Elizabeth A. Wissinger's book about the history, practices, and broader relevance of the modeling industry begins with the come-on with which many have been seduced: “You should be a model.” In her preface to This Year's Model: Fashion, Media, and the Making of Glamour, the sociologist confesses that she herself tried her hand at modeling in her youth – and, while she quickly grew disillusioned, its appeal to so many women fascinated her enough to pursue the subject in her scholarship. In This Year's Model, Wissinger illuminates her historiography of the fashion model by parlaying this familiarity with and proximity to the industry into (often shockingly candid) interviews with working models, agents, “scouts” and other insiders, producing an engaging book that introduces surprising ways in which she argues the “glamour labor” (2) of the fashion model affects our lives today.

Contrary to the embellishments of the title, there isn't much about either “fashion” or “the media” in this book. That said, its focus on the history and evolution of the fashion model and the modeling industry is compelling enough on its own, particularly in the ways in which Wissinger articulates how its reach in the Internet age has spilled into our everyday lives with alarming ease. Steering mostly clear of the more obvious and written-about matters of how the modeling industry has upheld rare and unattainable ideals of beauty, Wissinger is more interested in how it has significantly shifted notions of work for both the models themselves and their audiences. Her approach “not only acknowledge[s] the cultural construction of gender, consumerism, and work but also highlight[s] the cultural construction of the body itself,” via a form of work she dubs “glamour labor” (2). For those in its thrall, glamour labor “reinforces sexual ideologies while prompting us to buy things” (2), but it more perniciously “disguises work, setting the stage for increasing levels of immaterial labor” (182). In other words, “by performing glamour labor, models are on the frontlines of selling a way of being in the world, which pulls bodies into productive matrixes in novel ways” (4).

While the thematic organization of Wissinger's book jumps around chronologically from the late nineteenth century to the present, and back again, it is easy enough to follow the logic of her chapters, which mostly unspool according to the chronology of different, dominant narratives and technologies in the modeling industry as they emerged: from the invention of the fashion model in the first place to the body-altering technologies of our surgical and digital aesthetics in the early twenty-first century. Particularly compelling are the cultural, commercial, and technological reasons for the shifting ideals of beauty the modeling industry has promoted – from the composite appeal of the illustrated Gibson Girls, to Paul Poiret's boutique models, through to post-World War II icons like Dovima and Suzy Parker (photographed by Avedon and Penn), to the supermodels and “street-fashion” bloggers of today.

This shift, Wissinger argues, follows not only changes in beauty and commerce, but also changes in looking, as she contrasts Laura Mulvey's notion of the languid, “cinematic gaze” cast upon early models in boutiques, on runways, and in magazines against “the televisual glance” of John Ellis and Gilles Deleuze once cable television began airing both fashion shows and fashion-themed programming as part of new demands for fast-paced, easily consumed, constantly changing content.Footnote ¹ By the late 1980s, the fashion show had become mass entertainment, the presence of fashion models was ubiquitous in everyday life/homes, and their image was thoroughly embedded in the popular imagination. This, in turn, was followed by the digital era's “regime of the blink,” which sped up not only the slicing and dicing of audiences’ attention, but also the rate by which fashion's products were expected to churn (18). (As Wissinger points out, finding fashion houses producing everything from multiple “seasons” for multiple lines to perfumes and frying pans.) Thus the tightly scripted origins of glamour labor, wherein models first served as pleasant blank slates reflective of the range of consumers who purchased the clothing they modeled and serving as “characters” in fashion setups, gave way to the current, unpredictable ideals of the industry's unprecedented demand for new designs accompanied by a new “look” personified by a new crop of models.

Her uncritical (and often contradictory) referencing of Malcolm Gladwell's much-challenged notion of the power of “the blink” as a foundation for her analysis of contemporary visual culture reflects some of the overly simplistic readings dappled throughout This Year's Model.Footnote ² This is particularly evident in her chapters on model “scouting” and the “touch-up” technologies of models’ represented and real bodies, which feel tacked on and thinly theorized. However, the strength of Wissinger's book is how deftly she tracks the commercial phenomena of the modeling industry into personal ones, for both the model and the popular audiences to whom she is meant to serve as … well, a model.

In particular, her discussion of the manic nature of not just the changes in the industry but also the affective nature of its labor practices is an important and novel one. From the book's start, she addresses the oft-discussed “flow,” “energy,” and other frivolous je ne sais quois that agents, photographers, and other industry professionals are fond of using as the ineffable, undefinable, absolutely necessary price of entry for a fashion model today. And much of the book is dedicated to analyzing ways in which this “affective free-for-all” of “unpredictable energies [has been] set loose to produce in unexpected ways” (165). Models have both glamourized and normalized work “calling on affective resources of loving one's job, living your work as your life, embodying your work identity as yourself, in informal work environments with ill-defined rules, that blend work and play” for the rest of us, increasingly working in fields where we are unsure “about when the work will be for pay and when it will be for fun and whether one will get work at all if one has not been keeping up with a rapidly changing field” (172). For these reasons, while This Year's Model will obviously be of interest to both scholars and lay readers with an interest in the fashion industry and the ideals it reflects and promotes, it may also prove a useful, surprising new angle for those pursuing affect studies and labor histories.