One Model's Expectations

I'm a professional model. I won't say I'm the best model in SL, because there is always someone better. No matter who you are, someone is always going to better than you are in some way, and I'm all right with that. I embrace my flaws, and part of being a professional model is working toward correcting those. I'd be a fool if I thought I'd ever be able to please everyone, but I do what I do, and I do it well. I studied, I worked, I took my lumps when casting after casting saw me turned down for one reason or another, whether valid or not, and through it all I came out a pretty darned good model.

In recent weeks, I've come across what seems to be a growing trend that troubles me on several levels. That trend is in agencies that fail to acknowledge that maybe... just maybe... the models they hire actually know what they're doing. I see attitudes of show coordinators that more or less say to the models "we don't trust you." More often than not, those same coordinators seem to have a great deal of difficulty getting their own act together, as walk orders, finales, scripts, schedules, and even the walks themselves get changed time after time until no one knows what's going on until the very last minute. I've even seen coordinators "lose" the outfits they're supposed to be handing out because they just accepted them into inventory and didn't bother naming them something that might actually be logical, or put them into a file for that specific show.

Nothing annoys a professional model - and by professional I mean one who knows what they're doing and is always prepared, pays attention, knows how to style, how to pose, and needs very little instruction or assistance, if any. As I was saying... nothing annoys a professional model more than being talked down to and treated as if they'd just left the academy and had never walked a runway in their life. That said, I decided I'd post here a few of my expectations of any agency that wants to attract high quality models.

1. If you have a stable full of models, put them in your shows! I can't even begin to count the number of times I've heard from other models how this agency or that held an open casting, they were in the agency, and someone outside was hired over them. If you hired a model into your agency, you did so for a reason. USE them! If you're not going to put them in your shows, why are they in your agency? I'm a firm believer that all agency castings should be in-house, unless the designer specifically requests an open casting. If for some reason you can't get enough models to fill the show roster from the in-house casting, then and only then should an open casting be held. Hold open castings to hire models for your agency, absolutely, but once they're in there, it's not unreasonable for them to expect you to put them in your shows.

2. I expect show coordinators and runway coaches to know what they want and be able to accurately and concisely convey that to their models. We need to know how many stops, where those stops are, how many poses per stop and how long to hold those poses. That's it. We don't need a lot of other filler. If Model A is at pose stop 2 and Model B is supposed to enter when Model A goes to pose stop 3, tell us so. If you're going to cue it, cue it. If it's automatic, tell us it's an automatic enter when Model A goes to stop 3. And you have the right to expect us to understand and do it without a lot of confusion. Part of being a professional is paying attention to instructions.

3. If something is changing in the walk, the show order, or anything else that's going to affect the models, send us a notecard telling us what the change is! So many times I've gone to a dress rehearsal and been told, "Oh, by the way, we changed this two days ago, they practiced it at 1:00 on Wednesday," only now it's Friday and I wasn't there on Wednesday. Communication is essential to any good show, and if something changes that's going to impact your models, TELL them! ALL of them! Not just the people who happened to be able to make that rehearsal time.

4. There is no reason for any professional model to ever need more than two rehearsals for a show. No walk is so difficult that a skilled, trained model can't get it down in two rehearsals. Sure, if you've got 20 models involved in a show, or if the walk is exceptionally complicated maybe a third rehearsal may be needed for timing, but the vast majority of shows and walks are easy and don't require five rehearsals. A model's time is valuable, and when you consider each rehearsal averages 1.5 hours, five rehearsals is a lot of time. I certainly don't need that many, and I don't know any other professional model who does.

5. And finally, professional models have the right to be treated as professionals. This means the agency that hires us trusts us to know what we're doing, to know how to walk, how to pose, how to style. Don't talk down to us, giving us Modeling 101 instruction on how not to use AOs, armpit poses, hands in clothes, etc. We KNOW this already. We've been doing what we do a while, we have the experience and the knowledge, and we don't need our hands held. This is a HUGE pet peeve of mine. If you hired me, you did it because I'm good at what I do. Let me do it. I don't mind if at a dress rehearsal you ask me to change hair, or whatever. That's fine. But I don't need one-on-one instruction on how to pose. Don't expect me to "schedule time" for this sort of instruction. I don't need it, I don't know any other professional models who need it, and I won't do it. Call it diva if you want. I see it more as I won't let you insult me by treating me as if I'd never done a show before.

Guess that's enough for now. I needed to vent a little, apparently. :)