Banking on Beauty

Modelling is a schooling-friendly yet potentially lucrative way for slender young things to make some money. But how safe are teenagers in a world where they’re judged on looks alone? Sally Jones and her model daughter share their experience

When my daughter Madeline, a 16-year-old lower-sixth former at King Edward’s High School for Girls, Birmingham, announced she wanted to model, having morphed from a sports-mad adolescent into a skinny, sports-mad six-footer, I was horrified.

I used to work in television and often worked with models, so knew the pitfalls; the continual focus on size and appearance that triggers so much insecurity in vulnerable girls and often leads to anorexia or bulimia; the seamy demi-monde on the fringes of the industry, preying on naïve youngsters; the frequent rejections and self-criticism, from which many take refuge in drink or drugs.

At a photo session for The Sunday Times in the 1980s, I met one high-profile model who needed a bottle of champagne before every shoot, and another whose first morning ablution was to do a line of cocaine on the agency’s loo seat. That’s not the future I imagined for my daughter.

The lure of glamour
But even I can see that the idea of overnight stardom is seductive for most teenagers struggling through GCSEs. Tales of gangly girls (and boys) spotted as potential supermodels in Top Shop and jetting off on big-money Caribbean shoots sweep through schools and enhance the fantasy, especially when more and more models are emerging from independent schools.

“I do like a posh girl,” jokes Samantha Cookson, director of New Faces at Profile Model Management in Covent Garden, and former Cosmo fashion editor. “They’re usually organised and can separate school and modelling better, especially if they’re boarders. The Eastern Europeans are hard working and money-driven, but the slightly eccentric quirkiness of well-brought up English girls, like Stella Tennant and Jacquetta Wheeler, is unique and adorable. That’s why there are so many English supermodels.”

So how on earth do embryo models still at highly focused top schools cope with juggling history and haute couture?

“I say to the schoolgirls I work with: ‘I’m your second priority’,” answers Cookson. “I understand if you can’t do a shoot because of revision or exams or a hockey match – but not because you spent half the holidays partying.”

Some turn their back on academia the moment they bank their first million, but a good handful relish achieving top grades along with top catwalk billing. Take Lily Cole, who famously gained a deferred place at Cambridge despite her rapid rise to supermodel status.

Juggling modelling with GCSEs
Fellow redhead and academic high-flyer Alice Gibb, with a full house of A-grade GCSEs, likewise cleverly juggled her school commitments with modelling. “I think there are girls at my school who might be jealous,” she admitted recently,“but actually I don’t know why, because modelling isn’t that glamorous. You sit around for hours waiting for fittings, and they never have shoes big enough for me so I always have blisters. But my friends just hear that I stayed in an apartment in New York by myself and they say, ‘Wow, that must have been so cool!’ when actually it was a bit lonely.”

Undeterred, my daughter emailed some amateurish snaps to several London agencies. Most were politely discouraging, but Bookings in Shoreditch suggested a meeting. Terrified by tales of exploitation and anorexia, I insisted on going too, and after a two-hour train and Tube ride from Warwickshire, we arrived – Madeline quietly excited, me pessimistic but reluctant to crush her dreams. Five minutes later, after a quick Polaroid and a muttered conference between the bookers, we were out on the street: ‘Thanks but no thanks’.

After several more disappointments, we wearily slunk into Profi le Model Management in Covent Garden, where their booker Gemma took a Polaroid and, to our amazement, welcomed her with open arms. Yes, she had the look they wanted and would only work at weekends and holidays as school definitely came first – reassuring words to a mum...