Jenna’s Model Life

This is your freshly washed hair.

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And you kind of love it. It’s curly, but not bushy. It’s shiny and it feels soft. It isn’t tangly, and it reminds you of your little-girl wish for a head of big, tumbling curls.

If only there was anything that could be done to keep it this way: Within hours of waking up, your hair has inevitably fallen flat, its curls have unfurled, and it’s starting to look more like its normal, abused, shaggy mess. Snares of tangles follow by lunchtime. As soon as you give in to the temptation of the hairbrush, you know you’re sunk. Every strand separates and stands aloft from its neighbours in a big, frizzy halo.

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This is salon-grade, professionally-treated, blown-out, serum-shined, hot-ironed, fresh-from-the-chair hair. You are dreaming if you think you could ever in your life replicate this at home. It feels like spun silk, it’s been three days and you haven’t had to do more than run a comb through it each morning, and every time you pull it — effortlessly, one-handedly! — into a ponytail, it feels like 50% of its mass has been smoothed away. If hair had a bond rating, your locks would be AAA. Yours is the Berkshire Hathaway of hair. It might as well be made of rainbows and shed strands of unicorn tail, because you will never see hair like this again — outside of another visit to your stylist.

Nonetheless, you will convince yourself. All she did was blow-dry it and then use a straightening iron. You‘ve got a straightening iron. After the fifth day, all your New Haircut softness and manageability drops off precipitously, and you’re left pondering those powdered shampoos in the drugstore. Anything to nurse along the salon glow. But what you really need is a shower, a shower where you get your hair wet. So you buck up.

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This is more like it. You had almost managed to forget, to kid yourself that you had Good Hair. It was always the same old dry mane, it’s just that some Italian chick with a superior hair skillset had her temporary way with your locks. And the worst part is, even looking at this photo, you’re still thinking, At least I did a pretty good job on the side bangs. They don’t totally suck.

Yeah. Model to model: Fuck you, girl on the box.

These are Polaroids of me, my friend Liz, and Mark The Cobrasnake Hunter. Liz goes everywhere with a green-and-pink Barbie™ Polaroid camera. It’s useful for taking pictures of things.

A stranger hit the shutter for us, in front of the big spinning cube in Astor Place, and then Liz held up the Polaroids for me to photograph.

The Cobrasnake told us that he picked his name because snakes are cobras, and cobras are snakes, and there was an appealing kind of infinite (which he pronounced, “in-FINNit”), circular logic to the handle. He also made mention of the fact that he has a t-shirt for sale with Ksubi that costs $109. He claimed never to have taken drugs. After we left, he sent Liz a text that read, simply, “That was fun.”

Walgreens: It’s got what you crave.

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Ghostface Jennah has no comment on this modeling get-up.

I saw these guys outside the Ralph Lauren show Friday morning. Liz asked them if they had a Lenny Kravitz sort of steez going on, and they looked at her with straight faces, and said, “No.”

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College Friend Greg shaved his cheekwarmer! You heard it here first.

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“No, the thing about the Romanian Abortion Movie is that in the last scene, the two main characters eat a plate of brains and entrails. As you do, in Eastern Europe, I understand, but for me that was, like, Hello! Over-the-top metaphor, come on in and make yourself at home. Which is why I still rate Salò as the saddest movie ever.”

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“Have you seen Irréversible? Because I think that is a very sad movie.”

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“Dude, I am so in love with you right now.”

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“Well, I am the hotness.”

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“Don’t look at me, man, I’m in love with her, too. She bought us sake! In little pitchers!”

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“Really, won’t you just come and live on my couch and say things like, ‘In Poland, when we sell women into marriage, under Communism we expect only two goats. Capitalism has increased my value to three goats and a chicken!’ And whenever I have a dumb friend who drops by and asks you if Poland is named because it’s so close to the North Pole, you can scream at him in Polish.”

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“I’m not sure how to take that, Greg. How would it work between us when I’m informed that you are this small?”

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“Oh.”

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“I mean, who told you that? Come on.”

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“Back me up here, bro?”

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“I think we better just remember this as one awesome night.”

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“Well, okay. But what do you think of Michael Winterbottom?”

How’d I spend Friday night, you wonder? Swinging from a chandelier, knocking back calorie-free rum-and-diet-Cokes, or partying hearty after a long day of shows? Not quite. Or at least, the night didn’t start out that way.

My polymath writer friend Nam was in town to give a reading in the yoga room of a Union Square gym, so I took along College Friend Greg and we listened. First the gym handed out free day passes to everyone in attendance — Isn’t this kind of like giving copies of War and Peace to the spinning class? whispered CFG, and while I agree in principle, I’m totally using mine to schedule a massage for the day after fashion week ends — and then Matthew Klam read a really great short story that came out in the New Yorker in 2006. Then Nam read part of this story Peter and I and CFG and my friend Alyssa and everyone else I’ve mentioned it to really like, and which was deservedly in last year’s Best American Nonrequired Reading.

We migrated two doors down the street for an enjoyable Two Buck Chuck-fueled reception, during which time I talked with an effusive Indian named Digs about his boarding school (”So conservative we had to wear swimsuits when we showered,” said Digs), Project Runway (he’s a Jeffrey fan! Gah!), and ethnic literature. Then he offered to get me some lipgloss from one of his cosmetics clients (he works in PR) and finesse my boyfriend’s résumé ahead of our potential move to New York City. Though Digs regrettably headed home, CFG and I braced ourselves to continue the night with Nam and his entourage, which included a fellow Writers’ Workshop alum, and This American Life contributor Starlee Kine.

We went to Soho and began drinking heavily. Nam ate a sandwich, I had a molten-centre chocolate cake served with ice cream that mysteriously stayed unmelted and intact (how is that possible? surface tension? localised cold spot over the table?) for what seemed like an hour, while CFG and Starlee talked about candidates for the most depressing movie ever (the Romanain Abortion Movie v. Passolini’s Salò: Discuss) and the anxiously fertile Starlee intermittently solicited tall gentlemen for possible spermination. Nam and I discussed what it’s like to have agents, and therefore be able to put together sentences like, “My agent and I are doing lunch.” We ordered more mojitos and I had a beer from Maine that cost $8 and Starlee told a story about how although her favourite video store in Brooklyn gave her the name of the deadbeat who’s had the season two disc five of The Wire out for months, now she doesn’t know what to do, Facebook him or call him or what.

When we wrapped up, it was almost 4 a.m. We had to hand the poor waitress a sheaf of bankcards with esoteric bill-splitting directions composed on a tiny piece of paper. So many numbers and mathematics so difficult. So tired.

My eyes snapped open at 8:30 and I headed to Midtown for a hair and makeup test at 10 a.m. Certain of the bigger designers will pay models they aren’t using in their shows significant sums of money (sums of money more significant, in fact, than smaller designers pay the models they are using in their shows) simply for the use of their hair and skin a few days out from the runway. The team has at you, plays around with various looks, and then you try on some of the clothes to test how it all meshes. It’s basically being paid to play dress-up, only with more crud in your hair.

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This took four hours to achieve. I look like a black-eyed triangle-headed alien who gets her hair done either with or by Yulia Tymoshenko, except mine are five-stranded plaits, not three. Quite becoming, you must agree! Astoundingly, the hair team was the same Cockney-accented gay comedy crew who had me in stitches in Paris last season when they gave me a giant teased globe of interwoven curls. “Do you mind me putting goop in your hair, love?” leered the one with the hat as he squirted a pile of translucent styling cream into his palm.

“I think she likes it when you put goop in her hair, yeh,” replied the one in the t-shirt.

“Just a bit of protein, love, won’t hurt ya!”

“Comes right out with a wash.”

And then they set to work.

When they were all done, of course the man in charge of the rolling suitcase of products had packed up and ran off to a shoot with the powder shampoo that would have gone some way to relieving my locks of their solid, wet, dank film. And of course Mr. Hat and Mr. T-Shirt immediately turned and said to each other, “Blimey, today’s products were nas-ty.”

“Nasty indeed.”

“Nice enough guy but I’d never use that if I had a choice.”

“If I had a choice, yeh.”

The makeup artist’s assistant thrust a fistful of wipes at me and said, “Will this do?”

I nodded gamely. I had another three castings. So I took off the makeup as best as I could, then picked the navy-blue sleep out of the corners of my eyes with my pinkie, and persuaded the wiseacres to make the best of the situation and give me a nice, sleek ponytail. Lunch had just arrived, so I grabbed a bowl of dill and squash soup and some bread, and I was on my way.

This is what New York Fashion week looks like.

And this is what New York Fashion Week looks like:

I worked my first show last night, and it was pretty awesome. Not only did the jewelry I was wearing look really pretty on my throat and wrists, it meant I merited my very own trenchcoat-wearing, portly, Italianish Noo Yawk bodyguard when I went from backstage out to the building foyer to whisk my college friend Greg in from the cold. All photos by college friend Greg. You’re a trooper, dude!

Since fashion week had not officially begun yesterday evening — things kicked off today with a massive parade of BlackBerry-dingling fashionistas, models in lockstep, singing stylists, and the requisite drag queens down Fifth Avenue, didn’t you hear? — the show I worked was not a “show” but a “presentation.” Instead of marching down a runway, we got our hair did and our shiny leggings shimmied into and our Space Age Sophia Loren faces on and our two-inch acrylic nails that impeded manual dexterity to an amazing degree glued, and then we posed. For two hours. In front of a gaggle of gawkers. Important gawkers, I’m sure.

The blonde in the middle of the top row, in the red-and-black dress, was from Australia and she was really cool. One of the girls had her period — you can perhaps imagine how difficult it was to place a tampon with those damn nails on. Toileting myself during my one break was hard enough — I had to get a stylist’s assistant to help me jack up the shiny tights afterwards. You have to lower some of the boundaries around your body to model.

But hot damn! Did I love how I looked in the yellow get-up.

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More to come, darlings.