An Interview with a model

Jessica Patterson Interview- “Coffee or Tea?” I was deciding as the waitress took our orders. I had already drunk six cups of coffee in the last seven hours, so I decided on tea. Dark milk-less tea, it’s almost like coffee. Jessica ordered a hot chocolate, and as I watched her pour in her second saché of sugar I wondered how much of a person’s personality you could gauge from their hot beverage of choice. She took a sip of her hot chocolate, and I slurped my tea. There was a long pause.

“It was like summer camp with tall people!” she began. Jessica Patterson, a twenty year old animation student from Dublin had, “entered on a whim” into Britain and Ireland’s Next Top Model (BINTM) and had beaten a slew of statuesque hopefuls for a place on the show’s ninth series. I had all ways believed that the selection process for the show was something similar to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, where the winners of the genetic golden ticket were whisked away into a wonderland of bald Latino hairdressers and cocaine nose jobs, but Jessica confessed it was somewhat more grounded in reality.

“As part of the selection process we all had to do a silly walk competition…some of the girls were so nervous, saying that they didn’t know how to walk… so I decided to cartwheel!” I laughed but didn’t doubt her. She rolled her eyes to the roof, “Well I had spent a lot of the year training for Taekwondo [receiving her black-belt earlier that year] and thought the idea was to show of our personalities”. That’s not to say that I believe cartwheeling across the carpeted floor of a hotel lobby is a window into ones soul, but I could see it reflected her determination to be on the show.

Being professionally beautiful hadn’t struck me as being a particularly taxing career choice but I was quickly assured of the opposite, “We would be going to bed at 2 or 3 in the morning, because we had to do interviews at the end of each day, and you had to be up at 5 each morning. We didn’t get much sleep”. It seems that if the caveat of having to be tall, sleek, and physically superior to most didn’t hamper your chances of being a model, the high-stress work environment and long gruelling hours would. “From watching the show I knew I could handle it”.

The show itself uses the same tropes that most reality T.V would employ but supplements the ‘unusuals’ for the unusually good looking. As a supposed blank human canvas models are already subject to constant physical scrutiny, but BINTM added the extra dimension of an omnipotent ‘Big Brother’ eye being cast over them, searching for emotional cracks. “During the show one of the producers kept coming back to me, asking me the same thing. I was tearing up a bit, but I knew she was just trying to get the shot she was asked to get […] she apologised immediately after, they were ridiculously stressed as well working in shifts throughout the night. It was those guys I really felt bad for.”

I couldn’t help but wonder how Jessica had handled the voyeuristic scrutiny of the show. She was almost a cartoon character of happiness with blond puffy hair, constant smiles and awkward hand wringing.  “I would have been fine if I had to do a shoot underwater, I would have been fine modelling on top of a tiger, but I cracked when it came to the nude shot”. The prospect of a nude shot [which is a staple of each year’s series], taken this year on a cold rainy beach in all but blue jeans as Danni Minogue et al looked on in padded north face jackets, would be enough to deter the most brazen of nudists. “When they aired the episode they stopped the music as I was crawling awkwardly over the male model to make it even more awkward... I was expecting to be given a skin coloured bra, but we got nothing!” Jess was kicked off the show after failing to produce a good enough shot of her crawling frozen over someone she had just met.

She unlike myself, was more understanding of the decision, “No, there was no ‘injustice’; we had to expect this… we were just pawns in their big model….thingy!” splashing a small cup of unused milk on the table as she excitedly finished the sentence.

I asked if she believed that the industry was over sexualised, “Ye…ye probably” but confessed that she herself had never suffered that side of the business.  There was another ponderous pause as she looked into space, “Well I know some girls feel that you’re just treated as a piece of meat”. She told to me a story which could have featured in a Marx Brothers film, where a model and a fluent French speaker was being told her legs were ‘too fat’ in front of her, under the assumption she could not understand the language. It comes to me as a shock but not to her. Jessica understands the relationship between the industry and its model’s, having begun modelling at 16 her unblemished skin is thicker than she would let on.

I was called to the bathroom and returned to find the tables sprawling contents pushed to one side, with Jess doodling a character into her notebook. “Sorry I all ways get ideas for characters when I’m doing nothing, if I can remember them I jot them down”. I asked her if she would continue modelling or had the show put her off the industry, “Well at the start I got more experience than I had ever gotten and thought, ‘Oh I could do this’… I had gone back after the show to London in September, but it was during the height of fashion week and no one would even look at you if you weren’t already part of their agency! At one point I was told high fashion was not for me. They wanted a blank canvas”. I would have presumed that this would have been a serious blow to her confidence, but a Cheshire smile remained on her face as she said it. “I know I’m not high fashion, hell I’m 20 and people still think I’m sixteen! I prefer commercial modelling, I get to ride skateboards in commercial modelling”.

It was hard to pigeon hole her, animator by day model by night. I asked her where her real passion lied, “I think animation is where I want to go, I’ll keep modelling but animation is what I really want to do”. I asked to look at her notebook. It was a diary of muddled faces and trippy watercolours, the kind of stuff Francis Bacon would have drawn had he not been so disturbed. It was obvious from the drawings and the conversation that either modelling or animation would be viable careers choices, like a nuclear physicist who happens to enjoy playing major league baseball.

BINTM has since been cancelled by its host channel Sky Living in order to make room for ‘The Face’ a rival modelling show, but jess doesn’t have too much to lament about the show, “It was kinda’ cool being part of the last series ever, and I would have audition again. But it’s just the way these things go”. She speeds through the answer as another waiter politely tells us they are closing in five minutes. As we both rise to leave I ask her where she plans to go from here, “I’m going to a friend’s house for food, and I’ve made carrot cake. I just hope I remember where to get off the bus! I’m a serious scatterbrain.  This one time…I once forgot the word Aquarium!” I smile at the joke. She finished her hot chocolate, and I left my cold tea there, barely touched.