The fashion business is not known for its sense of irony or self-awareness. But Brazilian model Michelli Provensi is hoping to change this with a rap video satirising the profession and a book that lays bare its secrets.
"The word on the street is I live on lettuce leaves and ice cubes / That I'm glamorous and rich and my profession is so classy," she raps in her song, All the Models in the House. "Yesterday I was ugly, today I'm the flavour of the month."
The São Paulo-based model, 29, wrote the song to promote her book, I Need to Go Around the World – Surreal Adventures of a Real Model, an attempt to demystify what many see as an enchanted life. "There are moments of glamour, but few," she said.
It smuggles some serious points on to an infectious hip-hop beat, recommending that models study because while beauty fades, wisdom does not. "There's no point being pretty and having an empty head," Provensi raps.
But although she is happy to poke fun at the absurdities of her industry, Provensi argues that models deserve some sympathy. "We are thrown out in the world very early," she said, adding that she left her rural home town in southern Brazil at 16 to move to São Paulo and begin her career.
In her book, Provensi compares footballers to models – two professions in which people start young and are judged by their bodies, not their minds. "People say it's all easy, and we just make money, but it is a normal profession. There is a good part and a bad part, but it is a job," she said.
Provensi, who is a keen football fan and follows São Paulo team Corinthians from the terraces, never hit supermodel status, but she did play some "Champions League games", she said. "I don't think I ever was a top model." But then, as she writes, there is only one Pele – and one Gisele Bündchen, the Brazilian supermodel invariably described as the world's richest. Others, like Provensi, play in lower divisions, buy a flat, travel the world – and keep working.
Brazil's fashion industry has been accused of using too few black and mixed race models for a country where 43.1% of the population described itself as "brown" or mixed race and 7.6% as black in the last government census in 2010.
Brazil's most famous models – international names such as Bündchen, Alessandra Ambrosio and Cintia Dicker – are, like Provensi, white girls from the south of Brazil. "There is a very low quota of black models in the catwalk shows," she said.
Organisers of Brazil's two leading fashion weeks in São Paulo and Rio have a commitment to recommend to brands doing shows that they include a minimum of 10% of indigenous, black or Afro-Brazilian models in each show. But Provensi doubts the effectiveness of such measures. "The Brazilian market reflects the market abroad," she said. "It is a European standard of beauty."
But her book is a personal story. In one anecdote, she describes watching Brazil's first game in the 2002 World Cup alone in a London pub in a yellow team shirt because she had nobody to watch it with. As a result, she missed her only chance at a casting with designer Tom Ford scheduled at the same time.
Provensi said loneliness was part of the deal international models sign up for. "Sometimes even surrounded by a lot of people, there is no one you can really count on or open your heart to. There is that thing of competition. You spend a lot of time alone, working, in airports," she said. "[But] if you understand it is just work, you can have fun, you can learn a lot."
