Thoughts on working within the fashion industry

"If I wasn't beautiful, would you still want to buy me?"

Over the last few years i have been, working inside the fashion industry in Milan. Working as fashion show art director/ sceneographer / choreographer and casting director. I have been able to experience how the fashion world works from the inside.
It is said " that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder", but there must be something that the multi-billion dollar fashion industry knows, that allows them to be able to easily manipulate the "beholder".
Fashion is the industry that creates beauty, and visual allure, on the most quickest and hard hitting level. It dictates to the masses, both educated and not, what is acceptable in the ideals of beauty and what is not, it is a standard that we are all expected to follow.

In history the heads of court, dictated the ideals of beauty, but in an ever democracized society, it is the fashion houses themselves, (once the servants to the kings, now kings themselves), that now define, how we perceive beauty, how we should perceive ourselves and how we should perceive others.

Beauty is a strange beast.

We want it and if we can't be near, it we want to touch, buy or experience things that have been around beauty..

In my experience working as a casting director for shows, and I have to see hundreds of internationally beautiful men and women in one day for a show.

The standards are extremely high, her nose is too big, his bum is too low, she cant walk, too tall, too small, too old, too young, too thin, not thin enough, too Slavic, too Brazilian, too American, too editorial, too commercial, the list goes on and on and on.

Definition a model- 

1.One serving as an example to be imitated or compared..

2. A small object, usually built to scale, that represents in detail another, often larger object.

But despite the hard standards of what it is, when you offer yourself as a model, it is a something else that captures the imagination. They are all extremely beautiful people, people that you would stop in the street to look at.
But the good ones, the good you want to work with, be close too, have something else..

It is a certain presence, that makes you want to be around them, a brief moment of falling in love, a moment of infatuation.

Fashion like all art serves as a mirror to ourselves.

Fashion holds up a mirror to the viewer, but rather than seeing your own reflection, it reflects another, and even if you can't touch it, you want to..