There I was, doing nothing, when I received an Instagram notification from a Big Deal modeling agency: An agent wanted me to come into the office for a casting.
Opening the message, I realized it was not from the main account but, rather, their “curve” division. Most Big Deal agencies, in a bid to be more inclusive, have separate plus-size divisions, and recently some have rebranded from “plus-size” to the more nebulous “curve”—but does this rebrand really do anything but dress up an unfairly tiered system?
I am curvy—but curvy enough to go in for a curve casting? I have breasts that I suspect I inherited from my paternal grandmother, who had a penchant for high-waisted trousers and sweater sets, so it was hard to tell what ended where. From my maternal grandmother—a six-foot-tall corn- and matzah-fed midwestern beauty, I inherited the rest. I am not, though, plus-size, even by New York’s distorted standards. When I was growing up in the 2000s, Renée Zellweger was considered chubby. On America’s Next Top Model, a show which should be tried at the Hague for human rights violations, plus-sized girls were basically a size eight—four was even pushing it. One girl got so thin during filming that she stopped being plus-size altogether.
Wanting to be asked to model and wanting to model are each distinct personality defects. Everybody, I think, wants to be asked: You dream of someone eying you on the street as you trot along and they call out, “Hey”—dollar signs in their eyes, heart thumping out of their chest—“Hey! Have you ever considered modeling?” You, radiant bashful you, say, “Why, no, actually”—because you’re just too smart for that, or too damn busy, or any one of another myriad excuses. You always want to be invited to a party, even if you don’t want to go.
For the next week, I stared at the message whenever I opened my phone. I didn’t quite know how to say “I’m not sure I’m curvy enough,” so instead I spent a week saying things like, “I shouldn’t go, should I?” to my friend, and then her boyfriend would say things like, “And this isn’t a scam?” I would respond haughtily that “I’m sure nobody ever asked Gisele if she was being scammed.”
I also thought about the woman who made me who I am today: Carrie Bradshaw. In season 4, episode 2 of Sex and The City, Carrie is recruited to be an authentic New York Real Person model. She spends most of the episode with a gleeful smile saying “but I’m not a model,” until she’s walking down the runway in a pair of sparkly Dolce and Gabbana briefs alongside Frank Rich and Fran Lebowitz. Stanford tells her, “You’re the modeley-iest of the real people.”
So I went anyway, crossing the threshold from person who wants to be asked to person who wants. Immediately, the modeling agent was surprised—the first time in my life someone was upset that I was thinner than they thought I was.
She ushered me into a room. “So, you’re 17?” I laughed. “Not recently!” This, though, was not the right answer. Pursing her lips, she followed with, “What’s your ethnicity?” I was confident in this answer. “White.” “Really?” “New Yorker.” “Really?” “Midwestern?” “Really?” “Jewish?”
Leaning away from me: “And what are your hobbies?”
“Hobbies?” I repeated the word doltishly. She rattled off a couple—soccer, pottery, baking—as if my apparent amnesia would dissolve and I would remember that I was an avid knitter. “I’m a writer.” “Is that a hobby?” Yes, according to the IRS. “No.” “So—no hobbies.” She capped her pen.
It was a strike against me that I was not curvier, a strike against me that I was old, and now this? Somehow this agent thought I was a non-white plus-size teenage hobbyist. Mentally I scrolled through my Instagram, inspecting photos I’d posted of myself—flexing at Brighton Beach, my Halloween costume as Mrs. Robinson from The Graduate—wondering how I’d so gravely misrepresented myself.
Time to take digitals. Front. Back. Side. I wanted to say, “Stop no! I don’t look good from that angle!” But the point of modeling, of course, is to look good from that angle. It was all very frightening. She explained she would be taking a video of me where I walk around in a little circle and then pose.
As I stuck the landing, hip out, soft smile into the camera, the agent called out, trying to catch me unaware: “What are your hobbies?” My smile became gummy, haunted by the question. I resisted the urge to yell out, “And what are your hobbies?!”
How had the modeling industry gotten here? Fashion has always had an obsession with reality—after all, fashion is both an imitation of reality and an aspiration toward it. As we’ve traveled further digitally, though, our reality has traveled with it, and where we’ve landed, the average person has a lot more sway than they used to: They’re able to access new audiences and generate massive followings—what was once a blog is now a Substack; the weekend potter sells on Etsy—and this economy of the hustle hasn’t spared the modeling industry.
Today there are Instagram models and influencer models. There are runway models, the new supermodels, the old supermodels, plus-size models and curve models, straight-size models, and personalities asked to model; models who aren’t supposed to have personality, and models who drip with it. You can model for Balenciaga, or model your makeup routine on YouTube, or get sponsored to post about how much you love Skims. There are a million new boxes to check, a million ways to be real, a million ways to not be beautiful enough or not have enough followers or be not curvy enough or not skinny enough, so a million ways to fail and a million ways to succeed.
And how had I gotten here—was I so hungry that all I wanted was for someone, anyone, to say “You’re beautiful, you should model”? Sinking self-worth into a volatile market is a bad investment. Worse still, when had I decided to take myself so seriously? Or was the self-imposed seriousness an attempt to shield myself from the unknown, from rejection, to box myself up before somebody else could? I had gotten so stuck on whether I could or couldn’t that I’d stopped asking myself if I wanted to. The whole thing was a case of mistaken identity—or two cases: One on the part of the agent to me, and the other me to myself.
As she shooed me out the door, the agent said, “I’ll email you the digitals.” She never emailed me the digitals. Standing on the street in FiDi, though, I realized she was right.
I did need a hobby.