up on it. This seemed different. The photographer was with her husband, pushing a baby in a stroller, and somehow this made her seem potentially less sleazy." Within a week she was being offered a magazine shoot in Jamaica and a show for Calvin Klein. At school she juggled modelling with lessons. "I'd earn a few thousand dollars in an afternoon. I'd never earned more than a dollar from the tooth fairy, so as you can imagine this was all pretty exciting."

When she decided to become a professional model instead of going to college her parents were dismayed. ("For my parents it was not if I'd go to college, it was which one of five colleges I would go to.") Modelling was, Ziff admits, a way to rebel against her academic background. At the age of 18 she left home; two years later she'd earned enough to buy her own loft apartment.

The irony is that the women in Picture Me may be earning large amounts of money - Schell laughingly recalls piles of cash like you see in movie scenes - but they seem to have little power over their lives. "You become this living doll," says Ziff. Every decision is made by someone else. They remain somehow like the girls they were when they first entered the profession, encouraged not to think about their futures, anxious to remain the same body shape they were when they were teenagers. There's a suggestion that some models lose weight because it's the only aspect of their lives that they have any control over.

Picture Me shows Ziff turn from a breezy, confident 18-year-old intoxicated by the amount of money she is making into someone exhausted, emotionally and physically, before she hits her mid-20s. "By the end," she says, "I was a shell." Twenty-hour days were routine. In the film we watch her begging to be allowed a day off and being told that she's not allowed. "Sometimes people forget you're human," she says. We see her haggard and tearful, her skin spotty, her hair dragged back and greasy. By the end of the show season she weighs less than 100lb, not because she's been starving herself but because there's literally no time to eat.

Teenage girls will have seen Ziff in glossy magazines and wished they could look like her, but Ziff is filmed leafing through the same images in her local newsagent and saying how dreadful she thinks she looks. It seems the industry which makes the rest of us feel insecure and imperfect leaves its own stars feeling the same way.

She's 27 years old now, a full-time student at Cornell University who models when she can fit it in around her studies. She's with an agency she likes. Her portfolio may have paid her student fees but the cool loft apartment has been swapped for a one-bedroom flat, the catwalks for the college library. She describes her life now as nerdy and monkish. "Contrary to my wide-eyed, rather opportunistic outlook at 18, perhaps I learned that there are no short cuts in life," she tells me in an email after the interview. "Modelling brought some money and attention - but not the kind of attention you'd want."

myspace.com/picturemefilm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/07/sara-ziff-teen-modelling-fashion
 
when it comes down to model protection doesn't it depend on which agency you are with? or are all agencies filled with heartless people who turn a blind eye to statutory r*pe and child abuse? and are all the photographers in fashion sleezy men? and if they were why would editors continue to work with them? don't other models warn one another about people, who not to work with?
 
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