Working As A Model Booker
Do agencies represent male and female models?
In the old days, when there were fewer model agencies and men's divisions were new, they tended to be combined. Now the market has grown dramatically in the men's market. The divisions run very separately. You often find that it's a very different group of clients. If I was representing purely women and I was approached by a very experienced booker from a men's agency, I'd have to really think twice about her, because I'm sure we could do the job properly, but what I would be wanting is someone that was bringing a knowledge of clients, and now the two are very separate.
Do model bookers regularly work for the same publications or designers?
In the industry, we have what we call bread and butter, which generally tend to be Northern catalogue houses, like GUS, Littlewoods and Freeman's, and they are the mainstay of any agency: the more we can supply to them the better. That is not our prestigious work or work that we promote, but it pays the rent, it pays the salaries. At the next level up you have the department stores, the high street chains like Marks & Spencers or Top Shop, who have very big budgets and they work regularly. NEXT Directories are one of our most important clients in this country because they shoot all year round and they have enormous budgets for models. That's one side of being a model booker. The mail order is a very valid part of it. Surprisingly, the least well paid is the magazine markets. When a girl does a cover of Vogue for example, she gets £50, the agency makes £10, and by the time she's paid tax it's £20 in her pocket. However, that is a platform for a model to become a star because that's the most prestigious magazine of the lot, and on the back of it she could command fees from somewhere between £15-30,000 a day for a mail order company or for a high street chain.
Do you get paid commission for each model you provide?
The difficulty with paying bookers commission is that it's not always one booker that has seen the job from beginning to end. If that booker is out at lunch or having a pee, someone else may pick up the phone. The client doesn't necessary have the patience to wait for that specific person to come back in to sign the deal off. So on each job, four bookers may have been involved in it. The booker reports directly to the model involved because models are divided between the bookers, not necessarily the client.
How much can a successful model booker earn?
Model bookers can earn quite a lot of money if they're very good at it, because it's directly equatable to how much money they are bringing into a company. You're not necessarily earning money on each deal that you do, but I started my career earning £5,000 and ended up having a very large six figure salary.
Does more than one model booker provide talent for a job?
In New York, particularly, girls tend to have their own managers within a model agency. With Gisele, Tyra Banks or Naomi Campbell, there would be only one person allowed to deal with them. If I was a big client that wanted to book several supermodels, I would expect to talk to several different bookers about individual girls. However, on lower markets, if I'm a catalogue or a magazine, ringing up saying, "Who have you got available?", it doesn't matter to me who I'm talking to.
How can you tell if someone has star quality?
Finding a great model is like finding a great book: you can never be sure if someone has got star quality or not. It's that X factor, that sixth sense, whatever you want to call it, and I've represented some really gorgeous girls who would stop cars when they walk down the street, but I couldn't get them arrested when I sent them to clients. It's not purely about the looks at all. Everybody in the industry needs to feel like they've discovered something, so that when a girl walks into a room, they think, "You know what? I can see something in her that you can't. I can bring out this magic in this girl." So being pretty is absolutely not good enough at all. It's about something that happens behind the lens; it's about a relationship that a girl can have with a photographer. A model has to inspire wherever she goes, or else she just won't make it.
How do you know what the fashion designer wants?
How do you cope with a difficult model?
If you are in love with your job and you like doing your job, you accept that coping with difficult people is part and parcel of it. You have to have an empathy as to why they're being difficult. Is it being difficult? Is it being sensitive? Nobody behaves badly for the sheer hell of it and if you have been part of the creative process of making that model known, of guiding the career in the right way, you have that pride. It's a bit like having a child: "I've helped create this, therefore it's in my interests to keep her happy." As a model booker, we have to accept we're dealing with individuals, with youngsters that have not really developed in a natural way, and you have been part of giving them that unnatural environment to deal with. You are emotionally obliged to help her through it and if that means you're going to have the odd tantrum or the odd four o'clock in the morning phone call, if you're enjoying what your doing and taking it seriously it actually doesn't bother you at all.
Have you discovered someone who is now a big star?
I've always been responsible for Jodie Kidd and Naomi Campbell. I didn't physically find Naomi on the street, my boss did; she brought her in, and I thought, "Oh, she's alright." I wasn't overly-excited by her, I've got to tell you. I had to be really convinced by other people as well, because there's a moment when you see an image and you think: "God, it's happened, and we do have something special." There was a sixth sense in me thinking: "Okay, she's all right." I knew instinctively that I had to keep her a little bit exclusive, but it wasn't until I saw her first picture that I was a hundred percent convinced by it. With Jodie, we took a huge risk because she used to look shocking. She looked like this complete scruff with the most awful teeth you've ever seen, and I wasn't sure, but something in me thought: "There is something here." Again, by about her third set of tests, you knew she was a star, and that's all she could have been. She couldn't have been a working girl. You have to then approach the career in a different way. There would have been no way that I could have sent her out to the general castings. We had to pick and choose who we felt were right to work with her.
Do you provide all the models on a particular production?
Each casting that we get for a show or whatever is fair game. You are competing against several different agencies. The only way that you can control it and have a monopoly of your talent in anything is by essentially buying it or undercutting other model agencies, which is not something that I would encourage.
Is modelling on the catwalk different from magazine work?
Modelling on the catwalk is completely different to modelling in a studio for a magazine, for example. It's a completely different vibe. You have to impress a live audience when you're on a catwalk. You have to walk in a certain way and hold yourself in a certain way. There were many girls we represented who just weren't very good on the catwalk at all. In the old days, until probably the late 80s, the girls didn't cross over. You had catwalk girls, you had print girls for the magazines and you had catalogue girls. Now everybody crosses over and does everything. Catwalk has become a little less refined that in used to be. All that poise and elegance of the 50s isn't as relevant today as it was then. When you go to see a catwalk show, people want a frame of reference. You want to see the girls that are in the magazines now. It's a very different discipline, because if a model is on a photo shoot, she's the star of the shoot. She can get there a little bit late if she wants to, or she can impress them and get there early. It's all about her. She has her own hair and make-up artists and stylists, and it's a creative thing; it's very intimate, it's about the relationship with the photographer. Catwalk shows are about a team collaboration. There are generally 15 to 20 girls in a show and it's all a bit chaotic and frantic. If a girl is hot one season, she'll go from one show to the next, then fly to a different city, do fittings all night long, and it's very, very tiring. People can't maintain that pace. You will find that when you're building a girl's career, it's more important then than it is after. You'll find now that Kate Moss might make an appearance in one city and one show, will be paid exclusively to do it, so it's great. But, when a girl is working towards being a star, she has to every show, and after three seasons, she'd rather slit her wrists.
Do models have to audition before they get the job?
New faces and girls that aren't stars have to audition. However, everybody has to do a fitting. When you have a new girl into town, who wants to do London fashion week, her portfolio is sent out by the booker, her composite card is sent to a lot of people by the booker, and the booker then communicates with the show producers or the designers directly. He may say, "No, I don't want to see her" or, "Yes I think she's gorgeous. Send her: when she's here I'll make up my mind." However, if a star of the moment, who was well known to everybody, let's say Lily Cole, decides she want to do the shows, basically it's a really easy sell because the booker lifts up the phone and says, "Guess what? Lily want to do your show." "Oh, I'm delighted, book it!" So all she has to do is turn up and do a fitting. Fittings are very important because if the dress isn't fitting you well, it's not going to look as good as it can look; it if fits well, you look fabulous and you have a name in the industry that guarantees column inches in the paper the next day.
What happens if the stylist hates the people who youve provided?
Just because a model says, "I want to come and do the shows in London", doesn't mean that anyone's going to like her or that anyone's going to book her. It's her risk, her decision to come here, perhaps on the advice of the agent. Shows are free advertising for a model, particularly for a new phase. She does a well-known show and she is then in front of the world's press, the world's fashion editors and the world's buyers, so it's a really good way to introduce a girl. When I first made Jodie Kidd do her first collection, she was only booked for one show, which was Alexander McQueen, sponsored by Marks & Spencers. It was his first collection; it was a group of designers that they were launching. The moment she came out on that catwalk, word spread and she was booked at every show for the next four days. I put a lot of effort into it before she did that show, but no-one was convinced. When they saw her, it was like, "Wow!" and then she was booked solidly for the next two years because of it. That's the benefit of catwalk shows, but you can never force a client to book anybody, however well you sell a model. Until they meet them and until there's a rapport between the client and the model, it may never work.
Do models come in and out of fashion?
Models come in and out of fashion. I represented a girl called Bridgette Hall who has had a renaissance four times in her career, and no one can understand how this girl keeps coming back. She started out at 15, she did a Ralph Lauren contract when she was 16 and then died a death. Six months later, she cut her hair and she was on the cover of Vogue again. It's happened four times and it amazes everybody. I'm delighted for her because she can still buy houses because of it. In a way, the bigger splash a girl makes depends how long her career can last. Sometimes it's better to maintain a quiet career when a girl can have a 20 year career in the business, rather than, "Wow, she's the girl of the moment." There's a lot of pressure and even more competition at that point, and her career can then end within 6 months. In this day and age, with everything being so international and communications being so easy, models peak very fast and drop very fast.
How do you recruit models into an agency?
Each agency has its own methods of scouting. If you are a well established agency, you will have ties abroad with other established agencies where you will barter your new faces against theirs. For example, I gave Naomi Campbell to Fords and in return I got Christy Turlington, so it was a really good way to scout, right on the right level. The new faces division will communicate with their new faces division and you swap girls, you barter around the world. However, the strength of a model agency comes from its home grown talent. New faces divisions will go and scout in shopping malls, in Top Shop on a Saturday afternoon and rock festivals, and it's almost a pain in the neck; it costs a lot of money and it's sometimes very fruitless. You can spend days in a shopping mall boring yourself to tears where your vision goes a bit skew-whiff cause then you think, "God, I'm so desperate, she's 5'8", isn't she lovely?" You get the pictures home and think that she wasn't really, it's just that I was going gaga and getting bored. There are also model conventions around where people apply to be seen by agents. You do what it takes as a model booker. A good scout will scout wherever she is, whether she's on holiday, at an airport or on the tube; you don't stop scouting because your business depends on your talent.
How do you keep models at an agency?
We all learned a big lesson from the first breed of the super models in the mid-eighties. When the models were being stolen by other agencies so, you had compete with it. It's a very expensive thing for a model agency to have to put up with because now, during the shows, any good girl is surrounded by an army of their bookers taking care of them from being stolen by another agency. That's a relatively new thing and I think that started in the early eighties. It's not great for a business in this country to have to send its staff out around the world babysitting, because you're not really achieving much business hanging around backstage making sure another agency isn't handing their card to your star property.
