That incessant competition occurs when you treat your self as a product whose value you seek to invest in or maximise. Brown writes that this state turns workers into capital, and “when everything is capital, labour disappears as a category, as does its collective form, class.” [...]
[...] models are often paid not in cash, but in ‘trade’, typically clothing or perhaps a handbag. In such cases, employers choose to hire dozens of workers for the cost of their own products, which models effectively advertise by wearing or using them in their highly ‘Instagrammed’ personal life. T…
[...] Modelling work is controlled by agencies and clients in almost every way: how to look, walk, talk, shave, shop, eat, exercise, relate to others are all dictated on and off the clock. In this way, modelling work is an explicit distillation of the social controls usually implicitly experienced …