What it's like being a model

A petite fitting model, that is - where they cut your head off

I never saw myself as a model growing up, probably because all the other kids told me how ugly I was and how I’d have to ‘fuck an animal’ if I wanted to have sex, ‘as no man will ever fuck you’. (Charming, and possibly responsible for my not being overly fussy when it came to blokes in my teens and twenties. Hey, at least they weren’t animals. At least, not technically.)

But even when I blossomed in my mid-teens, I didn’t see myself as model material. Firstly, I’d stopped growing at 5’2”; secondly, I wasn’t stick-thin, mainly as I had large thighs. (Aged 19, I actually dumped a boyfriend for telling me my thighs were fat.)

I had anorexic catwalk ‘waifs’ in mind when I thought of models. I didn’t realise that there are many different types of model, and that I could work as a fitting model.

From ages 17 to 23, I made money from belly dancing in Asian clubs. I’ll probably tell you about that someday - it was really traumatic and dramatic. Frankly, it was dangerous: I actually look back and shudder thinking of the stupid situations I put myself in purely for the sake of money. It was exciting, too, but in the same way that stroking a tiger is exciting. Neither is a good idea.

I spent six years doing this. Photo by Gianluca Carenza on Unsplash.

By the time I was 23, I was already making money from writing as a TV scriptwriter, but was ready to try a different way of supplementing my income that would still allow me to attend script meetings.

So I used to read the audition pages of the arts and entertainment newspaper The Stage each week, looking for suitable jobs. And one day in early 2004, I saw an advert for a casting for fitting models, placed by a London agency called Fittings Division.

Now: a fitting model isn’t the same as a runway or catalogue model. No one cares what you look like aesthetically. It doesn’t matter if you have a face like a disfigured otter – all that matters are your proportions. In fact, a lot of the time they cut your head off when they take photos of you (either that, or the woman who snapped me was just really bad at framing).

Fitting models’ faces could resemble this fella, and that’d be fine. Photo by Karl Anderson on Unsplash.