It’s Fashion Week in New York City, which means that you can’t swing a stick on 5th Avenue without hitting a really, really, ridiculously good looking person. Add to that the recent release of the long-awaited “Zoolander 2,” and we have sharp cheekbones and purposeful runway struts on the mind.
Seasoned models Mitchell Robinson, 23, and Conor Hosford, 21, shared some secrets of the modeling trade with The Post — and gave their best Blue Steel impressions, of course.
As it turns out, models’ lives are very similar to yours, just with more jet-setting, professional makeup jobs and apartments packed to the gills with unusually good-looking dudes. Both Hosford and Robinson spent time living in the agency-owned model apartments of yore, which Hosford compared to “a very attractive hostel. Very European,” and Robinson presented as a rite of passage for newcomers to the industry. You spend your time sleeping in a bunk bed in a room with a handful of other guys, then you get your own place as soon as you can.
It’s like an unusually chiseled fraternity, a place where male models build lasting friendships and, as it turns out, share expensive jackets and mooch shampoo off one another. And there’s a moral support component as well: these bros have each other’s backs, sartorially and otherwise.
“If you look dumb, someone’ll be like, ‘hey, that’s not the best look,” Hosford said.
Of course, Hosford claimed that he didn’t have the “best look” when he was discovered in New York City, either.
“I was like 15, walking down 5th Avenue during the St. Patrick’s Day parade, and I had like, braces and buzz-cut, so I was really looking the part,” he laughed. “And they were like, ‘hey, you’ve got a look!’”
His grandpa, with whom he was walking, tried to ward off the strangers who approached Hosford, but eventually the teen got in touch with the scouts and began his modeling career in earnest. Robinson was similarly scouted as a teen in Georgia. Scouting sounds like every Internet-wary parent’s worst nightmare for their kid: “I got emails from random people that I had no idea who they were and I’m asking why I’m having these men emailing me about trying on clothes and doing photo shoots,” Robinson said. “Eventually I tried it out and it was actually a good experience.”
Just because models like Robinson and Hosford see their own faces staring up at them from magazine pages more frequently than your everyday person doesn’t mean they’re some kind of carbless superhumans. The duo described the coffee and catering at modeling shoots to be painfully, paradoxically tasty.
“I never understand that,” Robinson said. “You’ll be fitting clothes and they’ll be giving you bagels. Bagels and donuts and croissants and all this.”
“It’s like at Planet Fitness, when they do the pizza nights,” Hosford said.
Alas, the breakfast pastries are a no-go, at least before the pictures are taken. “You’re not going to fit right if you have them,” Robinson said. “I want those donuts. It’s like a test.”
Modeling, they said, is all about confidence. The ideal model face, Hosford said, is like Switzerland with cheekbones: “so neutral, but so powerful.”
As for being discovered on the street, as both Robinson and Hosford were, there’s no secret to that. It’s part luck, part look.
“Your best chances are if you just look like a little country,” Robinson said. “A little dirty.”
“[It’s having a] fashion innocence, really,” Hosford said. “Like, you don’t look fashionable. if you look like a model already, you’re probably a model.”