Behind the glitz and glitter

This photo of Makati is courtesy of TripAdvisor

We have always thought of fashion modeling as a glamorous profession, pushing to the back of our minds the idea that, just like anyone of us, models are not spared from life's pressures. An article written by a former model and published by the New York Times last week gave me an insight into the dark side behind the profession's glitz and glitter.
Fashion modeling "is unprofitable work for most of the people wearing the design," says Ashley Mears, the article writer who now works as a professor of sociology at the Boston University in the United States. "Because modeling is a freelance work done on a per project basis, models don't receive benefits, have little control over the conditions of their work and never know when the next job is coming. They are arbitrarily selected and dismissed."
There is also a vast disparity, she says, in payments among models even if they do the same work. Ashley, who wrote the article ahead of the Fashion Week in New York, says some top models earn between $1,000 and $5,000 per project while others are not paid at all. She did not say why some models have to work without pay, making me assume that probably they are those who dream of going to the top and have to work - to borrow her words - in "indentured servitude.
"Fashion is a glamorous industry, but rub off the sheen and quite another scene emerges," she writes. "..for many models it is grueling. Considering the huge success of modeling's winner-take-all market, most people miss the mass of losers. This is how glamour works: as a spell. Even the word glamour has magic roots, as a charm cast to transform appearances."
Taking the cudgels for the models, she says, Sara Ziff, a model working with Fordham University's Fashion Law Institute, has formed the non-profit group Model Alliance "that hopes to give models a platform to organize for workplace protection". She says "modeling epitomizes the kind of precarious job that, since the 1990s, has been spreading from the informal labor market into traditionally more secure workplaces, like the retail and service industries ..."
The fashion models' predicament easily reminded me of the previous article, "Our complicated lives", I posted here a few days ago. Just like anyone else, fashion models have their own shares of life's pressure to eke out a living. In turn, it reminds me of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve who were banished from paradise after they ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge. "From the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken, for dust you are and to dust you will return,"(Genesis 3:19)
Pardon me for dragging the Bible into this article but, when I write, some ideas just pop up into my mind. It just occurred to me now that there is a parallelism between the Biblical tree of knowledge and science. Modern civilization, which started when our ancestors discovered that friction could make a fire, has complicated our lives to become more hurried since the dawning of the industrial revolution.
There are times when I think that civilization has deviated from what it is supposed to be - to make life easier for us and to make us more humane. The first fire that our ancestors had produced led to the age of industrialization that, like the factories it has created, compartmentalized our lives and, as I said in my previous posting, led us to new caves - our offices - in the sky crappers that rose on vast tracts of idyllic lands our forefathers used to farm.
Now comes the digital age, which is trying to divest us of our birthright as humans. Tom Rachman, author of the novel "The Imperfectionists", harped on this subject in the article, "The Future of Offline Nostalgia", which he wrote also for The New York Times. Offline Nostalgia is a movement that has risen in reaction to the advent of the digital age, in the same way that romanticism rues against urbanization as a product of the 18th century industrial revolution.
Taking note of the 19th-century romanticist movement "that briddled at urbanization and the coldness of modern commerce", Rachman expects that the "coming decade will witness a similar rejectionist movement, with the rise of the group Offline Romantics that finds the "degradation of the human mind: its splintered attention span, the struggle to concentrate, the thrum of digital excitation pervading every waking minute".
I am a romanticist myself who often harks back to the rustic life in the farming village that I left behind to pursue a dream of getting a college education, unknowing that, like civilization, that dream to achieve something more lofty would be hijacked along the way by the pervasive currents of materialism that led us to our own caves which are sorely suffocating than those of our ancestors.

Please visit my other blogs Miscellaneous at http://www.miscellandous-oddnews.blogspot.com,
Viajero at http://www.viajero-funtravel.blogspot.com
and Fun in Life at http://www.salt-funstories.blogspot.com\