The melancholy of the flesh: A psychosocial account of couture modeling work
Elena X. Wang
This paper addresses the sexual politics of the Euro-American high fashion, or, couture industry. Since the 1980s, the changing conditions of the production of couture clothes have yielded the production of a kind of human commodity that, I argue, reflects and reinforces Western cultural pathologies as discussed by thinkers from Marx and Foucault to Irigaray and Bordo. Couture clothes, once hand-finished and made in-house from the highest quality fabrics, are increasingly machine-assembled in developing nations from inferior materials while sold at exponentially higher prices. Couture models are likewise sourced from the poorest regions of the world, rapidly phased out and radically underpaid, but assimilated into homogenous tableaus of wealth. The spectral, sullen couture model becomes a disposable good eviscerated of her human as well as sexually specific features. The question is why, on the one hand, she acquiesces to this injury, and, on the other, the injury that her body and mien articulate on the runway renders her a marketable female ideal type in contemporary culture. The claim is that the kinds of psychic attachment that the model forges to the couture industry evince a cultural attachment to injury enacted in the name of pleasure. Drawing on narratives of couture models’ working practices as well as contemporary feminist studies of female embodiment, the paper interrogates the relations between the social and the feminine somatic expressed in couture today.
1. Producing model commodities
The corps of bodies that stalk the runways add to the auratic value of couture. Faces painted, hair teased and limbs adorned, the models bring to life the concepts and narratives woven into the clothes and enhance their aspirational decadence. The models are the industry’s human emblems of wealth. As with the clothes however, the models’ real material value has declined with couture’s corporatization; unlike the clothes, they are supplementary labor-commodities whose market value constitutes part of the matrix of costs that corporations must cut in order to increase profits. The models thus appear to be elite specimens of women whose figures denote expensive and intensive regimens of self-care (diet, exercise, training in speech and manners), but are in fact the first expense to be saved in the couture industry. The corporatization of the industry increasingly transfers the cost of maintaining the appearance of quality onto the model herself. She is a radically disposable instrument, bought cheaply and, as a supplement to the clothes, effectively sold at a killing. She is the life-force of a brand image but, in enriching the industry, depletes herself.
Couture modeling emerged as an industry following the growing commercialization of high fashion in the 1960s and 1970s. Earlier in the century, the models more than the clothes embodied the distinctive qualities of each haute couture label. Six or more models worked exclusively for a label. They were European and often married women (Collins 2009). With the success of cheaper ready-to-wear and the consequent expansion of couture’s target audience to the Euro-American urban young, the age as well as tenure of the models declined (Breward in Welters and Lillethun eds 2011). More Eastern European and Eastern African girls entered the modeling industry. For the first time, individual models became international celebrities – that is, ‘supermodels’ who commanded $22,000 a day in the 1970s[1] (compare this to a typical wage of $300 a day for a model in the 1940s). But the majority was paid little, the turnover was rapid, and those who left the industry often left in debt to their modeling agencies (Porizkova 2007).
The corporatization of couture in the 1980s intensified and systematized this trend; the couture model became both a more specific and thus valuable instrument for the couture industry relative to the general class of models, and a more disposable commodity relative to other commodities in the couture industry. She formed a part of a transient, international, largely underage and unpaid labor force that enhanced the value of the clothes through individually taking on a vicious amalgamation of physical as well as financial and psychological risks. A supermodel earned up to $38,000 a day in 1990, but, again, the average couture model owed her agency money (for housing in multiple Euro-American cities where clients are concentrated, all transportation and lodging expenses incurred on castings and assignments, and numerous undisclosed agency fees[2]). Modeling agencies and couture clients thus profited from the model’s self-financed accretion of value that, from a systemic perspective, efficiently self-destroys once it is no longer useful. How then does this accretion and yet excision of value occur? Through what specific processes of production has the couture model emerged as the most disposable commodity in the couture industry? The production of the couture model occurs in three by and large disparate geographic regions, over the course of several discrete stages: she begins as a preteen girl who is sourced from a developing nation, vetted in the Asian-Pacific region, then assembled and standardized in the Euro-American fashion capitals for display.
In their native countries, couture models are scouted for possessing three features: extreme youth, height and thinness. Tall, skeletal physiques are thought to best offset the clothes. Youth is supposed to attract the couture industry’s increasingly young target audience, but equally, younger models are easier to work with and profit from. The scouting agency represents a model until she signs on with a modeling agency, through which clients commission assignments. The modeling agency is based abroad, and the average model – a 12- or 13-year-old girl from a poor Eastern European family – flies there under a contract whose terms are purposely vague (Cosslett and Baxter 2013). The contract stipulates her unique physical measurements and is rendered conditional on her maintaining those exact measurements. It nominally guarantees her work in the host country as well as a ‘minimum’ lump sum to be received at the end of her tenure.
Most models first arrive in the Asia-Pacific countries. There, her agency starts a portfolio and opens an undisclosed charge account for her; the process of accruing as well as depleting value begins. Her agency finds her housing, contacts potential clients and sends her to castings; every service rendered is costly; the model’s debt mounts from her first day abroad. It would seem that she can make money if she books assignments. But after trekking from casting to casting for weeks on end, she will realize that casting calls for inexperienced models rarely yield work, and more importantly, that work does not yield money; her agency is compensated and then supposedly subtracts the payment from her debt. Meanwhile, her agent instructs her to add a few years to her age in compliance with the country’s labor laws; to lose weight in order to attract clients; to always follow the photographer’s orders if she wants to keep her clients, whether they entail staring directly into 10,000-Watt camera bulbs until her pupils burn or posing nude, shaving her head or performing sexual favors[3].
Thus the preteen recruit becomes, if she is at once docile and aggressive enough, a teenage model: docile because she does what she is told, aggressive because she must compete with not only ever younger competitors that flood the market but also her own maturing body. The unique measurements with which she enters the Asian-Pacific modeling market resemble a satisfactory opening bid; she must follow a punishing regimen of self-improvement in order to succeed in and then exceed this stage of the game. Through restricting her diet, she drops sizes and gains employability. She secures more clients and builds a portfolio. While this is necessary groundwork for launching into the Euro-American arena – and possibly out of debt, couture clients demand a still finer range of height, weight and, crucially, age. Models can work in the Asian-Pacific market well past their teens, but the typical couture model is 16 years old, and the age continues to decline. The window of time for models to break into the Euro-American market increasingly narrows therefore, compelling aspiring couture models to take increasingly extreme measures to become ‘Paris thin’[4]. Common practices range from eating tissues to deflect hunger, to receiving nutrients through hospital drips. Those who can, simply fast. The average couture model is 5’10” and must fit into sample size garments, which are long and slight. Garments, hence bodies constructed according to these specific proportions are supposed to maximize the garments’ marketability; the model’s figure is minimized until it is an ideal supplement to the clothes.
The couture model emerges, but can she now maintain this standard? She is cast in a runway show in a Euro-American high fashion capital, but can she last for more than one season? Can she sign on, that is, with a major international modeling agency, which will distribute her portfolio to high-profile clients? This requires her to not only intensify but expand her regimen: on a daily basis, she continues to restrict her diet while also beginning to exercise; prior to and during major assignments such as runway shows, she returns to the extreme practices that had facilitated her advancement in the first place, now enhanced by knowledge of as well as access to techniques of an entirely different order – drugs. A cocktail of laxatives, diuretics and prescription medication that specifically delays puberty in adolescents (and destroys their liver), prepares her figure for the shows[5]. Recreational drugs are then readily available throughout the show season to make more bearable the long hours of fittings and waiting backstage[6]. The finished product is her pared, enervated, evacuated body. And the blankness of her mien reflects the hollow that has become her psyche. Finally, she steps out onto the illumined dais of the runway, an apparent embodiment of the wealth and training that corresponds to the apparent opulence of the clothes, but she lives out of a suitcase with 3 other models in a 4th-floor walk-up and owes her agency thousands of dollars; she possesses little to no understanding of the language or customs of her host country; she is a number in a line-up or look-book and scrutinized day in and day out like mute flesh; she struggles with eating disorders, substance dependencies, stress, anxiety and depression (Sauers 2010). With its changing crews and locales, each casting and show exacerbates the physical as well as emotional distance that she experiences ‘from preexisting support systems [of]…family and friends’ (ibid), each assignment de-personalizes and de-sensitizes her a bit further. The stark ‘contrast…between [the model’s] reality and the affluent arrogance [she is] paid to project’ (Tatiana 2009) grows more extreme as the price of the clothes soar but her own compensation dissolves into debt. Thus the model takes on risks that will wear her down without the industry’s explicit expulsion. She can either continue to work toward the real break of landing a lucrative advertising campaign or return home. Either way, the industry gains: she enhances the auratic value of the clothes during her tenure and pays her debts upon leaving.
A phalanx of hollow-eyed specters adorned in a dazzling spectrum of silhouettes, colors, fabrics, identically groomed and spaced, smoothed skin stretched taut over artfully protruding bones. These specters can be simply read as professional human hangers that animate expensive clothes. But two other attributes of the runway show point to the models’ disquieting cultural salience. First, couture models constitute a female ideal type: tall, skeletal, young and sullen. Second, this ideal is used to enhance the marketability of couture. The model thus contributes to an aspirational image of luxury though her appearance reflects a certain degree of physical as well as emotional damage[7]. Put another way, an ideal that reflects female psychophysical damage is used to enhance decadence; this idealization adds to the value of the clothes.
A political economic explanation of this macabre dimension of the runway show involves the industry’s role as well as the model’s role in producing human commodities positioned at the nexus of value and its evisceration. On the one hand, the industry produces the model in the manner of the clothes, the raw materials sourced and assembled abroad, the merchandise, high-turnover commodities that are marketed as rare artisanal objects. On the other hand, the model finances, starves, drugs and alienates herself until she is an optimally efficient cipher for the industry. Her body can slip into any sample size garment, her vacant visage can be made to resemble any character. Why however does the model acquiesce to this kind of injury? Why is this kind of injury acceptable, more so, exalted in the couture industry? These questions entail explorations of the psychosocial dimension of the model’s self-destruction. Using Foucault to enhance Freud’s claim that melancholy is a love-relation turned pathological[8], I draw out the theoretical implications of documentary film narratives and journalistic accounts of couture models’ working practices for the model read as a pathological cultural figure. Modern Western society is perverse because it produces and deploys manifold forms of pleasure for the purpose of social control[9]; in turn, the kind of love that the model harbors for the industry is precisely a love that maintains her subjection to its injuries.