Poor in Prada.
Welcome to my blog Poor in Prada, a behind-the-scenes look into the highs and lows of the fashion industry. I will be interviewing different colleagues and friends ranging from models, photographers, designers, stylists, influencers, magazine editors, agents, creative directors, makeup artists, hairdressers...etc. Highlighting how they started their career and the struggles they have overcome to be exactly where they are now, along with where they hope to be. ;)
The fashion industry appears to be one of the most glamorous career paths, but that is not typically the case. Since social media tends to only highlight the good, I am focusing on the authenticity and the truth that is unadvertised. Every person who has succeeded has altered their route and kept going after countless dead ends and rejection.
A “Poor in Prada” moment is when it may appear to the outside world that you are living the dream, but in actuality, you are at your lowest point. The beauty in being vulnerable and opening up about a journey will motivate the next person to continue through the distress. I hope my writing and interviews are relatable and inspire readers to pursue their dreams because if someone else can do it, so can you.
Meet Casey.
Agent, Owner of Maggie Inc. @caseyrfc
BB: How did you initially become an agent?
RC: I was a public relations major at BU looking for internships to try to figure out what I wanted to do for a career. I wasn’t ever interested in just “fashion” per se, I was more so interested in all aspects of the entertainment industry, with fashion being just one of the many aspects I liked. I had already done a couple of internships at that point and had found the industry split into a very corporate side and a very superficial side. It happened to be awards season when I was thinking about all of this and all of the actors were thanking their agents in their speeches; something clicked and I figured that the role of an agent cusped the worlds of business and entertainment and might be the right fit for me. There were no outright talent agencies in Boston at the time, but there were several modeling agencies and I figured I could try to work at a one and get the gist of what an agent does. I had seen some articles specifically about Maggie in local publications and she seemed like a really cool lady so I wrote her a letter and asked if I could come work for her for free for the summer to see how an agency works. That was the summer between my sophomore and junior years, when I was 19. I never left and it has now been 22 years total.
BB: Did you ever envision yourself taking over Maggie Inc. when you first started your career?
RC: God no, I must have given notice at least five times of the years, haha!! I always thought I was going to move on to another internship each semester through school, but Maggie kept asking me to stay, and my bond with her kept growing, so I did. By the time I was entering my last semester of school, a booker had left the agency and Maggie made me a proposition: she had a full time job waiting for me if I wanted it, but she couldn’t go five months without a booker as I finished my degree. So I arranged my class schedule to take all night classes for my last semester and came on as a full time employee before graduation (and, since it was entry level pay, I still maintained a part time job telemarketing twice a week, which I often use as an example to young models overwhelmed with balancing multiple responsibilities—you can have it all, it just means sacrifice and creative scheduling).
Even through my early 20’s, I never envisioned this as my lifelong career. Like most young people, I saw Boston as a transitional city and always though I’d move on to a bigger city and work my way up to the pinnacle of the industry. The last time I had given notice I was serious about moving on and had been applying for jobs in NY and looking at apartments and was about a month away from leaving when Maggie had a seizure in the office, that is how we discovered she had cancer and changed the trajectory of my career and life.
BB: Do you look up to anyone within the fashion industry?
RC: I have a well-documented obsession with Karl Lagerfeld. I love how he represented the very pinnacle of the industry: widely respected, insanely talented and smart, but managed to do it all with humor and wit. I love this industry, I’m in awe of the talent of the artists the comprise this community, but I also very much recognize it’s superficiality: whenever an exchange with a client or model gets a little too haughty, I’ll pull out the line “we’re all just trying to sell dresses at the end of the day.” Karl truly embodied that sentiment and set the right tone for a great swath of the industry.
Karl Lagerfeld
BB: Where is the best place to start if you want to become an agent?
RC: If I had to do it again, I definitely would have gone to school for law or business. You don’t have to fully become a lawyer, but any sort of law background would be such a great starting point. The most serious aspects of the job involve contracts, photo releases, photo usage, and it’s the most challenging to learn from scratch.
BB: If you weren’t working in Boston, what city would you migrate to and why?
RC: London, I’m a huge Anglophile. I studied abroad for a semester there and just fell in love and have been obsessed with all things British ever since: the royal family, British TV shows, all of it. I visited again a couple years ago and it felt more like home to me there than here; in many ways I feel like I’m a British person born in American person’s body.
BB: What do you look for when scouting new talent?
RC: Marketability: do I think clients will book them. It’s not an agent’s job to have an opinion; in fact, most of the time we’re tasked with suppressing personal opinion. It’s not about what I like or what I think is attractive, it’s interpreting the typical requests from clients, understanding what other people like and what sells, and paying attention to the changes and trends in client and consumer tastes.
And personality and professionalism: do they seem like they take it seriously, do they have realistic expectations, are they pleasant to be around. They can have the best look in the world but when they have a crazy glint in their eye, or seem like they’re drawn to this just for personal validation, or are only interested in being made up and told they look fabulous but not put in the actual work, then it’s a no from me dawg.
BB: What is one piece of advice you would give to anyone hoping to work within the industry as talent?
RC: Figure out your end goal and how you will use this business to achieve that end goal, because if you’re getting into this in anticipation of it being the end goal, you’ve set yourself up for failure.
Recognize your place in the industry: it’s not about you, you’re not a celebrity endorsing a product, models are tools used by advertisers to sell product and a model uses their face and body as tools to achieve good photographs to do so. The model is one cog in the machine that all comes together to push product; we’re all just selling dresses at the end of the day.
And shoot shoot shoot: the models who are most successful are the ones who say yes the most. It seems like such a simple equation, but it’s remarkable how often I see models screw it up. Every single casting and shoot is an opportunity that has potential to lead to something else. I regularly see models get jobs randomly from a photographer, stylist, PA, who may have met them years ago, remembered them well, and recommended them for a project that comes up for which they were perfect. Too often I see talent think of networking as going to parties or an industry talk or some other useless event when, in reality, there is no greater form of networking than actually being on set working with people. So do that editorial, do that stupid test shoot, do that low rate job, work for that client whose pictures always come out awful and you want to bury deep on the internet, every single one is an opportunity to meet and work with people and build relationships that can serve you down the line and, the greater your network of relationships, the greater likelihood you’re working every day of the week.
BB: What was your “Poor in Prada” moment?
RC: The week I took over the agency. It was something that had been in the works and discussed for a long time-- such a long time that I had started thinking it may never happen and, for the first time since my early 20s, I opened up to the possibility of starting a new chapter of my life. And it was right around when I turned 30 and I think entering a new life decade always puts a person in a pensive of place. So I was in this very raw emotional space when the prospect of taking over the agency, which had been discussed and dragged on for years, actually happened very abruptly and urgently, all in a week’s time, and I was suddenly questioning if I even wanted what had been my assumed destiny that I had worked towards for over a decade. The disconnect sent me into a spiral: full on mental break and crisis therapy.
The Best of Boston party happened to be taking place that same week, and it was a relatively exclusive event and hot ticket invite in those years. While I was in no shape to be socializing, a close advisor and friend pointed out that, if I was about to become the owner of the agency, it was important that I be out there as the face of the agency, strengthening relationships with important contacts. So I went and, in the midst of air kisses and canapes, I was running to the bathroom throughout the night to have sobbing fits and breathe in a bag, thus my Poor in Prada moment.
Pros & Cons of your job?
Pros
1. The wide range of fascinating people I get to meet. Most people think of modeling as just fashion modeling, selling clothing, because that is the only portion media focuses on. But models are used to sell such a wide range of things, and the types of models we represent to fill those needs is so much more diverse than just the tall young beauties doing fashion week. Our industry touches practically every other industry and we serve as sort of a hub, seeing how everything else operates, and engage with people from all walks of life as a result.
2. Getting to have a hand in the trajectory of other people’s lives. I don’t see modeling as an end goal, it’s not a practical career by any measure; I more so see it as useful conduit to an end goal. It’s a way to make money, travel and network to help inform and/or finance an end goal. I consider the agency’s greatest success stories to be the ones who actually quit modeling: ones who used their earnings to finance their own business or discovered a new culture through traveling for modeling that led them to non profit work, etc. And, because we are invested in long term relationships and work with people over the course of their lives, seeing the ones who leave and come back to it at different points in their lives, knowing that having built a foundation in this, they can always come back to it to draw income from while going through a transitional period.
3. The sense of community here, which I come to appreciate more and more with each passing year. I’m grateful to have a shared history and points of reference with the many clients and artists and models who have been around as long as I have; there’s true camaraderie amongst this community here and we all feel a profound sense of duty to nurture and protect. We know that it’s rare, anyone from out of town always finds it remarkable. It’s one of the things that I think helped us come out of the lockdown faster and stronger than any other market: we all know each other and felt a duty to protect one another as extended family, and got together early on to figure out how to get our industry churning again safely, long before any national formal protocols were announced.
Cons
1. Being the bearer of bad news. I know models have it rough facing rejection all the time, but imagine giving the news of that rejection to multiple people constantly. We don’t take it lightly, we’re pulling for them for each one of those gigs, even though there are always more models up for a gig than there are available spots. And we never take for granted that the gig is going to another model with the agency, there are many many times the agency is losing the gig as well. For that reason, I’ll often give good news of notable gigs via phone call so I get to share in the excitement when someone lands the big one, to help make up a little for the rest of the time.
2. Managing expectations. This isn’t a practical career choice by any measure, but of course everyone wants to give it a shot and we will do our best to position them to have that shot. But the reality is that the chances of making this into a career is about the same as winning on a lottery ticket. And, having started the careers of some models who have reached the pinnacle of the industry, I can say firsthand that there is nothing different we did in their ascent that made their career happen that hasn’t been tried by many others. There are always people who have worked harder, wanted it more, had more potential, and still didn’t make it. There truly is an element of luck, timing, and chance that no amount of hard work or desire can account for. It’s very hard for many to truly appreciate that and I’ve seen a lot of people really screw up their lives by hanging on too long, continuing to work at something that is just never going to happen.
3. Some better work/life balance would be nice… it’s not at all unusual for an agent to clock 12 hr days/6 days a week during busy periods, and slow periods aren’t all that much better because it’s spent making up for all the stuff that doesn’t get done during the busy times. And it would be cool if models could learn what a boundary is and not hit us up on the very few hours we’re not working with some inane question or request.
Meet Billy.
Fashion Model. @dontbebilly
BB: How did you become a model; explain how you were discovered.
BA: Well, my mother was a model, so I suppose I followed in her footsteps. I would attend castings and some shoots with her when I was younger, and I was always told I should give modeling a try, but I never really thought much of it. I was an equestrian for 12 years but when I turned 18, I decided I want to try to pursue modeling and see what could come of it. Luckily for me, my mom helped guide me and set up agency/management meetings!
BB: Have you always wanted to be a model?
BA: I always liked the idea of it, I wasn’t always sure of what it entailed. Everyone said I should try, so I did but I really had to work and create it for myself because at the start it seemed very intangible for me.
BB: If you weren't a model, what career would you like to pursue?
BA: Health is something I am passionate about. I have a holistic nutrition degree so I would say something along the lines of that. I am a big advocate for Acupuncture so perhaps even Chinese medicine. I have also started working on a side project in fashion that I have put a lot of work into with some incredible people, that is all I will say for now.
BB: What is the most rewarding modeling moment you’ve had and what made it so special?
BA: There was a point in the summer of 2019 where I let fear of the unknown take over my thoughts too much. I was in Italy and my manager had me booked to go spend some time in Germany, I was just in a bit of a funk and tried to talk myself out of it many times. I didn’t board my first flight to Germany because I had a panic attack. At the time I was making decisions based on fear, which is never logical. But we all know when you make a fear-based decision that isn’t aligning with your authentic self. I pushed through my anxiety and made my second flight to Germany. During that trip, I shot a Hermès campaign for Vogue, Grazia, and a fashion film for L’Officiel. It was the most pivotal shift for my career.
BB: Do you remember the first time you were rejected by an agency or a client?
BA: Of course, haha. I remember when I was 18, I went to an agency in Vancouver and the head booker there was like “I think you’re absolutely beautiful but at this point you are just too old to start modeling and I don’t think you will be able to make it big or ever go to New York because of your age.”
BB: How do you deal with constant rejection and criticism?
BA: I always love to remind myself, and others that no one cares about you as much as they care about themselves. If you think about it in a work type environment, it’s incredibly true. You are not going to be for everyone and every client and that’s okay! I feel as if you are never rejected or criticized and everything was constantly handed to you, nothing would really feel meaningful when those incredible opportunities arise.
BB: What was your “Poor in Prada” moment?
BA: My Poor in Prada moment was probably at the end of 2019. I overworked myself. My family at the time told me I really needed to take a break because I was pushing myself too hard. I was averaging around 14 flights a week and sleeping maybe 3 hours a night. Everyone on the outside probably thought I was killing it because I started booking all these incredible jobs, but in reality, when I wasn’t on set, I was having panic attacks and crying to my mom on the phone because I felt like I couldn’t function. There was one morning I woke up in Europe to take a flight back to LA and I was so weak that I couldn’t even lift my arms, I could barely push my suitcase at the airport. My body started to work against me, my skin would break out in stress rashes, and I would lie to the makeup artist on set and say that the detergent from my sheets gave me a reaction. I would wake up at 2am with panic attacks and starving because my body was craving more sources of energy. During that period, I really had everything I could have ever wanted materialistically, a beautiful condo in LA, a new car, more money than I ever had in my life, but I never felt worse. And I am still recovering from what I put my body through nearly two years later.
BB: How have you seen the industry change since you got into modeling at 18?
BA: I think it’s changing, slowly but surely. I’ve seen a lot more body inclusivity, which is incredibly refreshing to see. Since a majority of the population are not a size 0, people are going to be buying from these high-end brands more when they see the clothes on humans that they feel are relatable to them. I think the industry is more open nowadays with height requirements as well. I love how things are evolving but I always question, if there wasn’t so much pressure on the industry from society about diversity would they really be striving this much for change? There is a long way to go but at least it’s headed in the right direction.
BB: If you could change something specific about the industry, what exactly would it be and why?
BA: Oh man, hmmm. I think measurements are stupid. It puts pressure on girls to be at a certain number which 9/10 times is just completely not maintainable. I have friends who have been told they need to slim down, yet my measurements are larger than them and I am told to gain weight. It just makes no sense, and it is unhealthy. IMG has recently taken all measurements down from their website and that’s extremely proactive for the industry. Our mental and physical health is so much more important than being praised for having a 34-inch hip on paper.
BB: How do you maintain a healthy relationship with social media?
BA: It is so important to remember that social media is genuinely just a highlight reel of people’s lives. It is so easy to show to the world how perfect your life, relationships, work life is, etc. It is simply just not reality. I think if you try to somewhat implement that into your thoughts while on the app it can help but I definitely get lost down the rabbit hole sometimes. I will say, social media has brought me some incredible and meaningful individuals into my life, and for that, I am forever grateful.
BB: Last question Billy, where do you hope to be and what is your main goal that you have yet to accomplish?
BA: I have taken this past year off to get my health back and to feel myself again. So, when I start back full force again, I am my best and healthiest self. There really are so many things I want to accomplish career-wise. You really can create your own reality and hard work always pays off. Main goal? Vogue cover.