Body Horror

by Anne Elizabeth Moore

  My hosts’ twenty-minute lunch break ended quickly and they waved goodbye. In a few hours, three of the youngest would walk home together after work, to the cramped factory housing unit they shared with three other girls to save money, and make a meager dinner. After that, they’d fall asleep right away, because it would be late, and because they would have to get up early the next day and do it all over again.

  We recognize labor and human rights violations when they occur on the production end of global fashion, but any close look at the display sector will reveal a distressing litany of similarities—beginning with the tendencies of garment factories and modeling agencies alike to prey on young women. (A feature they share with the marketing divisions that stoke demand for the products of both industries.)

  “It’s a brutal world,” Meier says, recalling her entry into the display-side workforce. “They do want you to come in at the age of thirteen, fourteen, hoping that you’ll hit your prime at seventeen.” A 2012 Model Alliance report found that over half the models surveyed had started between thirteen and sixteen; another 1 percent had started earlier. More than half of those underage were never or were rarely accompanied by a legal guardian to castings or jobs. (The Model Alliance sample size was small—85 completed surveys, from the 241 who received the form—but so is the modeling world. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, tallied only 4,800 working models in the country that same year. It’s a growing field, however, as 2015 numbers indicate 5,800 total models working in the US—an increase of 21 percent over just three years.)

  Then there are the long, irregular hours. Models report working fourteen- to twenty-hour days without advance notice, a practice so consistent it shows up in the BLS job description: “Many models work part time and have unpredictable work schedules. Models must be ready on short notice . . . and the number of hours worked will vary depending on the job.”4 The lack of scheduling predictability was also a complaint of warehouse workers I spoke to at a facility in Joliet, Illinois, who ship out clothing by the ton to Wal-Mart and fast-fashion chains. The practice is slightly more troubling in warehouse work, given managers’ habits of locking employees into facilities during shifts, supposedly to minimize theft. Working long, irregular hours is of particular concern to parents, both in warehouses and in factories. In Cambodia, childcare options are few and expensive, so factory workers must delay having children, ship kids back home to grandparents, or invest in a good deadbolt and hope for the best during the workday.

  For all fashion workers, the pressure to remain malnourished is high, although it is only one of many health and safety concerns in the industry. The 2013 Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh, in which more than 1,100 workers died, pointed to one common health crisis that plagues garment employees—dangerous working conditions. In Cambodia, mass faintings that started in 2011 but continue today point to another. Studies found that in the regular course of any given month, between tens and thousands of workers fall to the ground in a faint from a combination of undernourishment, long hours, heat, and bad air.5 Workers in a Chicago H&M in summer of 2011 told me they left their job en masse when the AC conked out and they began to feel light headed and faint in their store. Some H&M employees have access to company health insurance plans, although other fast-fashion outlets, like Mango, Zara, and Forever 21, do not. (In developing nations, health insurance does not often exist. Regulated garment factories are often required to maintain medical staff, but just as often will let that requirement, among many others, slide.)

  Of course, the health concerns facing models are often less evident than indicated by mass fainting incidents: according to the Model Alliance survey, 68 percent of the workforce suffers from anxiety and/or depression. A quarter profess drug or alcohol dependency, and around a third lack health insurance. Undereating is pervasive—31 percent of models admit to eating disorders, although individual culpability is in question when undereating becomes a job requirement. Supermodel Amy Lemons was advised to eat only a rice cake a day.6 Others are offered more subtle hints—often backed up by contract stipulations—to lose inches from hips, thighs, or rear.

  Jennifer Sky, former Maxim and Sassy cover model turned Xena: Warrior Princess regular, says the industry gave her PTSD. In an emotional YouTube video, she describes unsupervised foreign travel as a child and a lengthy shoot in a swimming pool, when her legs turned an unattractive shade of blue.7 She was scolded for it, and years of such criticism began to wear on her, just as they did on Meier. Sky’s emotional health tanked.

  “The caste system on a set is specific and hard to navigate. And, while the model is the focal point, he/she is most often (unless she is a supermodel), at the bottom of the social caste,” she elaborated via email. “The model must conform to what the makeup artist envisions for his makeup, even though he is placing his vision on her face. Same goes for the hairstylist and the clothing stylist. At each station, the model must fit into her role, even before she steps in front of a camera. No wonder most models I have ever met are so unsure of where they stand with anyone and always questioning, massively insecure. Because they are never offered any voice or source of security. Their body is a commodity for other people.”

  Emotional neglect, little sustenance, and unpredictable hours would create rough conditions for any worker under the age of eighteen, but the industry that sets the standards for beauty and desire in our culture is also a big-money honeytrap for male predators. The poster boy for this ugly tradition is “Uncle” Terry Richardson, one of the highest paid photographers in the world, who got his start at Vice before moving into couture and celebrities. He has been regularly named in sexual assault and harassment complaints since 2005, for on-shoot behavior including non-consensual jizzing, offers to make tea from used tampons, and demands that models squeeze his balls. (It’s hardly a surprise that Bill Cosby, too, has evinced a strong preference for models in his long string of alleged sexual assaults.)

  “This is an industry that obviously lends itself to sexual harassment at the workplace,” Jennifer Sky tells me. But it’s not just models and factory workers: retail thrift store employees and warehouse workers are also targets of verbal or physical aggression and unwanted sexual advances. One worker in the Joliet warehouse told me she was raped by her manager, fired when she filed a complaint, and only reinstated after several co-workers joined protests in solidarity. Other fast-fashion warehouse workers say that sexual harassment at facilities is high because of the relatively few female employees and extensive surveillance equipment common in the Foreign Trade Zones where warehouses are situated.8 (One might expect surveillance equipment to protect against worker abuse, until one realizes how easily the surveillors can find opportunities to commit such abuses themselves.) Even in supposedly sustainable second-hand fashion, the industry perpetuates the hypersexualization of female laborers: complaints have been filed against Apogee Retail Inc., owners of the for-profit Unique Thrift Store chain, for sexual harassment and abuse.

  Model Alliance found that 30 percent of models experience inappropriate, on-the-job touching, 28 percent feel pressured to have sex with someone at work, and 61 percent express concern over their lack of privacy while changing clothes. Only 29 percent feel they can report sexual harassment to their agency, although two thirds of those who have taken this step discovered that their agencies didn’t bother to respond. Eighty-seven percent have been asked to pose nude without advance notification, which is a requirement for many agencies.

  It’s troubling enough to realize that models under the age of eighteen are routinely asked to strip for cameras without advance notice or supervision. But what makes the practice even more disturbing is that, in many cases, it’s all perfectly legal. Agencies are able to recruit heavily from the preteen set thanks to a loophole carved out in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 known as the Shirley Temple Act, which requires individual states to pass their own laws protecting child performers or farm workers. New York is one of many states that passed such pro
tections—although eighteen others have not—and in late 2013, Model Alliance successfully petitioned New York to reclassify print and runway models under the age of eighteen as child performers. This category would assure that underage models can only work with state-approved permits, and are entitled to limitations on the hours they work, while also guaranteeing them regular breaks, educational accommodations, and chaperones for those under sixteen. Compliance has been slow, but some in the industry say they’ve seen a slight upward trend in models’ ages since.

  There’s a far more insidious ripple effect in play, however, when a culture sanctions very young girls as symbols of sexual availability. “Dressing little girls up to sell women’s clothing affects the way women feel about themselves,” Sky says. “It affects the way men treat women. Why do we have such an out-of-control rape culture? Well if you look at the images of ‘women’ that advertisers are selling to us . . . [they] are of underage girls, cast as victims, their bodies taking on broken-doll positions, their eyes vacant, helpless, and submissive.”

  These images may demean individual models, but their cumulative effect also demeans the consumer, Sky charges. “How do you learn to memorize something? You repeat it over and over until is in your subconscious,” she explains. “It doesn’t take advanced behavioral science to pick up the messages being sold to us.”

  Still, if you’re the one selling the message, you might be able to make your individual peace with its pernicious content—provided the price is right. But here’s another counterintuitive truth about the modeling profession: models earn significantly less than you think. BLS suggests models in the US earned only around $19,300 in 2013, the year following the Model Alliance survey, which breaks down to a mean hourly wage of $9.28 per hour.9 (This is about half the mean income in fashion photography, a male-dominated field, where workers earn a mean of $37,190, and about one-fourth of the annual earnings for fashion designers, who also skew dude, and take home a comfortable yearly income of $78,410.) Retail sales workers across all industries earn mean annual incomes of $21,890, with big clothing retail chains claiming a workforce that’s 85-95 percent female. Warehousing and storage workers, who tend to be male, earned an annual mean in 2013 of $29,630.

  Look more closely at those earnings. The $9.28 per hour models earned in 2013 represented just 83 percent of the $11.50 per hour living wage in New York that year;10 while median earnings reportedly rose for models in 2015, the living wage did, too, and the gap between the two persists. The most recent BLS tallies have models earning 91 percent of a living wage, which is certainly a higher percentage of a living wage than factory workers take home in Mexico (67 percent), Guatemala (50 percent), Vietnam (29 percent), or Bangladesh (14 percent). It’s also true that part of a model’s wages may be offset by the country-club lifestyle and, ahem, low food budget. Yet a percentage of a living wage, however high, is still not a living wage—what stands out, across the spectrum of fashion-related labor, is that the pay for jobs dominated by women isn’t intended to ensure survival.

  Worse than low pay, however, is no pay. A recent report on Haitian garment factories found that every single one of the country’s twenty-four garment exporters was failing to meet the national minimum wage, paying on average only two-thirds of what the law required.11 Garment workers just outside of Delhi, India, who suffer gender pay discrimination as a matter of course, have had unexplained deductions and delays in payment diminish their paychecks as well.12 Indeed, workers at retail-outlet warehouses regularly face the range of practices known as wage theft. Laborers at a Walmart supplier in California, for example, won a lawsuit in 2014 for $21 million in back pay,13 and workers at a Forever 21 warehouse filed a similar claim in 2013, claiming that their bosses didn’t compensate them for overtime, or provide them with meal or rest breaks on the job.14

  Models have likewise reported that agencies dock pay over such offenses as having gained too much weight;15 it’s also common, models claim, for agencies to delay paychecks for months on end. Agencies charge for tests, visas, portfolios, delivery fees, etc.—all deducted from earnings before payout, and not always tallied for workers’ financial records. Additionally, some designers “pay” in “trade”—apparel that is often too small to sell to anyone else and too flimsy to withstand the rigors of everyday wear.

  “As we know, stuff does not put food on the table or a roof over one’s head,” Jennifer Sky elaborates. She’s now left modeling for writing, but still sits on the Model Alliance advisory board and advocates for change in her childhood profession. “It is the extreme arrogance of the fashion industry that someone like Marc Jacobs, who runs a massive global corporation, would not pay twenty young women $500 each to walk in his show instead of ‘gifting’ them a garment or two.”

  But, as is the case with exploited warehouse workers, models face enormous structural barriers to getting their grievances heard, let alone resolved. Agencies guard against costly legal action by claiming that models are independent contractors, not employees. The temp agencies where warehouses contract for labor do the same. This designation leaves workers uncovered by many of the sexual harassment protections that apply to other classes of employees. It also just makes organizing difficult—and dovetails neatly with fashion’s individuality-forward ethos.

  “To offer no protections is absurd,” Sky contends. That’s why she wants to see her fellow models form a union. “We empower the worker who is selling us the goods; we too will become empowered. We make the fashion industry use adults to sell adult clothing; it will have a huge global impact.”

  Modeling rests on the shaky foundation we may wave off as “beauty standards,” but its relentless reification of the displayed model-consuming self has far more distressing implications in a democracy than mere aesthetic preference would indicate. Models are not merely selected to reflect—read: entrench—cultural norms, but with every turn before the camera or on the catwalk, they’re also empowered to invent them anew. The modeling industry strives to offer that unique combination of recognizably desirable and wholly inoffensive; models are charged to be serenely unattainable objects of beauty at the same time that they must remain studiously and generally unchallenging, for the big spenders in white, mainstream, heteronormative America.

  Racial discrimination is paramount. Meier, remember, initially excused the animosity she felt from other models because she wasn’t competing with them for jobs. As a woman of color, she simply couldn’t have put in for the same marquee gigs that her white counterparts would be offered; the industry is founded on the practice of physical discrimination. Meier’s career path, she felt, was distinct from other (white) models’—even though the Supreme Court decreed in 1954 that separate but equal is not equal at all.

  Designers seem never to have heard of Brown v. Board of Education—or if they have, it hasn’t occurred to them that they, too, preside over an enormously influential institution devoted to educating American taste preferences. So it took more than fifty years before racial discrimination among models gained wider public attention. A 2008 Vogue article headlined, “Is Fashion Racist?” prompted a burst of adverse publicity that had industry leaders swearing to beef up diversity practices in 2009, only to lose interest in the project again once the new spring colors hit the runway. Since the entire industry is virtually unregulated, no one seems to have proposed target numbers or quotas, and old patterns, in fashion, always reemerge. The number of black models at New York’s Spring Fashion Week hit a low in 2013, and the number of white models—83 percent—a high, with some thirteen companies hiring no models of color at all.16 By Fall Fashion Week 2016, the number of white models had dropped slightly to 75 percent—still not anything close to what a reasonable outside observer would call “diverse.”17

  When I ask Meier, who is Asian-European, about racism in modeling, her eyes widen. “It’s part of the job,” she says after a moment. “You develop a thick skin knowing you’re going to be discriminated against because of your physical a
ttributes and race or whatever anyway. You take it as part of the job.”

  Throughout our conversation, Meier had often paused to reconsider her experiences. Unlike Sky, she’s not involved in the movement for model’s rights, which helped to keep her replies from parroting any broader advocacy agenda. (“I come from the Philippines, where I don’t think there are labor laws,” she joked at one point.) She took a long pause here before continuing. “This conversation has opened me up to the idea that maybe some of these things aren’t actually OK,” she tells me. “But . . . they seemed completely OK. I accepted them. I didn’t know that I couldn’t.”

  Not knowing has consequences, of course, which is why the models’ rights movement is important—although only as important as the movement for all fashion workers’ rights. That, however, is substantial: by some estimates, between one-sixth and one-seventh of all working women in the world labor in some sector of the fashion industry, making it the field of commerce perhaps more responsible than any other for women’s economic repression around the globe.

  Organizing fashion workers has its challenges. We tend to see each workforce in this vast system as distinct to job description—models, retailers, warehouse workers, and factory employees each special little snowflakes, doing their part to keep consumers rebellious but stylish. However, each sector has more in common than it appears: the fashion industry submits its entire workforce to the same system of global Fordism that governs the race to the bottom in apparel manufacture. The more the cutter and the packer are kept at separate ends of the line on a single factory floor, the less likely they are to communicate concerns about the factory they work in. Likewise, when factory workers are segregated from retailers, warehouse workers, and models, these related workforces are unlikely to collectively challenge the global garment industry’s systematic disenfranchisement of women as workers and as consumers. For dressed in factory uniforms, sensible slacks, or glittery couture, women remain first-order targets of oppression as workers for the fashion industry—which targets them again as they line up to pay heavy markups in stores.