A Model Professor

By STEPHEN HEYMAN

September 21, 2011, 4:34 pm

Greg Kessler The sociologist Ashley Mears (left) posed, quite convincingly, among models backstage at a Diane von Furstenberg ready-to-wear show in 2007. At the time, she was studying for her Ph.D. at New York University.

At a time when tree climbing and the “Lord of the Rings” language Elvish are both taught at the university level, who could argue that the world of fashion modeling is not also worthy of academic scrutiny? Ashley Mears, a young assistant professor of sociology at Boston University, just came out with her first book, “Pricing Beauty” (University of California, $27), which succeeds at dissecting the multibillion-dollar global modeling industry not only through traditional methods like interviews and data analysis, but also by resorting to a more gonzo means of academic inquiry. To study models, Mears actually became one.

Obviously, not just any researcher can infiltrate the modeling business in New York and London, appear in magazine editorials and prowl the catwalk during Fashion Week — all of which Mears accomplished while earning her doctorate at New York University. One must also be beautiful. Or — to make a distinction that’s relevant to Mears’s work — one must possess those qualities that the modeling industry considers valuable at the moment. “I don’t like to say I study fashion models,” said Mears, who met up with The Moment last month to talk about her new book. “Rather, I study questions of how cultural value gets translated into economic values.” The full interview transcript is after the jump.

Q.

I imagine people are very interested in your dual role here. You’re a model and a sociologist.

A.

It’s not so much about the work as it is about me, which I never thought was all that interesting. But to be in academia and to be thought of as, like, model slash sociologist, or model turned sociologist — which is how some people have referred to me in blog postings before — it’s kind of the kiss of death for an academic.
Did you encounter any members of the academic community who treated you with a little bit of skepticism?
Yes, but not so blatantly. I heard whispers of rumors that maybe my work or maybe I wasn’t being taken as seriously because of my associations with fashion.
In the book, the way you explain it, you chose modeling as a case study almost by accident. A model scout approached you in a Manhattan Starbucks.
Right. I modeled when I was younger, in Atlanta. I was 16 when I did my first job. It was just stuff at the mall. Then I went into the small catalog market. In the summers, I took trips. I went to Milan. I went to Osaka, Japan. When I graduated, I went to Hong Kong. I stayed in Asia for a year. And then, when I got into grad school at N.Y.U., I quit because at that point I was just about 23. Which is old. As a model, you’re finished. But anyway, at the moment when this person found me in a Starbucks, I was looking for a research site because I wanted to take a course in ethnography at N.Y.U.
In sociology, is there a tradition of somewhat covertly assuming the role of the type of people you’re studying?
Yes! This is like the highest bar of ethnography that one can achieve. We see it in all kinds of fields. Largely in industrial manufacturing in the American factory work setting. Michael Burawoy does that kind of work, where he would actually go and be a worker in the factory. One of the people that I was reading when I was doing this is Loïc Wacquant. For his dissertation, he joined a boxing gym on the south side of Chicago. So again, it’s this moment of, like, turning your body into an object of research as well.
At one point in the book, you admit to almost being sucked into modeling and abandoning your graduate studies.
I started doing well. “Well,” according to the standards in the industry. Objectively, I wasn’t making any money. But I booked a couple of jobs for a couple of high-status designers. And I did a couple of shows at Fashion Week in New York. And I started hearing this buzz about me. It’s really seductive. It’s not something that’s unique to me. I found out in interviews, when I spoke to women and men who were doing it, that for the most part it’s really unrewarding, especially financially, and it has a lot of costs associated with it.
You were 25?
Yes.
You were telling people that you were 25?
No. People would chat with you at castings and I would explain that I was a first-year or second-year at N.Y.U. and people would assume I was a sophomore or a freshman, that I was 19 or 20. Although, when people would ask I would follow what my agents had instructed me to do, which was to low-ball my age by about five years.
And you wouldn’t be questioned?
No. No one checks your ID. Although, sometimes, you would get stumped when people would be like, “Why are your cultural references, like, ’80s synth-pop?” But yeah, I would lie to everyone about my age. That’s ubiquitous with women.

Pablo DiZeoA current photo of Mears, who is now an assistant professor at Boston University.

What things were you being told when all this “buzz” surrounded you?
The agents on the phone were saying really appealing things. “You don’t know how big this is!” “You’re the breakout girl of the season!” My calendar was getting full of “options.” And this is a really deceptive thing in the industry and a pretty painful thing, too. As a way to mitigate models’ busy schedules, clients are able to put models on options, which are like options for financial assets, where it gives you the right but not the obligation to buy it.
There’s one point in the book when you quote a booking agent who attributes the prevailing aesthetic of editorial models — skinny, tall, often unfeminine — to the undue influence that gay men have over the fashion industry. Do you think there’s anything to this?
At the editorial end of the modeling industry, it is a pretty insular and closed-off world. It is a world in which there’s a higher proportion of gay men — and women — than in other fields of work. I don’t think, however, there’s a straight causal arrow that you can draw from that — that gay men will choose a model that looks a certain way necessarily. That was one theory put forth by a booker.
But why is there this perceived disconnect between traditional beauty and the type of look that is coveted on the runway?
If you walk into an agency, you see the models’ cards along the wall. They’re often divided into these different boards, sometimes not obviously. But most agents will be able to see what’s the editorial end and what’s the commercial end. The commercial end are models that bring in the bread-and-butter income of an agency: the catalog stuff, the fittings, the trunk shows at the mall. The kinds of jobs that are intended to sell things, to move merchandise. They have to resonate with a mass audience. The editorial end is the elite end, it’s by far the more prestigious end, it’s where a fashion agency gets all of its symbolic status or cultural prestige. They don’t make nearly as much money unless they get picked up to do a mega-campaign, like a Kate Moss for instance. And they look really strange. They don’t resonate with a mass audience, and that’s the point. They’re not intended to. That’s kind of a general principle that we take from the art world. The more people a specific piece of art is intended to make sense to, the less valuable on the whole it is. Something that resonates with high prestige, elite insiders, the Anna Wintours of the universe — it’s like a wink and a nod to their own competencies just to get it.
Where does a specific kind of preference come from? Why is one look ascendant as opposed to another?
It can move, and it does. One chapter of the book is about the “Size-Zero Aesthetic,” where the skinny body comes from. And after I sent the book out to my publisher, there were all these busty models coming out on the catwalk. And these curvaceous Lara Stone types are now in. But they’ll fall out again and something else will come in.
But a lot of that — the curvy models — that’s more the result of tokenism, right? It’s distinct from a kind of shift in the baseline preference, which is for extraordinarily thin and tall white women.
Right. The baseline never changes.
So why is that?
I argue it’s class. The distinction between editorial and commercial fashion ultimately is a class distinction. If you look at a historical trajectory of what, in Western society, elite culture values, it’s this prized aesthetic for women with extremely thin, taut, controlled bodies. A corpulent body, a body with rolls and with flesh, is a body that signals looseness, sexual availability, and is antithetical to a kind of “elite” body. You can see this in strip clubs as well. There’s some ethnographic work that shows that strip clubs that cater to higher-class audiences have thinner women, and whiter women. You see it reproduce in all kinds of different settings. The ways that things change are a bit harder to explain. Why curves or why Asian or why blue eyes this season and not the next?
This project must have been emotionally taxing. Here you are, a doctoral candidate, and you’re subjecting yourself to all these kinds of superficial judgments.
It’s strange because you don’t think you’re going to get judged so much on your appearance once you start grad school. I mean, you’re expected to be judged on the quality of your thinking, not your outfits. It was always stressful. But that switch wasn’t so consciously taxing. For me, it was the logistics of balancing it all. When you’re modeling, you have the heavy portfolio plus the shoes. Plus you have the schoolbooks and you’re not supposed to walk into a casting with your giant Jansport backpack. But then you don’t want to go into seminar wearing skintight jeans and heels because that’s not the right signal you want to be giving to your potential committee members or dissertation chair.