Go See, by Jenny Bahn

12:09 p.m.

I’m late.  I walk into the casting and ask for Candace.  She steps out from the back wearing a yellow lace mini-dress and black blazer and black boots that remind me of my Margielas.  I compliment her shoes — that’s how you make small talk in the industry.

Cute shoes.

Cute bag.

Cute dress.

I want to kill cute, murder the word, that terrible, vanilla, anti-creative word that’s supposed to encapsulate anything we like just the right amount.  Not gorgeous.  Not outstanding.  Not magnificent.  Just cute. Like your little sister’s school play was “cute” when you didn’t know what to say because the background was just OK and the kids messed up their choreography and sometimes forgot the lyrics but they were just kids. Same with the fashion crowd. They speak a language of leather jackets and bondage jewelry of gilded bird bones — not casts, the real thing.  Dead matter trapped inside precious metal.

Candace asks me if I am in school as I strip down to my underwear and put on a tailored pantsuit.  Stupidly, I think she might actually be interested in my extracurricular activities.  I tell her that I was supposed to go back in September but now I’m not because I’m a writer and things are going well.  I say that I’ve been given opportunities that I would be waiting for after school anyway and why would I pay a hundred grand to reach a destination I was already getting to for free.

She photographs me against the white space in between two rolling racks. “How does that feel?” she asks, smoothing out the sleeve of my jacket.  “Fine,” I lie, feeling the tightness in the broad shoulders everyone tells me about. We walk back into the other room and I ask if she went to school in the city, still thinking that we are having a legitimate dialogue about education.  She went to undergrad in Canada.  “McGill?” I ask because it’s the only school in Canada I’ve heard of.

She has me try on a long dress in ash gray silk.  It’s the kind of dress that would normally cling to your problem areas, but it’s still morning and I haven’t eaten anything or had anything to drink so there are none of those to speak of.  Fabric falls from hollow to hem unhindered.  The perfect coat hanger.

The woman pulls the yellow measuring tape hanging from her neck and measures the circumference of my shoulders, my bust, my waist, my high-hip and low-hip.  Before I modeled I didn’t know there were such things as high-hips and low-hips.  I watch her write numbers on a piece of paper, which is less stressful than when someone takes your measurements and then yells them out to a person across the room in charge of jotting them down.

When I was a fit model I used to get measured all the time, at least once a season, to make sure I hadn’t consumed too much food in between spring and fall, holiday and resort, pre-spring and pre-fall.

I would come back Monday after seeing someone Friday and put on the same corseted dress and she would struggle with the zipper and jokingly ask, “Did you eat cookies this weekend?”  Everyone in the room would laugh except me.  I didn’t eat cookies.

My measurements are written down on a piece of paper underneath the name of a girl I know.  I compare our shoulder and waist measurements out of curiosity.  Next to the other girl’s name is a circled note that says “NO SCHOOL.”  Of course.  This woman didn’t care about my intellectual aspirations; she just wanted to know if I am available around the clock, five days a week, so they would never have delays with their production schedule.  I should have talked less, not more. Been the body and not the brain.

***

6:35 p.m.

“Who hasn’t shown me their book?”

A blonde in combat boots orders girls up front to pre-screen them.  She flips through their portfolio while they stand limply next to her.  She looks up between the photographs and the real thing.  Squinting.  Turning pages.  Turning pages.  Looking again.  She tells them, “Thank you,” if they are to leave.  She asks them to stay if she likes them.  All of this happens in front of everyone.

Girls sit and stand in the lobby of a studio — beautiful girls with no muscles and portfolios from top agencies.  They’re young, probably between 18 and 23.  Two French bulldogs cavort around the room, under the lean legs of teenage Russians.  The girl next to me talks about being out of shape when she was in Paris and not doing the shows, but she booked some lookbook.

It’s my turn with the bleached blonde.  I give her my portfolio and lean against the wall, casually, as though I don’t give a shit about this kind of stuff anymore, as though it doesn’t make me nervous that this woman is going to just tell me, “Thank you,” in front of a room of other girls and send me on my way.

“How tall are you?”

“Five ten and a bit,” I say, because you can’t be too tall and you can’t be too short.

I stick my hands in my back pockets, attempting to emphasize my laissez-faire approach to this ridiculous industry.  Castings are like going out on a date with a really rich, really beautiful man that you want for all the wrong reasons and you’ll do anything to get him. You play the casual, nonchalant card that says, “I’m anything you want me to be, even if that anything is nothing.”

She looks back and forth between my portfolio and my card.  She looks at me again.  “Do you mind staying?”

I’ve made it.

I sit back down in the mass of beautiful 20-year-olds.

They begin turning girls away at the door.  It’s only 7 and the casting is supposed to end at 8.  “Sorry, we’re finished,” the receptionist tells them.  The girls look at her vacantly, not processing what they’re hearing because the casting is nearly four avenues off the subway stop and a fifteen-minute walk and they’ve come all the way out here on a Wednesday evening only to have someone tell them they’re too late.

“But it’s supposed to go until 8.”

That’s what each of them says.  These girls forget that there is no logic in fashion.

It’s you.

It’s not you.

They like your eyebrows.

They don’t like your eyebrows.

You’re too big.

You’re too small.

It doesn’t matter.  It has nothing to do with you.  The casting is over when they say it’s over.

I am called to the back of the studio with four girls and we sit again but in different chairs against a different wall.  It’s my turn and some man in summer shorts asks me to try on the gray sweatpants with the cummerbund.  “And the cream sweater?” I ask, demonstrating my massive intelligence by showing I’ve been paying attention.  The girl two turns in front of me wore the same outfit.  They liked her, so they made her try something else on.

I change into an outfit that can best be described as sloppy-chic, something a rich person might wear on an airplane to sleep in but still costs over a grand.  I style myself in the mirror.  I tie my hair back into a tight ponytail, tight enough that I feel the sides of my eyes raise and the skin on my forehead go taut.  My face looks sharp and angular in the mirror, younger than it is.

I walk in front of the photographer and his team of five.  I make my voice higher than it is to look young and stupid, naïve enough to hire.  He leans against the back of his camera and lights snap and he tells me to bring my feet closer together and he says, “Good, good, good.”  After four shots he turns to the woman at the computer and asks if they want anything else.

I wait in the center of the white seamless backdrop, my feet in painful silver shoes, positioned over black tape that tells me where to stand. I wait.

“Would you try on one of the dresses?”

I’m still in.

Header image by Tierney Gearon.

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