The garment image shows a rectangle of black-and-white speckled paper, a dark binding strip running down the left edge, and a white ruled label headed COMPOSITION. Inside that label, an outlined ghost and an outlined pumpkin sit side by side. The whole thing is printed on a shirt. It is not a notebook. It is …
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The first thing the eye finds is not the sentence. It is the hat. A cream-colored witch’s hat sits at the top of the design, drawn in an engraved style — the kind of fine parallel linework you associate with old book plates and …
Editorial note: This publication and Quirky Cotton Collective share an owner. The garment preview shows four characters and a period: meh. Lowercase. Bold. White on a dark ground. The period is doing work that a comma or an exclamation point could not — it closes the sentence before anyone else can add to it. The …
In March 2024, a commercial model in Los Angeles received a portfolio update from a brand she’d shot with back in 2019. The images weren’t new campaign stills. They were synthetic variations of her face, generated by an AI model trained on the original shoot photos. The release form she signed five years earlier contained …
A model signs with a New York agency at seventeen. Fourteen months later, she owes $8,400 in test shoot fees, housing deductions, and composite card printing costs—all advanced against future earnings that never materialized. She was sent to castings with no confirmed hourly rate. She lived in a model apartment leased by the agency’s parent …
Transparent compensation means a model knows, before accepting a booking, exactly what the client pays, what the agency deducts, when payment will arrive, and what happens if the client pays late or not at all. It sits at the intersection of contract law, labor rights, and basic business hygiene. In an industry where a single …
Body standards in fashion are the physical measurements, proportions, and visual characteristics that casting directors, designers, and clients treat as the default for commercial work. They are not abstract preferences. They are written into size charts, fit models, casting briefs, and contract riders. For working models, these standards decide who gets booked, who gets paid, …
By Dominique Laurent | Investigative Report Fashion’s body standards aren’t just about taste. They’re a set of rigid, enforceable metrics—bust, waist, hips often locked at 34-24-34 or smaller—that act as a gatekeeper. For working models, these numbers don’t just shape their employability; they dictate the legal and financial scaffolding of their entire career. Stray from …
The fashion industry’s relationship with the human body has always been a negotiation—but for working models, it’s a contract written in bone and sinew. The term “sample size” is not a neutral descriptor. It’s a gatekeeping mechanism that determines who works, who starves, and who gets discarded. For the models navigating castings in Paris, New …
It starts with a request that sounds technical, not threatening. An agency sends a casting brief: come in for a digitization session. A studio in New York or Los Angeles has a scanning rig. It takes forty minutes. You stand on a turntable while cameras capture hundreds of angles. The technician tells you to hold …