Female

(The pictures are on my SubStack are rarely gonna be especially relevant to the subject matter. Sorry about that; I'm quite a selfie person so that's what I've got.)

When I first started modelling, I was terrified of meeting other models. The first time I saw one in the flesh, bleached blonde and pulling a bright pink suitcase behind her, we were passing each other at the Beehive studio complex in Camden, and it was my first ever studio shoot. I didn’t actually speak to her, obviously. I was absolutely certain she’d be mean and bitchy, like the very worst girls at high school. Because where in fiction are models ever portrayed as kind and friendly, with an interest in helping other models succeed? The answer, at least in 2003, was nowhere. Hence my fear. I’d never met any real models, so my opinions were based on stereotypes.

21 years later, my husband Hywel and I are waiting in a riverside restaurant, for our model friend to meet us for dinner, with her husband and daughter. Because 2003 me was 100% wrong — all sorts of people become models, for all sorts of reasons, but many of them are exactly the kind of people I want as friends. The greatest resource we collectively have as models, both for finding work and (more importantly) for staying safe, is the community of other women who do the same job as us. So much so, that if you do happen to be a truly terrible person, your modelling career probably won’t be especially long or distinguished. Modelling without a community would be horrible, but with model friends it’s a career I never want to leave behind.

Gemma (not her real name), with whom we’re having dinner tonight, is one of my favourites. I remember the first time I met her, realising that I’d never encountered anyone who seemed so immediately anxious to pass on the details of photographers I might want to work with. Was this how everyone would be, I wondered, if they were so secure in their own gorgeousness that no one felt like a threat to them?

It took me a few more meetings, and a few more years, to discover it wasn’t that Gemma is magically without insecurities, it’s just that she truly, genuinely wants success for other people, even if she’s only just met them. She makes me want to be better. I think she actually has made me better. Perhaps that’s what the best friends always do?

Hywel and I are snuggling on a bench seat when Gemma arrives. Though actually, it’s her 8 year old daughter, Aurora, who precedes her parents to the table, because Gemma and her husband don’t run in restaurants, being probably rather too tired for any such excitable thing. I’m not judging — Hywel and I didn’t in run either. I stand up and hug Aurora – I’ve sprayed my dress with perfume at waist height in the hope she’s still young enough to want to hug me. Gemma’s entire family smell delicious and I don’t want to be any less scented than them, since having children who aren’t yours voluntarily hug you is a privilege which should most certainly be met with expensive cologne. I tell her she looks beautiful, and she does — she has Gemma’s face in miniature and is vividly expressive, like a child in a Pixar animation, all wide clear eyes and perfect skin, and heart-on-sleeve emotions you could read from the gallery. She’s wearing white, as is her mother. At a pasta restaurant. As always, I’m impressed. I’ve dressed in anticipatory pasta sauce colours, just in case.

I hug Gemma and tell her that she, also, looks beautiful. She says my hair looks amazing. We talk about hair at some length, because I’ve finally found a way to make it curl without spending hours with hot tongs, and am triumphant. Gemma tells me she has hers styled at a salon, once a week, in order to save time doing it every day at home. Our husbands generously wait for this information sharing to run its course — for a model, hair styling isn’t as frivolous a concern as it sounds, and as the husbands of models, they choose to understand this. But Hywel and I spent the previous evening watching a Netflix documentary on ‘Kidfluencer’ YouTubers, and I have questions for Aurora.

The thing with talking to bright children, as far as I can see, is that if you get them onto a subject they’re knowledgeable about, then respond with sincere interest, the conversation you end up with is just as satisfying as it’d be with an adult. Aurora tells me about her favourite child YouTuber, and what her USP is, and how involved the YouTuber’s parents seem to be in running her channel. We discuss the potential for Kidfluencers to be exploited by their parents, and what the signs of that might be. We theorise about what kind of channel Aurora might have if she ever starts YouTubing. She dismisses toy reviews as too juvenile but has wondered about hair tutorials. This reminds me that I follow a child gymnast with a YouTube channel that Aurora hadn’t known about, and our conversation moves on to gymnastics. Aurora takes classes and I used to compete as a teenager so we always spend at least some time talking about that. She is a charming conversationalist, and I realise that I’ve missed talking to her quite as much as I’ve missed her parents. We’re busy, so only see each other a handful of times a year.

Like every really good communicator, Aurora’s noticed that Hywel has been quiet for a while, since he has limited interest in YouTubers. She addresses herself to him, across the table. “Have you been on a holiday to Antarctica yet?” she enquires, with great courtesy. I can imagine our late Queen asking just such a question, in the very same manner. I cannot quite believe that she has remembered our conversation about Antarctica from the last time we had dinner together, last year. Hywel had said that he has ambitions to visit. We weren’t actually planning to do it any time soon, but in Aurora’s world, with an internationally successful model for a mother, if you want to go somewhere, you do it. She makes me feel a little ashamed — I am by no means prepared to take a month off work to go to Antarctica with Hywel; it’s the sort of thing I imagine us maybe doing when we’re in our sixties. I wonder if being a bit more like Gemma would be a good thing — they’re just back from four weeks on the other side of the world, and she doesn’t seem in the least stressed by having taken time away from work for travel.

I’m delighted that this vibrant, happy child has the social skills of her parents, and is full of curiosity about the world, and that I get to spend time with her sometimes. I hope I’ll see her at 12, and 15 and 25, and every age in between. I hope she’ll always share her enthusiasms with me, and that I’ll be able to be a good listener for her, whatever those enthusiasms eventually might be. Aurora is likely to turn into the sort of beautiful woman who could do any kind of modelling that she wants to, which means she’ll be the sort of woman I’d once have been scared of. My world is full of beautiful women now, and I’m not generally scared of them any longer — I’ve discovered that female friendship is one of the most valuable possible things, and the community of models looking after each other is one that I’m endlessly proud to be part of.

It’s getting late, and I ask for the bill. Gemma and I split it — we both earn more than our husbands, and I don’t know if she feels the same, but this makes me glow inwardly with pride, from the knowledge that we’re good providers, in the exact way that traditionally, people seem to expect men to be. I never thought I’d have a job, what with having grown up in a patriarchal religious cult. So this simple act, paying the bill between us, feels powerful — no patriarchy at this table.

I love it that having a mother who provides financially like this will seem normal for Aurora. It makes me optimistic for her future. She’ll know she can work hard and achieve financial independence if she wants, and have children if she likes, without having to give up her career. And she’ll know that having friendships with other women is always worthwhile, and that there’s no need to be scared of them even if they are models, with blonde hair and pink suitcases.

At least, I hope so.