I’ve been backstage enough times to know how hard models work. They’re pushed and pulled from here to there with no say in what goes on their skin or their hair, never mind the actual clothes on their backs. I’ve sat in Paris cafés watching lean and beautiful girls queue up outside tiny little offices hoping to be cast for Paris fashion week and I’ve also done a stint at painting nails for the runway – plenty to say about that one, including the fact that it turned out that the agent providing the nail artists was taking all their money while they were working for nothing – not even lunch. She said they had to do it for the ‘experience’, meanwhile charging the brand a full rate. This was a massive dilemma as I was working as a journalist with an ethical brand so I could write about the experience. I also got trod on while someone tried to open a window – they literally didn’t care that I was in the way (between the legs of a Ukrainian model trying to get her toes into some sort of polished shape while others worked on her face and hair) – they needed a hoy up and I was there.
Funnily enough, the time I saw the Celine casting queue was actually with Ruth Crilly, friend and author of How Not To Be A Supermodel. We were on a Dior press trip and gosh, there’s a lot to say about that one, including the delegation from Russia whose PR turned out to be writing a sex blog. But this post is about Ruth’s book and the book is about, in no particular order:
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- That time she straddled Sophie Dahl for a Patrick Cox campaign mostly naked and the first her mum knew of it was when she opened a newspaper to see her bare daughter staring out of the pages.
- That time in Tokyo she was told her teeth were too gappy and she looked like a witch in the woods.
- That time her eyebrows were bleached out completely…
And so much more. There’s just a wonderful fluidity to Ruth’s writing that makes How Not To Be A Supermodel quite addictive so I’m warning you now, start it in the morning and be prepared to not want to take a break til nightfall – if then.
You need to be ballsy to be a model and you need to ‘do’ the major cities – London, Paris, Milan, Tokyo and New York and people will treat you less well than they treat the clothes you’ll be wearing, if you’re lucky. Finding your way around a strange town especially not knowing the language is really hard as is negotiating with the entitled, the jaded and the dispassionate. That’s something that I liked about the book – there was a sense of growth as I read through, in particular going from sharing a bed in a miserable ‘model apartment’ to insisting on her own apartment. This confidence hike and realisation for Ruth that she had her limits and could finally vocalise them just brings so nicely to the fore that models are as sensitive as the rest of us, only usually, more beautiful.
I’ve known Ruth for at least 14 years – maybe more – and she’s always been exactly herself. We have had some very fun times together so I can say that How Not To Be A Supermodel is exactly her – always seeking, always learning, always funny, always fair and always clever. It seems a very natural transition for Ruth from modelling to blogging to influencing (and yes, I hate the word, it’s too blanket and too trite) to authorship – if you have a sense of fun and any memory of when supermodels ruled the world, this is 100% for you. The book is £15.45 HERE.
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