The modeling business has a lot of scams and I think that you have to be careful. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is too good to be true. Learn about the business that you want to be in. We live in an age where information about specific models, you have access to.
If you want to learn a story of a model and how she started and what happened, there’s enough online and enough information for you to learn her story. It’s not going to be your story but if you listen to enough of those stories, you’ll get the idea that models all come from different places, they all come from different walks of life. How they were found and discovered is completely different.
Some models send their pictures in. Some models are scouted by somebody on the street. You need to find somewhere, whether it’s very local and very close to you or some place that’s a regional place that’s close to you where you’re actually working with people who work with clients. People who are actually teaching you what you need to know to get a job.
Modeling’s really an on the job training situation. You learn as you go. You grow in the process of getting better and better at your job the more you do it. So, you don’t become a model in a day. You don’t become a model because you take a class. Nobody says you have potential and you take a picture and, oh, my gosh, you’re going to be the next Kate Moss.
If anyone tells you that, they’re lying. No one can tell you in one picture what kind of star you’re going to be, what kind of model you’re going to be. You have to be in the environment. So, every step, I always think of it as like a layered cake because you can’t get to the top layer of the cake without all the layers underneath. Every house needs a foundation. Every career needs a foundation. So, don’t go into things blindly. Don’t believe, necessarily, everything that everyone says unless it’s concrete advice that applies to you. Something that you can see that is tangible that you can understand.
Like, for example, you need to have a portfolio. We want you to test with this photographer. This is how much it’s going to cost. Okay. Well, find out about the photographer. Go and look online. Look at the photographer’s pictures. Use your common sense as to whether you think those pictures are going to be something that you’re going to benefit from.
You are going to depend on someone for information because everybody is going to know more than you in the beginning and it’s really frustrating that you are the commodity that people are trying to groom but you don’t know as much as everybody else. So, there is a dependency factor. So, be skillful and be smart about who you want to entrust that to, who you want to talk to, who you want to talk about you. Those are the kinds of people that, it is a fast business, it is a hard business. There are a lot of scams. There a lot of downfalls. There are a lot of people that are not interested in your best interest.
So, you have to be careful. It’s not true that you don’t ever have to invest anything to do this. There are investments but the investments are tangible. They’re things that you actually know. If you’re learning to walk on a runway for example, you want to learn from somebody who’s actually walked on a runway.