Jenna’s Model Life

Fashion flotsam: ladymag inspiro-collages, composite cards, cigarettes, and the right kind of hairspray. Note the colorswatched skeins of human hair, and the pile of hairpieces. You know what this means: Wigs!

My Saturday job was for internal use at a chain of hair salons. The series of images were intended to illustrate to stylists the correct diagnosis of a client’s face shape, and the transformation of that client by the application of a suitable haircut — that familiar beauty industry fiction of the incipient beauty awakened by specialised knowledge and tools. The first shots were un-made-up, pony-tailed photomat snaps; the final image in each model’s series was of a confident, extroverted Hot Chick throwing down outrageous poses. Because that’s what we women do when we are blessed with Great Haircuts. I strutted, jumped, goofed, leaned, hoisted limbs aloft, smiled with my eyes, and tossed my hair around to my heart’s content when my time came.

In the lineup of shapes, I was, I learned, the visage losange — the diamond-face. All day long, I heard conversations like this:

Assistant hairdresser: “When does the Circle get here?”

Hairdresser: “She starts at 2 p.m.”

Assistant hairdresser: “What about the Square?”

Hairdresser: “Square’s not till tomorrow.”

As if we were Platonic forms descending upon the studio according to our own inscrutable schedule. At various points, team members actually called me losange. Which makes sense, in a way: I’d been losange on a storyboard, in meetings, and in a client’s mind for months. I’d only been Jenna since 8:30 that morning.

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Like I said, the first look was very basic and natural. There’s René, the head hairdresser, waving his favourite bottle of hairspray — he caught the assistant applying some kind of inferior atomised stick to my head, and immediately made her brush it out and start again. The makeup artist was truly special — quick, and so talented I felt about five notches unprettier when I had to wash off her handiwork at the end of my day.

The studio was a big, family-run space in a town outside Paris. The photographer’s brother, mother, and various children wandered in and out all day. I like how the lighting makes it look like I selectively coloured the armchairs and the plant in the foreground, and the makeup artist on the set.

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I was nervous when René started preparing my head to be wigged.

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This mainly involved pulling my hair straight back into a tight ponytail.

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And applying a thick coat of lacquer to my crown.

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A slathering of red eyeshadow later — and I suddenly have orange Jon Bon Jovi hair!

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I tried to capture the wig’s magnificent mullet, but I couldn’t fit it in the frame.

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Wigs kind of hurt your head. But they also kind of make you feel goofy.

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My transformation was completed when they tied the mullet-fronds out of sight behind my neck, and gave me an H&M t-shirt, a bunch of necklaces, and an Alaïa skirt. I threw a memory card’s worth of ridiculous poses before the photographer said he had ‘it.’ (That means I totally out-posed the Oval, a Russian with limited English who ate half a salad for lunch while I had salmon tagliatelle and home-made tiramisu, because he had her keep going for three cardsful.)

Unfortunately I don’t have any snaps of that (and anyway, the images are proprietary). You might wonder how I have any pictures at all, given my dearly departed camera. Recently, Model Room-mate was fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of a French-American student, whose friendship I more or less inherited when she left the country a few weeks back. His photographic needs being well-served by his ultracompact point-n-shoot and his iPhone, he was kind enough to lend me his Lumix DMC-FZ5. Which has been pretty awesome so far.