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[...] 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 by workers. Modelling is a quite pure neo-liberal experience. As Wendy Brown points out in Undoing the Demos, individuals ‘are expected to comport themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future value […] though practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/or attracting investors’.
[...] 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. These ‘perks’ may offer a temporary feeling of approval or success, but they in no way offer greater power over one’s own working life.
Such scraps of luxury aren’t gifts, they are the tacit purchase of a model’s gratitude and loyalty.
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.” [...]