It must look easy to be a fashion model. All they have to do is stand there and look pretty and smile, and everyone adores them for it, and they get adorned with all the hottest fashions. Not to mention they get paid millions of dollars in endorsement deals and they get to travel all over the world for both work and leisure. The glamorous aspects of the job are undoubtedly thrilling, however being a fashion model is not as easy or care-free of a lifestyle as it seems.
First of all, before any model becomes well-known, they must be signed by a modeling agency. Modeling agencies are larger companies that represent fashion models to work in the industry. They often handle the business side of fashion design, like contracts, billing and booking jobs. An agency can bring a model to fame with their vast connections in the industry. One of the hardest parts is getting signed by the agency in the first place. In order to even hope to qualify, women models must be between 5’6″ and 6’0″ with a body weight “proportionate to their height”. In other words, perspective models must be extremely thin. Since hundreds and thousands of girls audition for modeling jobs, a successful model must have something-some special quality that makes her stand out from the hoards of wannabe models.
Once a signed, working model, you must constantly search for ways to get yourself out there. One of the biggest events in both the modeling and fashion design world is fashion week. A fashion week is a week-long series of runway shows that feature several different designers’ new collections. New York City’s Mercedes Benz fashion week is one of the most famous fashion weeks, along with Paris and Milan, the fashion capitals of the world. Exposure on a runway during fashion week can lead to high-class, lucrative contracts for models. Each fashion week often shows collections of over one hundred designers, and each designer showcases a spring and a fall collection, but compared to how many models vie for spots on these runways, the competition is still fierce!