Discussion for article #233374
Good article. I didn’t know how she was going to tie women working in Asian sweatshops with youngsters walking down the world’s runways, but she did. The same people with a race to the bottom mentality control both the factories and the fashion displays. Those people don’t change their attitudes when they move from the factory to the runway. The result is an ugly exploitive industry.
I didn’t know the average model makes less than $20,000 per year. I thought they were mostly making in excess of $100,000. Well done. The author is to be commended.
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Add professional football cheerleaders to the list. Ridiculously underpaid in a multi-billion-dollar industry, working ungodly hours in physically demanding and demeaning circumstances, and unable to gain an ounce under threat of being fired.
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A Bond villain would be proud of the vicious circle: underpaid, exploited young women projecting a sheen of happiness and elegance that gets thousands upon thousands of even younger girls to abuse themselves in the hope of getting a job as a model. (And parents spending on a “beauty” industry that makes for-profit colleges look like paragons of charitable work.)
I would have thought that there were at least wage/hour protections for the under-18 models, but nah…
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But that’s only a tiny fraction of the models who are employed. Catalogs, stock, calendars…
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Thanks for the fantastic article. This is yet another example of TPM’s publishing fine long form journalism.
One thing the article made clear is that organizing will be tough since models are in constant competition, so solidarity is limited. Also, who has the stones to organize when they’re under 20, or perhaps not even adults. Organizing is tough and not for children. So change will have to come from outside the industry.
One aside: the demographics of the population in the United States is changing and I have had the impression that the demographics of models are starting to change to reflect this. I grew up in the Christy Brinkley era of blond blue-eyed models. Many of the models I see in ads and other media now are less white. Many of the models have ethnicity that is harder to pin down, just as our society is mixed.
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Bookmarked to read later
I have often made the argument that an employer, who employs a worker full time (in the sense that to do the job, it has to be your only job), that employer is now responsible to make sure that you, and one dependent, can survive. That, I argue, is the minimum requirement. Survival, to me, means to survive in good health, safe communities, and good working conditions, etc. The fashion industry fails, even more than the restaurant industry, to meet this minimum standard, especially for female employees.
Very interesting article. It also never occurred to me that child labor laws and protections don’t apply to models. Yikes.
Excellent article.
I’ve seen the same kind of dynamics in the high-end interior design industry in New York.
For young people in a highly competitive and seemingly glamorous field, there are always sharks looking to exploit them in any number of ways.
The machine just grinds them up.