When I was first scouted at 19, I thought that male modelling was going to be all glamour, parties, meeting girls and endless fun.
But the industry is tough. It can be fake, demanding, soulless and full of naive boys with no business sense. At the beginning, most of us were taken advantage of financially.
When you’re young and inexperienced, the magazines and designers pay you nothing at all. They also expect a very specific body shape that is getting thinner and thinner.
Coming from Sydney, I have a surfer’s physique, tall and muscly. My statistics were fine while I was working in Australia, but five years ago I went to work in Paris. One of the biggest agencies in Paris put me on their books.
That’s when things started to change. After a few weeks, an agent told me that they all believed in me, but that I needed to lose some of this, and she grabbed a chunk of my thigh. I was forced into a situation where I had to lose weight rapidly and confront unnecessary body issues. It wasn’t a happy time.
Advertisement
The ideal male model’s statistics are unrealistically slight. In Europe especially, you need to have a 30in (75cm) waist and weigh between 7st 12lb (50kg) and 10st 3lb (65kg). So I had to lose a lot of weight quickly. Essentially I just tried to stop eating. Everyday I drank litres of water to fill me up, and spent most of my time, while I wasn’t shooting, at the gym or scanning the internet for ways to get thinner.
The hard work definitely paid off, though. I went on to work for labels including Lanvin, Givenchy, Kenzo, Costume National and Diesel, as well as GQ and Maxim.
The reality is you have to be ultra-skinny to get any jobs these days. Even muscle definition isn’t a good thing in Europe. The look they want is a pre-pubescent boy.
But it isn’t only the weight thing that screws with your mind, it’s the sheer boredom of the work:even doing the catwalks is mind-numbing.I still model but spend most time in New York, where you can carry more weight. Paris and Milan are the industry’s extremes.
I’m 29 now, and too old for European catwalks. For me, now, it’s about trying to land the big fragrance campaigns. If you get one you can earn hundreds of thousands of pounds for a couple of days’ work. These jobs are rare though.
Advertisement
Modelling can be very easy money when it’s going well, but the journey to financial success is a tricky one.