A beautiful woman sits in front
of a video camera. Her name is Sena Cech and she is a fashion model. Her tone is
matter-of-fact, as though what she's about to describe is commonplace in the
industry in which she works. The scene: a casting with a photographer, one of
the top names in his profession. Halfway through the meeting Cech is asked to
strip. She does as instructed and takes off her clothes. Then the photographer
starts undressing as well. "Baby - can you do something a little
sexy," he tells her. The photographer's assistant, who is watching, eggs
her on. What's supposed to be the casting for a high-end fashion shoot turns
into something more like an audition for a top-shelf magazine. The famous
photographer demands to be touched sexually. "Sena - can you grab his cock
and twist it real hard," his assistant tells her. "He likes it when
you squeeze it real hard and twist it." "I did it," she shrugs,
looking into the video camera. "But later I didn't feel good about
it." The following day she hears that the job is hers if she wants it. She
turns it down. "I didn't like the way the casting had gone. If the casting
was that sexual I was sure the job would be really sexual and gross." The
photographer never offered her work again.' This is the ugly, sleazy side
of the modelling industry, the side few insiders like to talk about. It's one
of the most secretive businesses in the world, which is ironic when you
consider that it is also one of the most pervasive. Its stars are some of the
most recognised icons of our time, household names whose bodies are frequently
emblazoned across 40ft-high billboards, yet apart from the occasional flurry of
publicity about anorexia or drug-taking, outsiders know surprisingly little
about the multimillion-pound business which profits from some of world's most
beautiful women. Models rarely give interviews, and if they do they're as studiedly anodyne and vague
as Premiership footballers quizzed outside the changing room after a match. Sena Cech is one of a handful
of models who has decided to talk publicly about the seedy, unglamorous and, on
occasion, abusive side to her profession for a new documentary, Picture Me. The
woman behind the film is Sara Ziff, a catwalk model turned documentary maker. Ziff makes an unusual
whistleblower. She's made hundreds of thousands of dollars from the modelling
business. Her motivation for speaking out has nothing to do with revenge or
failure (when I ask her what it's like to be rejected for a job because of the
way you look, it's clear this has not happened to her very often). She's been
the face of brands like Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Stella McCartney, Dolce
& Gabbana and Gap. Her long limbs and angular cheekbones, almond-shaped
blue eyes and blonde hair have adorned hoardings in Times Square and beyond.
She's strutted down the catwalk, eyes blank, unsmiling, for all the top
designers from Marc Jacobs to Louis Vuitton, Gucci to Chanel. Picture Me began as a quirky
homespun video diary. Ziff's former boyfriend and co-director Ole Schell would
often accompany her on jobs, and because he was a film-school graduate it
seemed natural to take along the camera equipment in order to make sense of the
surreal, insular world in which they found themselves. The earlier parts of the
film reflect the lighter side of the industry such as the camaraderie among the
models and the buzz of a catwalk show. Schell would also document their private
moments: arguments about money because Ziff was earning Monopoly amounts and he
could not compete; Ziff in the bath after a long day at a shoot. The process might simply have
highlighted an industry as fake and frothy as a bowl of Angel Delight, but what
emerged over the course of five years of filming and hundreds of hours of
footage was something darker, more subversive. They started giving the camera
to fellow models, putting them on the other side of the lens and giving them a
chance to speak. Gradually the couple became less like innocent home-movie
makers and more like undercover reporters.
"We might need to see you without your bra on."
The dark world of teen modeling.