Welcome to real people modeling
Rise Of the Real People
The thin and beautiful have had their turn. The hippest models today look more like the rest of us.
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Scott Schuman is prowling SoHo, camera over his shoulder, looking for subjects
for his photo blog of street fashion. He spots a promising model: a girl with
long, shiny hair, wearing high heels midday on a Saturday—two signs, he says, of
a fashionista. But ultimately he decides her look is "a little too Nordstrom."
Instead, he shoots a bearded man wearing a brown puffer 
coat that cinches at the
waist. The image, when posted on Schuman's blog, The Sartorialist, draws more
than 70 comments about the coat: a good response, but hardly unusual—a single
photo on the site can attract posts from hundreds of fashion-savvy commenters,
who hotly debate the length of a jacket cuff or the fold of a pocket square.
few) are both creating and responding to interest in
street fashion. "The Look Book," a collection of photographs of
fashion-conscious New Yorkers originally published in New York Magazine, came
out last September, graced the November cover of French Vogue. Merlin
Bronques, who posts photos of trendy clubgoers on his blog, Last Night's Party,
has shot his friends for ads for Ben Sherman and Converse. Now real people are
even strutting the catwalk—the swimwear company Lycra plucked 20 women of all
shapes and sizes off the beach to model their suits at last year's Miami Swim
Fashion Week.Fashion-industry folks say the trend of using real people to sell clothes
attests to a fatigue with skinny, expressionless models in ads and on runways.
As proof, they point to the negative publicity surrounding the painfully thin
models at last spring's Fashion Week "People would like to see somebody up there who reflects how people on
the street really look." (The TV show "Ugly Betty" echoed this sentiment in a
recent episode where Betty staged an "alternative" fashion show with
nonprofessional models.) Now, with New York's Fall 2008 Fashion Week arriving
this week, fashion watchers say we may begin to see subtle indications of the
trend on the runway: the models will still be thin and gorgeous, but they may
look more like thin, gorgeous versions of real people than like stereotypical
models. "In the '80s and '90s, models were expected to look glamorous and clean,
like Niki Taylor and Christy Turlington," says Faran Krentcil, former editor of
Fashionista. "Now people want girls wearing concert T shirts and jeans they've
patched themselves—girls who have an appeal that goes beyond how pretty they
are." In other words, the demand is for models who exude personal style, whether
they're wearing their own ratty duds or haute couture.
Clothing companies are responding to the trend by seeking real people who look at home in the clothes being sold. "With the photos for Ben Sherman, I put the clothes on friends I knew who already wore Ben Sherman," says photo-blogger Bronques. It helps, of course, that Bronques happens to have some pretty great-looking friends. "The most successful brands know how to fuse what's happening on the street with their product," says Krentcil. "But if you don't look good in clothes, you're not going to sell them." And herein lies the sticking point: even designers who would embrace real models on runways face obstacles.
Still, there's no denying that change is in the air. While Ben Sherman won't be showing at fashion week, Dana Dynamite, VP of marketing, says the brand is enthusiastic about using real models on catwalks in the future.
