Model behaviour

Models wait to be auditioned for Fashion Week 2009. Photo / Herald on Sunday

Hundreds of hopefuls gathered yesterday morning at Auckland's Viaduct in a shed-like building on Halsey St. Near-universally slim, tall and young, each got one chance to impress. Each strode out, posed and then turned in front of representatives from almost every major fashion house in New Zealand. "There's a stream of legs from nine o'clock until 12," says one modelling insider of the casting process. "It's what we refer to as a cattle call," says another.

These girls are competing to emulate their role models in the glossy fashion rags and the contestants on New Zealand's Next Top Model. From the hundreds at audition, only a couple of dozen will make the cut and have the mixed blessing of walking the catwalks during next month's New Zealand Fashion Week. Next week designers will confer and decide who they should cast – shattering the dreams of many wannabes – and engaging in behaviour worthy of wild scavengers.

Given that many shows run one after another, not all designers can get the models they want. Red 11 modelling agency head Amanda Betts says representatives of well-known New Zealand clothes-makers have been known to shout, swear and make threats when their first choices aren't available. The whole casting process, says Betts, is "like throwing chips to seagulls."

While New Zealand Fashion Week is dwarfed by similar events in New York, Paris, London and Milan, locally born model Jenna Sauers knows the casting call well. Until recently Sauers trod catwalks in Europe and America – as well as last year's New Zealand Fashion Week – and has appeared in fashion spreads in Marie Claire, Harper's Bazaar, Glamour and InStyle.

She's been privy to the best and worst of a profession that ranks high on the list of teenage girls' preferred careers. For two years Sauers, under the name Tatiana Anymodel, wrote an anonymous blog on feminist website Jezebel dishing the dirt on the trials and tribulations of international modelling – including the pressure to lose weight, the drug and sexual abuse and an economic structure that leaves many catwalkers impoverished.

Last month she outed herself and announced that she was quitting the profession. Speaking from New York, Sauers, 23, says girls need a reality check before they decide to try walking down the runway. "A lot of the ways the industry advertises itself are not necessarily the full story. People's perceptions of modelling can be misleading."

Sauers wrote in her farewell blog that there was one particular model who probably could serve as a poster-child for the dangers of the industry. The model was managed by her mother who pocketed her daughter's considerable earnings from television commercials. She was engaged in an intimate relationship with a male musician, one with a penchant for barely legal girls.