I’ve been back enough times to know how models work. They are pushed and dragged from here to there with no say in what goes on their skin or hair, never mind the actual clothes on their backs. I’ve sat in Paris cafes and watched skinny and beautiful girls line up outside tiny offices in hopes of being featured in Paris fashion week and I’ve done nail polish on the runway – so much to say about this one, including it turns out that the nail delivery assistant takes all their money while working for nothing – even lunch. He said he had to do it for ‘information’, and charged the full price. This was a big problem when I was working as a journalist with the kind of ethics to write about what happened to me. I also stepped on someone trying to open the window – they didn’t care that I was in the way (between the legs of a Ukrainian man trying to keep his fingers polished while others worked on his face. and hair) – he needed a hoy up and I was there.
Interestingly, the time I saw Celine’s line was with Ruth Crilly, a friend and author of How Not To Be A Supermodel. We were on the Dior press tour and gosh, there’s a lot to say about him, including a delegation from Russia whose PR was writing a sex blog. But this post is about the book of Ruth and here it is, in no particular order:
- That time Sophie Dahl walked the Patrick Cox campaign mostly naked and the first thing her mother knew was when she opened the newspaper to see her naked daughter looking at the pages.
- That time in Tokyo he was told that his teeth were very happy and he looked like a witch in the forest.
- At that time his eyebrows were completely out…
And many more. There’s an amazing twist to Ruth’s writing that makes How Not To Be A Supermodel so addicting so I’m warning you now, start in the morning and prepare so you won’t want to rest until nightfall – if at all.
You have to be stupid to be a model and you have to ‘do’ the big cities – London, Paris, Milan, Tokyo and New York and people will treat you better than they do with the clothes you will wear, if ‘I’m lucky. Finding a way around a strange town, especially without knowing the language, is really difficult as a conversation with freedom, jaded and dispassionate. This is something I love about this book – there was a lot of growth as I read it, especially from sharing a bed in a sad ‘model house’ to being stuck in a house of her own. This self-confidence and Ruth’s realization that she had her limits and finally being able to name them just shows so well that the models are as compassionate as all of us, often, very beautiful.
I have known Ruth for at least 14 years – maybe more – and she is always on point. We’ve had some fun times together so I can say that How Not to Be a Supermodel is exactly that – always searching, always learning, funny, fair and always smart. It seems like a natural transition for Ruth from blogging to influence (and yes, I hate that word, it’s too blanket and too stupid) to be a writer – if you have fun and remember the time when supermodels ruled the world, this is 100% for you. The book is £15.45 HERE.