How To Build A Successful Modeling Career?

How To Build A Successful Modeling Career?
By Conor Kennedy for Models Observer
August 2007

Conor Kennedy, owner of Muse Model Management in New York, talks about building a successful modeling career and outlines the challenges models and agents face.

An enormous part of launching a new model involves how to package her. This is a moment that requires lots of scrutiny. A manager needs to be a tough critic and anticipate the requirements and demands of most demanding client.

Is she in the right physical shape? Does she need to lose or gain weight in order to fit the clothes? Does she need a makeover for hair, eyebrows, or personal style.

A brand new model has the toughest job of the industry. She has to inspire photographers, designers and stylists. She doesn’t yet have a body of work; no campaigns or even editorial to show her range. She has yet to build relationships or establish recurring clients. This is a critical point for a great manager to help start her career. She needs to learn the basics of posing, as well as the skill of networking and sell yourself. A young model in effect goes on tens of what we would call job interviews every day. The ratio of jobs to rejection is overwhelming. The top agencies work with a few hand picked test photographers who have the skills to work with a new model and create inspiring as well as marketable images of her.

Managing a top model is often more about saying “no” than saying yes. Clients are calling for work constantly. It’s a manager’s job to map out a framework for a healthy, well-balanced modeling career. This phase requires extensive knowledge regarding the relationships between clients.

How do you choose between two options on the same day when both are for a prestigious magazine like Vogue Italia? How do you balance both the editorial (magazine) and commercial (catalog) aspects of a models career. A majority of the world’s high fashion models are based in New York and so her relationships with her foreign agencies (and clients) must be overseen. Is her London agency only calling in $ options and not successfully seeking editorial? Is Milan pushing to confirm an advertising client that will damage her image? Is her German agency underselling her?

At a high level a top model CAN work every day, but she shouldn’t. At this stage, there are very few actual go-sees and the portfolio is less and less important. She should be working with the right level of photographers, stylists and art directors. She needs to maintain her visibility and image and keep herself modern. A model’s career should be constantly evaluated to make sure is balanced. Is the book moving too commercial or too edgy? If she’s a swimwear model-is she doing editorials that also show she can do fashion? If she’s a great runway model, are people also shooting her for beauty? Does she have any covers that will help pave the way for a cosmetics contract?

There is an over abundance of talent to the point than many models cycle in and out of fashion faster than ever before. A simple glance at style.com from three years ago will invite more than a few “What ever happened to?” This increases the pressure on the agencies and models to push for as much work as quickly as possible. Where as in the past one might have turned down advertising for fear of over exposure, in this era it’s not uncommon to see the model of the moment in five campaigns. It doesn’t leave much work for the rest of the models, but in addition to the considerable amount of money, it creates the possibility that she will rise above the fray and reach the level of a Giselle or Karolina Kurkova.

Conde Nast Pays Models a Pittance In Trade for Prestige - Fashionologie

Conde Nast Pays Models a Pittance In Trade for Prestige
Fashionologie.com
Fri, 03/20/09 — 05:30:37 PM

It's no secret that modeling is hardly peaches and cream, but here's an eye-opener for you. Managing editor of Models.com Betty Sze asserts that when it comes to editorial work, Conde Nast (which means Vogue, Teen Vogue and the like) "pays $150 a day if you are a new model, after 1 year it goes up to $250. That means if you are Gisele [Bundchen] and work for American Vogue 2 days in a row, you would make $500. Many editorials pay nothing."

As she goes on to explain, this practice has nothing to do with the recession. "I was an agent for 10 years and I still talk to all the agents. In fact I just called one of them up to see if the rates had changed a lot. When I was an agent, 10 years ago, the new girls got $135 a day, now they get $150 per day . . . so it's increased slightly."

So why would anyone work an entire day for that rate? "Actually Conde Nast doesn't have to pay anything, I don't even know why they do. Girls don't do editorial for money! Getting editorials and covers of French Vogue for example, drives up your rate for everything else and gets you noticed by the huge money clients like Lancome and Estee Lauder. Simple. Editorials and covers are the path towards the real money."

Source: Fashionologie

Designer Profile: Derek Lam in US Elle, March 2009

NYTimes: Prominent Magazines Lose Weight, Shedding Hearly Half Their Ads

Prominent Magazines Lose Weight, Shedding Nearly Half Their Ads

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD

January 5, 2009

AT a glance, the covers of Allure magazine from January 2008 and January 2009 do not look very different from each other. The 2008 issue trumpeted headlines like “Mega Makeover Issue” and “Insanely Flawless Skin,” and 2009 has “Big Makeover Issue” and “Powerful Skin Care.”

Inside the magazine it was a different story: the January 2008 issue had almost 70 pages of ads, while the January 2009 issue had 41, according to the Media Industry Newsletter, a decline of 41 percent.

It was an ugly January not just for Allure, but also for Condé Nast magazines in general.

January issues tend to be thin even in good years, and most magazines posted a decline in ad pages. But the average decline across all monthly magazines was only 17 percent, and most Condé Nast magazines fared much worse, according to analysis of Media Industry Newsletter data.

Wired, which is usually thick with consumer electronics ads, was the worst hit, down 47 percent from a year ago to 43.6 ad pages. Architectural Digest fell 46 percent, to 63.2, from 116.8. Vogue and Lucky were both down about 44 percent.

Of the 10 monthlies with the worst declines in January, four were Condé Nast magazines: Wired, Architectural Digest, Vogue and Lucky. It was the only publisher with more than one title in the top 10. The other hardest-hit magazines were Boating, published by Hachette Filipacchi Media; Power & Motoryacht, published by Source Interlink Media; Everyday Food, published by Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia; Salt Water Sportsman, published by Bonnier Corporation; Texas Monthly, published by Emmis Communications; and Boys’ Life, published by the Boy Scouts of America.

Only two Condé Nast magazines did better than average: Glamour, which was down 15 percent, and Vanity Fair, down 5.9 percent. (W Magazine was down just 2.4 percent, but it is published by Fairchild Publications, a division of Condé Nast.) Condé Nast executives were unavailable to comment late last week because they were on vacation, their representatives said.

Condé Nast magazines casting wider nets for ads seemed to fare better. Allure and Glamour are both aimed at young women, for instance, but Allure carries mostly beauty and fashion ads, and Glamour carries those categories in addition to health, pharmaceuticals and food. And while Vogue features women’s fashion ads and GQ carries men’s fashion ads, Vanity Fair has both alongside ads for TV shows, cars and hotels.

Roberta Garfinkle, the senior vice president and director for print at TargetCast TCM, which buys and plans advertising placements for clients like Expedia and Sun-Maid Growers, said ads for Condé Nast’s January magazines must be submitted by October or November, which hurt the company this year, as there was so much financial uncertainty in play.

“January books with very early closes have always had a problem,” she said, “made worse this year by the fact that clients are slower to approve their budgets and that perhaps there are clients that are cutting back.”

While January issues are rarely bulging with ads, December issues are, as marketers try to reach holiday shoppers. But the Condé Nast magazines that published combined December-January issues, including Cookie and Condé Nast Portfolio, did not do well either. Cookie plummeted 45 percent to 93.2 pages, Portfolio fell 35 percent to 72 pages, Domino was down 26 percent to 60.9 pages, and Teen Vogue declined 29 percent to 105.4 pages.

“Some of the advertising they carry in luxury goods, certainly in the automotive arena, without being able to look at the numbers broken out by category, I think that’s why they’re hard hit. The fashion pages are down,” Ms. Garfinkle said. “Some clients cutting back on their budgets makes it that much worse.”

Unlike other publishers, Condé Nast is known for being inflexible on ad prices.

“The problem now is that some advertising agencies have come to realize that with the unnegotiability of Condé Nast’s titles, and the broader demographic group that are associated with the more mid- and downscale brands, you don’t have to buy Condé Nast,” said Steve Greenberger, chief executive of the advertising firm S. R. Greenberger & Associates. “You can buy Women’s Day, you can buy Parents. You can buy around it.”

But Jack Hanrahan, the former director of print at the agency OMD who is now publisher of the newsletter CircMatters, said that Condé Nast had a smart long-term strategy.

“In a negotiation environment, you’d be better off taking the hit now with regard to paging, but preserving your well-established, in their case long-term, pricing position of being equitable across advertisers and not really engaging in heavy discounting and widespread negotiations just to get a small schedule,” he said, using the industry term for an advertiser’s annual commitment to a magazine. “And you can do that when, one, you’re not a public company, and two, you have these larger bases of ad pages.”

Condé Nast is a private company, and does not report quarterly revenue, unlike Time Inc., Hachette Filipacchi Media and American Express Publishing, which are all part of public companies. Mr. Hanrahan said other publishers regularly offer heavy discounts to advertisers.

Condé Nast’s is “a fair approach to pricing and not this ‘I’ll do anything to get a schedule,’ which others do — and, I think, have paid for it,” Mr. Hanrahan said.