Model Apartments = Exploitation [pre-G]

The Dark Side of Modeling

With its estimated annual revenue of $1.5 billion in the US and the global fashion industry valued at over $2.5 trillion, the industry offers significant financial potential.

Housing-

At the end of the long work day, the models — an often-underage and female workforce — will shrug off the clothing, wash off layers of makeup and return home to overpriced, short-stay accommodations referred to as "model apartments." Housing its teenage workforce has long posed a problem for the modeling agencies that provide temporary workers to the ad men of Madison Avenue. As a solution, agencies have turned to such model apartments — short-stay accommodations in which underage girls, often from foreign countries, live almost unsupervised, at exploitative rates. And it is lucrative. 

Jennifer Sky found herself, in 1994, moving into an agency-sanctioned model apartment on N. Moore Street, in what was then-still-industrial Tribeca. My new home was a two-bedroom converted loft with pre-fab walls. Eight underage girls lived there. Four twin bunk beds were placed in each room. Broken stilettos, milk cartons and candy wrappers were piled forgotten in corners. It reeked of CK One. It cost me $800 a month. During the month-and-a-half I stayed at N. Moore Street, for instance, the apartment was always at capacity. Eight girls at $800 a month is $6,400 a month, and $76,800 a year — about the equivalent of $125,000 in today’s dollars. Today, world-renowned modeling agencies charge their out-of-town clients roughly $1,299 to $1,799 per person, per bed, or $150 a night to live in these temporary accommodations.

Debt Bondage- A control method used to keep people trapped in a trafficking situation long term. People are forced to work to repay a real or perceived debt incurred through their travel or employment [or housing fees].

And staying put in an agency-provided apartment is a different kind of horror movie. Seay-Reynolds describes a typical New York version. “There were like eight girls living in this tiny space, and there was a scale that you had to step on to get into the kitchen. The only thing that’s ever in the fridge is Diet Coke.” Ziff adds that the agencies are raking in money as a quasi-landlord. She says agencies typically house eight girls in a two-bedroom apartment with four bunk beds

and charge each model $2,000 per month, while the market rate for the entire apartment would run approximately $2,200 per month. 

Alex Shanklin, a former J. Crew model and Wilhelmina client is the lead plaintiff in a long-simmering class action suit filed against NEXT and Wilhelmina in 2013 that is now in the discovery phrase. “As a model or any worker, you should have the right to know the terms of any agreement that’s being negotiated. We sign over power of attorney to agencies under the current system. That would be a huge thing if that’s eliminated. Many of us start at a young age, and we shouldn’t allow someone to have that much control over us.” That suit claims that agencies took advantage of their young charges, stuffed them into apartments and deducted expenses from their pay that included rents that far exceeded market value. (Wilhelmina did not respond to a request for comment.)

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