My mother didn’t exactly love that I loved fashion. My stubborn and fanciful fondness for what she felt was a rather superficial industry built on questionable values and my ill-managed paychecks were a concern for a feminist doctor who paid her own way through Stanford.
As she saw it, fashion magazines were full of skinny models donning unaffordable material goods that falsely promised self-worth with purchase. She feared (she knew) the imagery was fake. She feared it made me insecure. (It did.) She disapproved of my spending.
And don’t get her started on the health hazards of high heels and tight jeans or the travesty of style that low-rise jeans represent. She’s equally vocal about the tight American Eagle t-shirts and the porn style that was American Apparel. Then there’s the issue of outrageous pricing, the shallowness of brand names, the grotesque flaunting of a status symbol, and a little logo-studded purse that holds absolutely nothing.
On the overarching female-body-as-frivolous-sex-object culture that all this “cute” and “trendy” clothing represented.
These were concerns enough. We didn’t even know about the environmental damage taking place to produce the Abercrombie jeans that she would not buy me. Nor were we aware of how horribly underpaid the garment workers sewing said jeans abroad were. In 2002, at around the time when my Limited Too catalogs became Delia’s catalogs, filled with circles I’d drawn around new t-shirts I just had to have, George Packer exposed how thrift store surplus was heading to Africa—but we wouldn’t read his article until 20 years later.
This is not my memoir, no. I am writing a review of (or rather a response to) activist and supermodel Cameron Russell’s latest book.
Her memoir, How To Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone, which is in part a long letter to her mother. Another strong woman who also did her best to protect her beautiful daughter from the darker, more preying sides of the fashion industry.
How To Make Herself Agreeable… is an opus of semi-confessions. Lamentations of the fashion industry’s continuous and unavoidable—no matter how warned you are—abuse of female bodies. Stories Russell did not want her mom to know or suffer. An academic-footnote-reinforced (citing model memoirs, ethnographies, theories, philosophies of the career) compilation of her insights into what it really took to become and then be a supermodel. A revelation into how ironic it is that the glorification of the female fashion image comes at the cost of any respect for the actual woman at the center of the picture.
With this book, Russell reclaims the voice silenced during her modeling career.
Russell writes, “By elevating me for something I have no control over, [my inherited looks], the industry and economy signal to all women: There is almost nothing you can do or create that is as valuable as how you look.” And continues, “The better I am at being submissive, the better my chances of success.”
Good looks and submission. The latter, at least, is not the aspiration of most strong girls. The former is not to be over-prioritized by the intelligent woman.
So why did she do it? In the Russell household, making a living by showing off one’s body rather than intellect was not immediately considered a great career choice. But as she puts it, “No other job would pay the day rate I am making now.” Which is exactly the problem.
“We are crude in an effort to trivialize the superficial while having our fortunes tied so intimately to it,” Russell writes, adding how her mother told her not to share just how much money she made modeling with her friends. “Anyone who works hard for their money will feel kind of degraded,” her mom said.
It has always seemed imbalanced that hot models and musicians generate millions of dollars while brilliant women like my mom work nights and weekends at Urgent Care to make middle-class ends meet.
How To Make Herself Agreeable… (HTMHATE going forward) is not the first time Russell has brought the issues of unfair inherited standards of beauty and objectification, as well as racism in fashion, to our attention.
In 2012, she became the first fashion model to deliver a TED Talk, explaining that while fashion images are powerful, they are also superficial. She highlighted the extensive retouching in fashion photography, pointing out models who were well-lit, unnaturally posed, and heavily styled with spray tan and hair spray, often fearful of eating. Not coincidentally, reports at the time indicated that 78% of 17-year-old girls were unhappy with their bodies.
Russell is adamant that she doesn’t deserve any particular credit for just being a “pretty, white woman” (or in industry speak, a “sexy girl”). She acknowledges that she benefits from a longstanding, narrow definition of beauty that favored her success over many others, particularly people of color. The talk was ahead of its time, eight years before the Black Lives Matter movement encouraged fashion companies to create more diverse marketing, before body positivity became (barely) more of a thing. HTMHATE continues the discourse. Her career “[celebrated] my White face over and over while women of color make, pack, ship, and sell the clothes for nothing close to a livable wage.” (White with a capital W to emphasize how America and the world overvalue whiteness).
What Russell didn’t mention in 2012 was the sexual harassment.
How To Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone is, finally, a #MeToo moment. Russell reveals the multiple, ceaseless attempts by men to get her drunk and sleep with her. To touch her tits. To photograph her nude. To have her stay with them upstate. “I don’t think I wanted to kiss you…” writes Russell about giving in to one photographer’s advances, “but maybe I wanted to know what kissing is like?” in an illustration of how male photographers, stylists, agents, and more preyed on young models’ vulnerability, curiosity, and fresh youth. Her experience dodging slimy men would have made my protective mother die inside.
Being a famous supermodel also involved a dissolution of her self.
We are grateful Cameron kept enough critical thinking to write this exposé. She embodied the cultural ideal of the perfect body, but notes that “to build a career around my body required me to disassociate from the body.” The image constructions were not how she usually looked. Nor did she have any real say in how she appeared. “I am speechless after all…what we say with our bodies is not evidence that we are saying anything at all.” Being agreeable—getting ahead—was about letting the image constructors believe they made you. Letting them believe they owned you.
The industry demanded Russell look sexually available at 16 years old. The world she entered was a culture of images imbued with desire, paid by men, viewed by men. Sex sells, after all.
Models are not only sexually abused (sometimes to the point of suicide– Russell relays in a harrowing story) but also insanely underpaid.
“According to the Department of Labor,” she reports, “models average a little over twenty-five thousand dollars a year, far below a livable wage. Although it may seem that they should only receive a small salary for what Russell often emphasizes is not necessarily a highly skilled job, it’s important to remember that these women’s bodies drive and sustain the wealth of the richest men in the world. These men oversee an industry that employs at least 430 million people and generates nearly $1.8 trillion (and likely more) annually.
HTMHATE (which, fun fact, by the way, wants to autocorrect here as HTML HATE, which, if we consider this story a sort of fashion industry code, sounds fitting) is ultimately a confirmation that in the business of making and selling [excess] garments, women’s bodies are exploited at all levels of the supply chain. Russell continues re: the poor pay, “And that’s just models; wage theft and unlivable wages are standard throughout the supply chain.”
Damage from the fashion industry is widespread: from pesticide-ridden cotton crops to overworked and underpaid garment workers, to poorly paid retail associates, to cruel bosses, to sexually harassed and assaulted models, to consumer victims going into debt, to minds poisoned by images that invoke a lack of self-worth, to then the environment again when we trash our old clothes.
Like last season’s styles, Russell is profoundly aware of her own disposability.
“I want to know what happens to models when we find ourselves, no longer fourteen and doe-eyed like the day we were scouted, but adults, navigating access to mainstream media and wealth, largely made possible by poverty wages and resource-intensive production,” she writes.
Not long after reading Cameron’s memoir, I saw The Substance, in which an aging but gorgeous Demi Moore puts herself at…uh, we’ll not spoil it and simply say “serious health risk” in pursuit of eternal youth and beauty. She, too, is disposable to the industry. She, too, is owned by her male bosses, one ironically named Harvey. This is all not long after the shock of watching a man who proudly “just grabs pussies” get re-elected into office. This memoir is more relevant than ever.
Women, we need each other; we need to help each other. Russell’s work, her life’s work, could be deconstructed to say just that.
–Anne Elizabeth Whiting
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