how to think, how to shape, how to recognize conjunctions of the resistances to the universality of the Market (which very often and perhaps successfully the Market itself recuperates: as is pending in the case of ecology) and the alternatives to the Market as a form of organizing communications, exchanges or interactions
The modeling industry is a “greedy institution” that seeks “exclusive and undivided loyalty” of its workers (Coser 1974, 4). According to Soley-Beltran (2006, 34) the demand for flexibility and full engagement forces models to function as “chameleons”, able to change into whatever the fashion of the moment happens to be. As fashion is about constantly changing styles, models’ guidelines are in constant flux (Entwistle 2002; Mears 2011). A strong claim is made on models to be “fresh”, flexible and able to adapt to changing trends, symbols and technologies in order to get new jobs and survive in the industry (Neff et al 2005, 326-327). At the same time, this malleability requires models to maintain their bodies as a neutral basis upon which other professionals from the industry can project their envisaged image. At castings especially, models experience pressure to present themselves as a “clean state”, able to turn into anything a client envisions.
However, apart from merely constructing and maintaining a specifically requested aesthetic surface, aesthetic labour also involves the imperative to project and produce a particular self, in the form of personality. As such, it involves the entire body and self, as keeping up appearances requires both serious emotional effort and physical discipline. Furthermore, it is not carried out solely on the work floor: the enduring nature of this particular form of aesthetic labor requires models to always be “on” and to adapt their whole lifestyle to professional aesthetic imperatives (Entwistle and Wissinger 2006, 788).
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. In her study of the modeling market of Japan, Mears observes: “there is something distinctly alienating in the labour of being aesthetic when aesthetic labour is being entirely organized for the worker” (2013, 139). In situations such as castings or in the back stages of fashion shows, models are often treated as passive objects on display (Mears 2013). This makes modeling different from those other corporeal labor professions: it is a profession in which this entanglement is not only intense, but also potentially experienced as problematic. As such, fashion modeling sheds light on the contradictions inherent in aesthetic labor, and the clash between the requirements of work and self in present-day societies. Modeling therefore provides a strategic case to explore aesthetic labour and its relation to selfhood, asking specifically: how do workers experience and justify being employed in a greedy industry? How do they account for the aesthetic and bodily practices required for their work? What moral repertoires do they refer to in accounting for their work? Based on ethnographic and interviewdata collected in the modeling industries of Amsterdam, Paris and Warsaw, this article investigates how models account for the professional “colonization” of their body/selves by the modeling industry, and which modes of justification they appeal to while doing so.
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