Here’s A Brand New Project I’m Very Proud Of

I have some very exciting news to share: an organization that is very dear to my heart, and a project that I’ve had the honor of working on in one capacity or another on and off since the fall of 2009, is now on the cusp of its public début.

The Model Alliance is the brainchild of my friend and partner Sara Ziff — check out Shakthi Jothianandan’s excellent profile of Sara in the brand new issue of New York — and I am proud to serve on its board. The Model Alliance is a brand new nonprofit that works to address labor issues in the fashion industry, particularly labor issues affecting models. We want to promote the health and well-being of the very young people — many of them just children — who work as models.

We’ve been thrilled at the level of support we’ve enjoyed from the fashion industry: for many months now, we’ve enjoyed a very productive relationship with the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and we’ve had positive meetings with top editors at American Vogue,  show producers, casting agents, key people at various top modeling agencies, and many, many models. And we are lucky enough to count professor Susan Scafidi of the Fashion Law Institute at Fordham Law School and professor Dorian Warren of Columbia University as members of our board. The top model Coco Rocha sits on our advisory board. And we just got a shout-out from none other than CFDA president Diane von Furstenberg in her seasonal open letter to the industry. She threw her support behind our Backstage Privacy Policy, one of the three initiatives we’re pushing for this coming season.

Our Web site very quietly went live on Monday. You should all go click on it! Especially this page, where we’ve published beautiful, un-airbrushed portraits by Peter Ash Lee of many of our founding supporters, and this page, where you can read Sara’s introductory note, and this page, where you can see three excellent essays. One is by Lisa Cant, who writes about navigating the conflicts between having a career and getting an education, one is by Lisa Davies, who writes about financial transparency, and one is by Jessica Clark, who — under consideration for a major international cosmetics campaign — writes about the construction of race within the industry. You could also click here to get information on our three policy initiatives for the FW12 season, here to check out our news feed, where I’ll be writing about labor issues and news, and, oh, look, here you can even give us money. (Money is great, it really helps us do things.) Over the coming weeks, we have so many great things in store. If you want to make sure you’ll be the first to know, follow us on Twitter or “Like” us on Facebook.

This has been a long time coming. I love working in fashion, but given my background and experiences, I know first-hand there are problems in this industry. I, for one, am proud to be helping to find solutions.

A New Interview With Me In Black Magazine

Last September, my friend Isaac introduced me to a photographer from New Zealand named Adam Custins. Adam works mostly on large-format Polaroid film, and he was visiting New York for the first time. He came up to my apartment for a cuppa on one of those languorous late summer afternoons when all you want to do, if you’re me, is make tea and conserve energy for fashion week, and we had a great conversation about models and modeling, how the industry works for photographers, finding Polaroid film, and the places we’ve lived. I think we ate some biscuits that had just arrived in the mail from my mum. Somewhere in there, he took a few Polaroids of me.

A few months later, once Adam was back in Auckland, he asked if he could interview me for the New Zealand fashion and culture magazine Black, which was interested in running one of his portraits along with a short feature on me. I happily consented, and we had a long chat on Skype about fashion as art, writing for online vs. writing for print, my family background, growing up in New Zealand before the Internet was really A Thing, and how that meant I had to pay $20 a pop for my out-of-date issues of Vogue Paris at the only newsagent in Christchurch that would special-order them for me. (You kids with your Fashion Gone Rogue, you don’t know how easy you got it.) The resulting story is now out; click on the thumbs to enlarge, or else I’ve copied and pasted the text after the jump, in case you’re curious.