Why is it that so many fashion models keep on working in the fashion industry even while experiencing the many problems arising from their ambiguous status in this business? Some feminist scholars who have focused on fashion models have reduced these issues as well as the management of the visual aspect of female sexuality more generally to one of material exploitation and female false consciousness (for example, Reference GreerGreer 1999; Reference BordoBordo 2002). Given that a number of women, both fashion models and consumers of fashion, are fully conscious of the exploitative mechanisms at work, this is hardly a satisfactory explanation. In this article, I engage with another portion of feminist work on beauty and desire in human life and relationships (Reference EtcoffEtcoff 2000; Reference ScarryScarry 2001; Reference DavisDavis 2003; Reference McRobbieMcRobbie 2009; Reference MearsMears 2011; Reference Rosenman, Parkins and SheehanRosenman 2011; Reference WissingerWissinger 2015) and argue that considerations of agency together with an experiential approach to how fashion models navigate and negotiate their own being in the world make for a fuller explanation.

My point of departure is that the fashion‐model business and its sites—such as the photography studio and the runway—represent the female subject in ways constantly threatening to disconnect the generalized woman from her possible political agendas. I see this threat as situated in the historical configuration of women and sexuality with regard to women's wage work in the wake of modernity as documented in studies of nursing and social work (Reference Lewis and SmartLewis 1992; Reference CarpenterCarpenter 2010), and also in fashion modeling (Reference Bates, Parkins and SheehanBates 2011; Reference Brown, Entwistle and WissingerBrown 2012). As Ellen Bayuk Rosenman put it in her historical essay on fashion and the coquette, it creates a double bind: “Victorian culture perfected a fashion double bind that is still with us today: women are required to invest themselves deeply in their appearance and then are derided for this obsession” (Reference Rosenman, Parkins and SheehanRosenman 2011, 89).

This ambiguous figure of the seductive and vain coquette is directed at the generalized woman, who cannot escape its effects (Reference McRobbieMcRobbie 2009). Thus, the coquette, who is arguably a genealogical forerunner of the fashion model, is a constant reminder of the deep split between the expectations to look good, on the one hand, and, while investing in this, being despised for being narcissistic, on the other. This double bind, however, is opposed to experiences reported by fashion models, which have to do with the desire, joy, and creativity they experience in front of the camera where they are invited to express their sexuality freely and without shame. As part of my conclusion, I suggest that this particular experience ties in with the fact that beauty matters in profound ways in human life (Reference ScarryScarry 2001). In the words of the psychologist Nancy Etcoff: “Beauty is a basic pleasure. Try to imagine that you have become immune to beauty. Chances are, you would consider yourself unwell—sunk in a physical, spiritual or emotional malaise” (Reference EtcoffEtcoff 2000, 8).

Building on eight interviews and memory work, I start by situating my research methodologically and establishing the empirical context for my concerns. In order to contextualize fashion modeling with regard to women's work and subjectivity, I compare some key features in the working conditions of fashion models with those of regular work life. I see the formation and internationalization of the fashion industry and fashion modeling as work, in relation to its interaction with women as primary fashion consumers. This particular interaction has played an important part in the configuring of a particular sexualized, racialized, and classed frame for performing femininity within a global context. The basis of this venture is inspired not only by the effects that modeling may have on fashion models with regard to alienation and objectification, but also with regard to their management of desire. Indeed, I suggest that the experiences of fashion models with desire may serve as a foundation from which we may start to rethink the double bind of appearance articulated by Rosenman, and frame it by the acknowledgment that beauty matters.

Setting the Stage

The main empirical basis of this article draws from in‐depth interviews with six Norwegian fashion models: three in their early 20s, and three in their 40s, conducted between 2012 and 2015. All have worked from five to more than ten years as professional and fairly well‐paid high‐fashion models. Two have worked mainly in Europe (France, Italy), and three have also worked in the US. In addition, during the past five years I have had a number of conversations with experienced fashion models as well as with one booker, the person who connects the fashion model with clients, and one stylist, the person who is in charge of selecting and combining the clothes, shoes, and accessories the model wears in front of the camera. All the interviews and the conversations have in one way or another focused on how to survive in the fashion‐model industry and how to deal with being positioned as a fashion model inside as well as outside of the business.

Since I have several years of experience in the business, I will briefly situate myself by making use of autoethnographical and reflexive approaches. Here knowledge‐production develops from the confrontation between the researcher's experiences (my own) with the experiences found in the field (interlocutors and texts) (see Reference Soley‐BeltranSoley-Beltran 2004; Reference DauphineeDauphinee 2010; Reference Soley‐Beltran, Entwistle and WissingerSoley-Beltran 2012; Reference DauphineeDauphinee 2013; Reference Neumann and NeumannNeumann and Neumann 2015). From 1985 until the end of that decade, I worked mostly as a fashion model in Norway, but took shorter trips to work in Germany, France, and Greece. While working in the fashion business, I had clear ideas about the choices I continually made involving agreements about future jobs as well as thoughts and feelings having to do with acknowledgment outside the business. The label “fashion model” and the social effects of this labeling were strong. Experientially, it felt like being rewarded with a high‐quality rating and guarantee, telling me that this body is good‐looking and this face is beautiful, even if in fact not all people thought so, or so I suspected (see Reference Soley‐BeltranSoley-Beltran 2004 for a similar experience). This often worked as a social force making people admire and envy the work I did and the way I looked. I also knew that my continued participation had to do with the dream of being close to fame. This was illusory, even if it was sometimes true in the sense of being invited to glamorous parties and meeting rich and famous people. Inside the business, however, I never felt farther from being beautiful. By stylists and clients, I was perceived as either too fat or too skinny, my hips were too narrow or too broad, my eyebrows too thick, my lips uneven. I worked with many people I did not respect, and most of the time on photo shoots I was bored, or cold, or uncomfortable, and hungry. In addition, I was able to support myself financially from this work for only a couple of years, and that with an income similar to that of a low‐wage occupation (see also Reference MearsMears 2011).

I blamed myself for staying in the business. I realized its political incorrectness, and I had moral doubts about my co‐responsibility for women's oppression and young girls’ eating disorders. I felt disgusted with my observations of clients’ decadent consumption, and with the power games and power displays among bookers, stylists, and clients. I saw the eating disorders and unhealthy lifestyles of many models, and I was acutely aware of the sexualized undertones of the most innocent topics of conversation when at work as a fashion model or in informal settings, where (rich) men would show off by inviting young fashion models to their private parties. Yet none of these issues made me seriously consider quitting the business. Why?

Women's Work and Subjectivity

The experiences and questions I have just contemplated originate from the mid‐1980s and early 1990s, yet they remain highly relevant today and can be connected to a number of additional concerns. First, the three young fashion models in my empirical sample reported many of the same critical reflections and feelings of alienation that I had more than twenty‐five years ago. Second, the modeling business in recent times seems to have developed for the worse, not for the better. According to my booker informant, thirty years ago it was considered unprofessional and out of the question for young women in Norway to work without pay. This, however, is no longer the case in Norway. Nor is it in the US, where young models trying to succeed in the business risk being financially indebted to their agencies when they leave the business after only one or two years of modeling (Reference MearsMears 2011).Footnote ¹

Nowadays, most fashion models are freelancers. Of those who work regularly, only a handful earn much money. As a rule, models are young, between 13 and 22; they are employed on a contract basis, and many are periodically unemployed and/or underworked (Reference MearsMears 2011). The structure of the work means that models are usually hired by the hour, day, or project, with no guarantees of continued employment (Reference Entwistle and WissingerEntwistle and Wissinger 2006, 782). Compared to mainstream working life in western Europe, the working conditions for fashion models (with the exception of super models like Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne) involve the absence of contracts, low pay, employer harassment, as well as sexual harassment. The fashion industry is old‐fashioned, outdated, and sometimes even illegal (Reference AspersAspers 2001; Reference GrossGross 2003; Reference MearsMears 2011).

This kind of working environment and its effects on fashion models in many respects resemble the kind of alienation experienced by laborers in early capitalist industrial production described by Marx and Engels. Fashion modeling understood as embodied wage work carried out by women subject to relentless harassment and oppression mirrors the classic definition of alienation, as labor estranging us from our own humanity (Reference Soley‐BeltranSoley-Beltran 2004; Mears 2012). Moreover, the experience of alienation is not situated in the fashion‐modeling business alone, but is also an effect of the male and female objectifying gaze directed at the fashion model when she is outside the business. This raises a potent question concerning women as such, inasmuch as women participate in their own alienation by embodying the objectifying gaze of dominance (Reference HaugHaug 1983; Reference BourdieuBourdieu 2000).Footnote ² At the same time, the experiences of alienation paradoxically occur within a context that is also seen as glamorous and prestigious, most notably by spectators situated outside the business, and oftentimes as magical and fun by the models themselves (see also Reference GrossGross 2003). The glamorous and prestigious aspects of being a fashion model tie into an internationally situated spectacle involving an actively sought‐after visibility that probably, at least in part, explains why some beautiful girls and women are attracted to and put up with this work. It is therefore interesting to contemplate the question of why they, like me, do not shy away from the business even when they experience its many alienating features and wrongdoings (Reference MearsMears 2011).

One obviously confusing riddle confronts feminists about this situation: In Norway as well as in many other European countries, women today have more opportunities and choices with regard to education and work than ever before (Reference EnglandEngland 2010), and in Norway, women outnumber men in higher education (Reference HolstHolst 2009). Still, when young women are “discovered” as fashion‐model material, culture demands, although ambivalently, that they ought to capitalize on their beauty, instead of pursuing educational or other career goals (Reference EllburgEllburg 2008; Reference MearsMears 2011). I see this demand to capitalize on beauty as intersecting with an internationally situated desire for beauty and fashion that is part of, and reflects the allure of, becoming a fashion model in an internationalized, decentered sphere with the runway and fashion photography as its space.

My concerns are inspired by Joan Scott's analysis of the biased gender relationship with regard to recognition (Reference ScottScott 1988). She has shown that whereas men have only one legitimate arena where their subjectivity and agency might be recognized, namely in their roles as employers or employees in public or private work life, (white, middle‐class) women have traditionally had two arenas of recognition: as workers in public or private work life, and/or as caregivers in the private sphere of home and family. The first sphere of recognition involves a participating and economically accountable subject, whereas the latter is at risk of producing an economically dependent and, possibly, politically subordinated subject position. Although the gendered relationship arrangements with regard to work and family life were more dominant in the 1980s than today, throughout western Europe we still see significantly larger numbers of part‐time working mothers than fathers (Reference HolstHolst 2009; Reference EnglandEngland 2010). In addition, in countries like Norway and the UK, as well as in the US, the labor market continues to be marked by a distinct gender segregation and lower pay for women than for men (Reference LeiraLeira 1992; Reference GreeneGreene 2006; Reference Halrynjo and LyngHalrynjo and Lyng 2009; Reference HolstHolst 2009; England 2012).

Thus, a major challenge for women arises at the intersection between structurally determined life and work chances still positioning women as inferior to men (Reference BrighouseBrighouse 2005), and the vulnerability embedded in femininity and the fashioned body (Reference EntwistleEntwistle 2000) shaped and acted upon within a context defined by the inescapable dominant and objectifying gaze of male and female spectators (Reference BergerBerger 1972). As I will try to problematize, the vulnerable subject position of the fashion model exposes this vulnerability to the generalized woman's political agency, an agency that is under constant attack, and will continue to be so as long as full political agency and subjectivity is denied the woman embodying the subject position of fashion model.

My preliminary suggestion is that female subjectivity is culturally framed in ways that still predispose women to seek out and endure situations colored by the awkward combination of wanting to be seen and flattered, while at the same time feeling shameful about this desire (Reference EtcoffEtcoff 2000, 19; Reference HakimHakim 2010, 510). I would like to consider here Elaine Scarry's claim that beauty matters in profound ways to human life because “beautiful things have a forward momentum, the way they incite the desire to bring new things into the world” (Reference ScarryScarry 2001, 46), and indeed: “the pleasure we take in beauty is inexhaustible” (50). This acknowledgment of what beauty does calls into question not the joyous part of the fashion model's work—most notably when she is in front of the camera co‐creating pictures and feeling in control of her sexuality—but it may provide us with grounds for rethinking the double bind of beauty/narcissism often translating itself into desire/shame.

These concerns connect with the work of feminist writers and gender scholars who have addressed key issues in the lives of women for several decades. Among the theoretical and empirical questions that have been analyzed and deconstructed, women's positions as objects of desire versus their positions as autonomous subjects have prevailed in different forms (for example, Reference HaugHaug 1983; Reference HochschildHochschild 1983; Reference HarawayHaraway 1991; Reference HardingHarding 1991; Reference Lewis and SmartLewis 1992; Reference Smart and SmartSmart 1992 and Reference Smart1995; Reference PagliaPaglia 2001; Reference IrigarayIrigaray 2002; Reference BraidottiBraidotti 2006).

Even if the answers have varied with respect to philosophical and ideological points of view, there has been a tendency to connect the question of female subjectivity with questions of what is required for women to distance themselves from the position of the passive, dependent, consuming object, and to become recognized as autonomous subjects (Reference BraidottiBraidotti 2006).

Until recently, the business of fashion modeling, and indeed the experience of being a fashion model, has mainly been silenced, and if analyzed at all (Reference CraneCrane 2000), it has long been targeted as a women‐hostile industry encouraging practices harmful for all women (for example, Reference GreerGreer 1999; Reference BordoBordo 2002). Today, however, the fashion‐model business is the subject of a growing academic literature ranging from the exploration of the subjective experiences of fashion models (Reference EntwistleEntwistle 2000; Reference Soley‐BeltranSoley-Beltran 2004; Reference EllburgEllburg 2008; Reference MearsMears 2011; Reference Soley‐Beltran, Entwistle and WissingerSoley-Beltran 2012; Reference WissingerWissinger 2015), to more systematic investigations of the structural and economic features constituting the industry (Reference AspersAspers 2001; Reference MearsMears 2011; Reference WissingerWissinger 2015). This growing body of work also includes historical studies of the fashion model and her relationship to modernity, sexuality, race, and class (Reference Bates, Parkins and SheehanBates 2011; Reference Parkins, Sheehan, Parkins and SheehanParkins and Sheehan 2011; Reference Rosenman, Parkins and SheehanRosenman 2011; Reference Brown, Entwistle and WissingerBrown 2012). This new academic literature indirectly challenges earlier criticisms of the fashion‐model industry as promoter of practices hostile and repressive to women by drawing on written accounts that thoroughly explore what fashion and fashion modeling means both today and historically. These writings also contain inquiries focused on the meaning of what a fashion model does when she models, and, as a less developed subtheme, the joy connected to that work.

In what follows, I connect knowledge and insights from this research with my own feminist concerns, experiential knowledge, and insights acquired through interviews and conversations with insiders from the fashion industry. Starting from the decentered global scene of desire and the development of fashion modeling from regular work in fashion houses for working‐class women, I move on to the contract‐based and insecure international enterprise the fashion industry represents for female fashion models today. These women are performing a historically white, Western, middle‐class elegance and cool based on a sanitized sexuality.

The Formation and Internationalization of Fashion Modeling

Although fashion and fashion modeling carried a certain aura of the international from the early 1900s onwards, owing to the spread of fashion and fashion norms from Paris to other countries, scholars researching the genealogy of fashion modeling tend to agree that large‐scale internationalization of the business began in the 1980s, with the coming of the era of the supermodels (Reference CraneCrane 2000; Reference Evans, Bruzzi and Church GibsonEvans 2000; Reference Brown, Entwistle and WissingerBrown 2012; Reference Entwistle and WissingerEntwistle and Wissinger 2012; see also Reference GrossGross 2003). Although fashion has long been associated with the fashion designers and houses of Paris, this city's very first fashion‐modeling agency was actually set up only in 1959 (Reference Evans, Bruzzi and Church GibsonEvans 2000), decades after the establishment in 1923 of the world's first modeling agency in New York (Reference Brown, Entwistle and WissingerBrown 2012). Thus, despite its international reputation, fashion modeling was long highly specifically situated and it was only well into the 1980s that women (and men) working as fashion models began to travel extensively outside of their own countries (Reference Entwistle and WissingerEntwistle and Wissinger 2012; Reference WissingerWissinger 2015). Today, a model who lives in Madrid, and who works internationally, typically travels between Paris, Milan, New York, and other locations on a weekly basis. As former model and sociologist Ashley Mears puts it:

Far from being truly global, fashion modeling remains primarily geographically and symbolically restricted to fashion metropoles in Europe and the US. These are Paris, Milan, London, and New York, where the prestigious modeling agencies and clients from around the world are found. The fashion business and indeed fashion modeling itself gain glamour not only from the occasional large sums of money that a handful of models receive and the wide distribution and public visibility of its products in magazines and commercials, but also from the very association with the “international,” echoing historical and contemporary developments in politics (Reference NeumannNeumann 2012).

Obviously, the desire for and the spread of norms attached to beauty and good looks involving dress have a far longer history than modern fashion modeling (on Viking women, see Reference GlørstadGlørstad 2010), but it became directly related to modern fashion modeling beginning in the mid‐ to late 1800s, when working‐class women began to lend their bodies to artists and fashion houses and later to catwalks and photography in return for wages. As historian Elspeth Brown points out, fashion modeling had sexually tainted roots owing to its early association with prostitution and artistry (Reference Brown, Entwistle and WissingerBrown 2012). This meant that designers and fashion houses were required to sanitize the sexuality of the working‐class women wanting to work as models:

The key to fashion modeling, then, is selling commodities by making them desirable. According to Diana Crane, the development of fashion from “class” to “consumer” follows general modernization and urbanization trends and upward class mobility in western Europe and the US throughout the twentieth century (Reference CraneCrane 2000). This historical development gradually allowed the growing middle classes to buy ready‐to‐wear fashion that in the early 1900s had been handmade haute couture available only for the privileged few. This development linked the consumer to the development of the work and working conditions for fashion models as the expansion of fashion design and markets for ready‐to‐wear clothing changed the models’ working conditions. In the beginning of the industry, fashion models were regularly employed fashion‐house mannequins, wholesale models, or couturier models. Working conditions today call for combined catwalk and photography models belonging to agencies whose job is to connect models to commercial clients (Reference Brown, Entwistle and WissingerBrown 2012).

Ilya Parkins and Elisabeth Sheehan have employed a different perspective on the fashion industry and the women who constitute its main consumers. In their analyses of women as consumers of fashion, they argue that femininity is intimately tied to “fashion's ubiquity and widespread influence on modernity in its multiple guises” (Reference Parkins, Sheehan, Parkins and SheehanParkins and Sheehan 2011, 5). They see this in relation to scholarly studies of men's fashion and point out that:

By comparing Brown's historical work on fashion models with the work of Parkins and Sheehan on women as fashion consumers, an interesting picture of the gendered, racialized, classed discourses and practices emerges, showing classed, gendered, and racially defined parallels with the development of social work and nursing in the late 1800s throughout Europe (Reference Bates, Parkins and SheehanBates 2011).

White, upper‐middle‐class women across Europe and in the US implicitly promoted the upward class mobility aspirations of working‐class women in the fashion industry by being fashion consumers par excellence. This happened in the same historical period that witnessed women of the bourgeoisie much engaged in voluntary work for the poor and needy (Reference RichmondRichmond 1917) as well as projects aimed at educating working‐class women as nurses and social workers (Reference CarpenterCarpenter 2010). In the fashion industry, the fashion models were working‐class women who were taught upper‐middle‐class manners of elegance and cool, coupled with a nonthreatening, upper‐middle‐class sex appeal:

In the wake of globalization, it is true that the fashion‐model business has gradually started to include Asian and Hispanic women in its workforce. Despite the fact that we have a few black supermodels, like Naomi Campbell and Janna, the overall impression of today's fashion model is one embodying white, thin, and (upper‐) middle‐class ideals of femininity, whether they are performed by fashion models with working‐class backgrounds (Cindy Crawford) or by upper‐middle‐class and even aristocratic fashion models (Cara Delevingne) (see Reference MearsMears 2011, 194–96). As one of the stylists Mears interviewed put it:

Since women were the chief consumers of fashion in this early period as well as now, they can also be understood as the ones acting as a civilizing force promoting and securing (white) middle‐class taste, sexual norms, and manners within their families and personal networks (see Reference SkeggsSkeggs 2002). This work also entailed and still entails work on beauty, through negotiating the aestheticization of self and others. In what follows, I will attempt to unpack the mechanisms of oppression reported by fashion models, and then go on to consider the joyous part of the model's work. By seeing the joyous parts of the model's work in connection with Baudrillard's analysis of narcissism and Scarry's understanding of beauty, I hope to move us closer to a perspective that may provide us with grounds for a rearticulation of the beauty/narcissism double bind.

Bodies at Work

It is the model's physical body that is cultivated and staged, and for many fashion models, this entails tough, ascetic work where the body must be exercised, cared for, and starved. As a rule, the body of the woman wishing to be a fashion model must be above 175 centimeters (5 foot, 8 inches) in height and be, for many, dangerously thin. Spain, Italy, and France have recently prohibited fashion agencies and clients from employing fashion models with a body mass index below 18 (Reference WillsherWillsher 2015). A model is also judged good‐looking if she possesses subjectively defined “good” facial bone structure. Interestingly, one does not have to be considered beautiful in the everyday sense of the word (Reference MearsMears 2011). One of the bookers interviewed by sociologist Joan Entwistle characterized models as “genetic freaks” (Reference Entwistle, Thomas and AmedEntwistle 2004, 60). Nonetheless, for both women and men, being perceived as beautiful depends upon a balanced facial bone structure (Reference EtcoffEtcoff 2000). Still, as Entwistle and Wissinger emphasize, the fashion model has to be concerned with body maintenance at all times (Reference Entwistle and WissingerEntwistle and Wissinger 2006, 783). If she wants to work as a model, she has to be ready: slender, clean, and plucked. In order to accomplish this state of readiness, she has to do extensive self‐management and self‐surveillance to sell herself to the clients (see also Reference FoucaultFoucault 1980). In the interview I did with fashion model Clara, a former renowned fashion model now in her forties, she expressed the significance of removing the moustache:

Obviously this was a disciplining experience, and Sandra, now in her twenties and still working as a fashion model, had this to say about the business's professional standards:

Like dancers and other athletes, the model's work is directly mediated though the body (see Reference Wainwright, Turner, Thomas and AhmedWainwright and Turner 2004). Like dancers and athletes, they prepare for the next job by restraining themselves from doing a lot of the things they would like to do or would otherwise have done if living “normal” lives, like going to a party, staying up all night reading a book, eating, and so on. Yet, unlike dancers and athletes, fashion models have no training grounds like the gym, the playing field, the studio, the scene, or the contest. While dancers attend to their muscles, bodily flexibility, precision in movement, and other bodily expressions, the model attends to her skin, her body fat, her hairdo, nails, and her body hair. Clara put it this way:

Thus, preparation for fashion models is about holding back—enduring boredom, refraining from eating, and hoping they will not get older while waiting for their breakthrough. Why then, do they keep up with this seemingly nonstimulating and underpaid work? One answer might be the hope for fame, another may be that the modeling work provides the model with a legitimate ground to express her desire.

The Desire of the Spectacle

There can be little doubt that the fashion business intersects with, mirrors, and influences not only social forces like desires for consumption and specific lifestyles, but also with particularly specific sexualized norms concerning women. This affects women globally in that it represents and reinforces ideals of women's bodily visibility and accessibility, something that women have to relate to, whether they enjoy and embrace this visibility or not.

The fashion model, when dressed for work, is particularly susceptible to this, and I see her experiences, while on the receiving end of this attention, as a representation of the discursive expectations of visibility and accessibility directed at all women (see Reference BergerBerger 1972). Mears recalled how she, unlike her male colleague Dylan, continued to be a sexualized object after having attended a casting:

For the fashion model as well as for women in general, this visibility is linked to the visions of the ideal body that “everybody” strives to possess (Reference WissingerWissinger 2015, 2), contradicted only by the numbers showing that the male and female populations in countries like Norway, the US, and the UK have grown significantly heavier in the past twenty years (Reference Wang, McPherson, Marsh, Gortmaker and BrownWang et al. 2011). Arguably, it is the fashion model herself who is most fully aware of how photography manipulates her bodily image. She is also highly aware that photographic representations of her are not how she sees her bodily self.

Patricia Soley‐Beltran, a former fashion model and now a scholar doing autoethnographic and ethnographic work on fashion modeling, describes the contrast between the alienating effects her modeling work had upon her sense of self and the knock‐out effect she had on men and women outside the business who learned she was a fashion model. The minute she was marked by the others as a fashion model, she found herself admired as well as envied: successful but cut off from the social as a subject in her own right (Reference Soley‐BeltranSoley-Beltran 2004, 321). This same phenomenon appears in my interviews. Cora, another former high‐fashion model in her forties, used this image in an attempt to articulate the experience of being a fashion model:

As if it was not enough to experience the alienation stemming from this objectification of her body, Cora found that she also had to take responsibility for making people feel secure around her, while at the same time finding a way to come across to them as a subject. Cora continued:

Her coping strategy could be seen as an example of “looping,” an analytical concept developed by Erving Goffman, where the vulnerable person not only has to pretend that she is indifferent to the humiliation she is experiencing, she is also required to take responsibility for protecting aggressive others from being embarrassed by making sure that they are unaware of the pain they are inflicting upon her (Reference GoffmanGoffman 1961, 35–37). Another fashion model in my sample, Louise, in her twenties, reported a similar experience from within the business. At a go seeFootnote ³ for a prestigious designer in New York, a young model was harassed for her big breasts in front of 150 other fashion models and clients. No one dared to talk back to the designer, and it made a strong impression on Louise seeing her colleague crying silently, trying to pull herself together. This tackling of humiliation and shame resembles the kind of emotion work done by female flight attendants in interacting with male passengers, analyzed by Arlie Russell Hochschild (Reference HochschildHochschild 1983).

As both Entwistle and Wissinger and Mears have suggested, emotion work in fashion modeling entails “keeping up appearances” (Reference Entwistle and WissingerEntwistle and Wissinger 2006; Reference MearsMears 2011). I agree but wish to strengthen the case by suggesting that one major challenge involving emotion work by models in the fashion industry is that it cannot be recognized as work as easily as is the case with that of other kinds of service workers (Reference AmbleAmble 2012). This is so because the subject doing the emotion work in the fashion‐model business is not recognized as a subject who in this context is faced with difficulties or humiliating emotional challenges. Unless she is a supermodel, she is rarely considered a person in her own right, as someone to be reckoned with at all, except when she is in front of the camera. And it is here that we get to the reasons why models stay in the business. The desire to create beauty and to be seen by thousands is simply so alluring that it blocks out all the hassles. Clara articulated her desire like this:

Clara talked about these experiences in a passionate, joyful, and lighthearted manner, and she described them as magical moments. Caught up in this mood, as she spoke she snapped into character and became the famous model (her head raised, her back straightened, eyelids lowered). Her response and the way it was expressed stood out in sharp contrast to the other aspects of the high‐end fashion‐model work we had been talking about up until then. A few minutes before this turning point, she had described modeling like this: “You really are nothing but a well‐paid clothes hanger.” Clara explained that part of the reason keeping her in the business was the feeling of freedom to express her sexuality legitimately when working in front of a camera, and the fact that she knew her audience desired her. She described a feeling of being exactly what she wanted, and at the same time, in those moments, feeling untouchable. She could be the subject creating desire and be an object of desire of her own and the imagined others without being seen as a person inviting men to have sex with her.

Thus, the terms coolness and the display of (self‐) control stand out as two of the concepts grounding the expressions of desire produced in fashion photography, due in great part to the work of the fashion model herself. This emphasis on the fashion model's active participation in the production or creation of desire stands as a marked contrast to the common understanding and experience of the model's work as being nothing but a clothes hanger (Reference AspersAspers 2001, 85; see also Reference EntwistleEntwistle 2000, chapter 7). It addresses the model as subject and co‐creator. Even if the model is normally not in the position of choosing the location for the photo shoot, picking clothes, and deciding makeup and hairstyle (see Reference EllburgEllburg 2008, 97), the creation of the photograph nonetheless depends heavily on her ability to act out in expressing the emotions, the atmosphere, and the theme desired by her employers (see also Reference MearsMears 2011). In high‐fashion photography, this always requires exquisite display of bodily and emotional control and a certain kind of coolness, along with the fact that the model is supposed to look good and to be compliant regardless of her emotional state of being.

The magical moments of managing desire in front of the camera while being in control of her sexuality and audience can also be understood in terms of the narcissism the fashion model performs and releases in the other. This has been articulated by Jean Baudrillard in his analysis of the reactions that the exquisite and graceful striptease artist produces in her audience (Reference BaudrillardBaudrillard 2002, 107–10). According to him, she gives the impression of self‐fulfillment and self‐containment, that she needs no other, and that she has reached completion by her own efforts. The narcissism she performs brings the audience in touch with their own (longing) for self‐love, or of the experience of being self‐contained. Thus, the experience of expressing sexuality and sensuality in front of a camera, in order to trigger the desire (and lust) of an imagined audience (men and women), yet at the same time being untouchable in the moment, can also mean freedom from shame.

Resisting the Double Bind

The demands raised by the feminist movement with regard to liberation and equal rights as well as specifications of conditions for women's possibilities of being active, creative, and independent subjects (Reference ListerLister et al. 2007) place the fashion‐model industry in a complex and ambiguous light.

What is normally understood as belonging to the sphere of intimacy—bodily expressions of lust and desire—is displayed through cool and controlled sexualized and sensual posing, publicly staged.

If we accept Baudrillard's observations about desire and narcissism, neither the fashion‐model business nor the work of the fashion model can be reduced to a matter of power/repression or exploitation/passivity. Rather, the reported experiences of the pleasures of fashion modeling show the fashion model taking control of her sexuality and appearance when in front of the camera, challenging the very notion of passivity as well as that of shame. The question that may be asked, then, is what the generalized woman may learn from the experiences of the fashion model. Or rather, how may the experiences of fashion models inspire the generalized woman to start ridding herself of the beauty/narcissism double bind of appearance?

The first suggestive answer is to know that fashion photography is a representation of beauty, not a true reflection of how the fashion model looks in the flesh. The alarming rise in cosmetic surgery may suggest that this is not common knowledge among women in general. The second suggestive answer is for the generalized woman to take control of her appearance in her own specificity.

Thus, the problems with the fashion‐modeling business and with fashion modeling itself have little to do with the fact that people around the world like to watch beautiful things and persons. Women's and men's urge for beauty in all its variants—in the fine arts, architecture, and in everyday life with home decoration and dress—appears to be an important part of what makes life meaningful (Reference ScarryScarry 2001). What the modeling industry attempts to do is to separate beauty, narrowly defined, from the fashion model as a human being, and tie it to the embodied icon, the representation of the fashion model. In this sense, the fashion‐modeling business and the subject position of fashion models represent a constant challenge to the generalized woman in her ongoing struggles to be taken seriously and to take herself seriously as a political subject. Acknowledging that beauty matters as a major source of creativity and life expressions may be a way out of the double bind that exhorts us to invest heavily in our appearance and to be ridiculed for it at the same time.