Nick Foulkes meets the woman who can spot a potential top model at 20 paces
It is a clammy afternoon in a Covent Garden office. Messy, frantic and frenetic, rows of young people toil at banks of computer screens.
Imagine a high-pressure City dealing room with a slightly loopy dress-down ethos. In my suit and on the other side of my 35th birthday, I look out of place. The kindly if harassed-looking child at reception takes pity on me and returns with Chrissie Castagnetti.
Chrissie is probably the only person in the room who is older than I am.
The first thing she says is “you look stressed”. I ask how she can tell. She answers that she can read faces very well. And therein lies the clue to what she and her band of young telephonists are selling.
Welcome to the wonderful world of Select Model Management.
This summer Select celebrates its 21st birthday, and a big party is planned. Select is a name that most laymen could identify as a model agency, and yet it bears as much resemblance to the glamour parodied in Ab Fab as the Royle Family does to Dynasty. Chrissie is successful. I imagine that were she selling timeshares or houses she would be equally successful, it is just that she is “selling” models. And as at your local estate agent, their details — height, bust, waist, hips, shoe size, hair and eye colour — are recorded on cards. As are various pictures of them: crawling along the edge of a swimming pool in backless bathing costume and heels or posing in red zip-up high-heel ankle boots.
We move into the casting room: slightly battered sofas, a cupboard door off its hinges and a fridge containing a pot of houmus. Whoever tells you modelling is glamorous has absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
Chrissie, however, does. She seems to know the business inside out, back to front, from the late Seventies to the present day. She has picked models from supermarket checkouts and even from the sea of mudspattered, bleary-eyed faces at Glastonbury. If she wanted, she could probably go into Covent Garden piazza and pick you the new Helena Christensen — after all Helena is on her agency’s books, as well as Amber Valetta, Stella Tennant, Caprice, Honor Fraser and the Brazilian berbabe Gisele.
Chrissie explains her first brush with the world of fashion. “I was born in World’s End,” she says. “The Rolling Stones lived down my street and Petula Clark lived opposite. The Totem Club, which Clapton and Hendrix used to go to, was nearby.” As was Granny Takes a Trip, the Voyage of the psychedelic years.
She received her Damascene conversion to the world of fashion while on her paper round. “Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones were staggering back, and she had her skirt pulled up and was holding a flower. I thought wow.” She worked in a boutique called Bus Stop and then worked as a booker with a model agency before starting Select with sister Clare and friend Tandy Anderson. She was then 26, now she is 47.
“It’s completely different,” she says of the modelling business now and then. “There is more pressure. It has become cut-throat. In the late Seventies and early Eighties there was no such thing as a supermodel.” What is so appealing about Chrissie is that she demystifies the modelling game to a point where it becomes almost pedestrian. Her ideal model is “a classical beautiful girl who has got the height.”
Surely there must be more to it than that? I mean what about the aristo-model look, the supermodel look, the talentless German sausage look, the heroin chic look, the anorexic look, the glamour look, the trailer-trash look? “I get sick of these slants,” says Chrissie, putting me firmly in my place.
To listen to her pragmatic analysis of the world of multimillion modelling is a treat. Apparently if models want to look like waifs, they just turn up at a casting in a pair of jeans, trainers and a tight leather jacket, having had a go at their hair with a pair of nail scissors. And when they heard that glamour was making a comeback, the waifs got proper haircuts, got their nails done and dusted down their high-heeled shoes.
“Glamour is good for the modelling industry,” says Chrissie.
However, if coaxed, even she admits that just as palaeontology and archaeology fall into certain periods, so does modelling.
The period of the late Seventies and early Eighties is characterised by words such as healthy, all-American, Swedish, teeth and Christie Brink-ley.
By around ’84 and ’85, incidentally the time that Sadie Frost was represented by Select, the look became androgynous.
Then, in 1989, along came Claudia.
Select represented her when she started, but then she switched to another agency. Chrissie rather regrets not piling on the pressure for her to stay.
But such regrets were probably assuaged by Helena “supermodel” Christensen.
After supermodels came super-waifs like Shalom Harlow. Chrissie recalls that at the height of the waif thing, the work “started to drop off” for another of Select’s high profile signings Keeley Hawes. “Now Keeley has a great pair of boobs,” explains Chrissie, recounting how she took a slightly despondent big-chested Keeley out to lunch to tell her to cheer up and go back to acting while the waif thing blew over.
A subset of the waif thing was the aristo model. Select represented two: Stella Tennant and Honor Fraser. Of Stella, Chrissie says: “she demonstrated beauty with aggression. She even came with a nose ring, but eventually it came off.”
And then during the late Nineties came Caprice: less of a modelling slant and more of a one-woman phenomenon. Caprice’s look is described as “a California babe. We never had one of those before, we would have thought it was cheesy,” laughs Chrissie.
Last year’s model was Lisa Ratcliffe. As before with Stella, Chrissie was looking for something a little extra that would set her apart. “I get easily bored in this industry and you can see a steely look in her eye.
Not a sign of vulnerability.”
And yet, of late, it is the vulnerability of models that has become an issue: with worries about the promotion of thin body shapes and so on.
And then there was the slightly preposterous MacIntyre Undercover programme last winter that investigated the modelling business and revealed the shocking truth that older men fancy younger women and that some times young people take drugs.
It was not however so trivial for Select, as one of the agency’s girls, Carolyn Park, was filmed bragging about her heroic intake of stimulants.
Nick Foulkes meets the woman who can spot a potential top model at 20 paces
When it comes to drugs Chrissie demonstrates her sangfroid. “It would be a problem in a typing pool,” she says, if a “colleague is on drugs or pissed all the time and there is only so much you can do.”
When Select discovered that Carolyn Park had a drug problem, the agency put her straight into rehab.
“You are looking after girls 16 years old and up. You have got to care for them. If you didn’t this would be a cold-cut business, instead it is full of emotion.” And money.
The sums of money involved these days are huge. An average model may pull in about 90,000 a year, while an up-and-coming star may make a quarter of a million in her first six months, a million in her next year and then… well, forget not getting out of bed for a mere 10 grand a day, hit the right cosmetics campaign, work for three days and make up to a million quid.
Modelling for some is a second Hollywood.provided, of course, that you have got the next look, and only someone like Chrissie will be able to tell you what that next seven-figure look is.
“The next look? I will wait until it walks towards me.”
By Nick Foulkes for The People.
(Source: highbeam.com)