Model worker
Last night one of our Shenzhen friends sent us a very excited text message followed by an email. She was walking down a street of shops in Shekou and saw Myles. In a clothing advertisement, that is.
A lot of friends and family have asked if we are going to continue with modelling in Beijing. I have to say it is doubtful. I have the feeling that the Beijing fashion industry is actually competitive and uses real models. In Shenzhen, the Western kids are sought after and practically begged to model. The agents walk around the foreigner neighborhoods to recruit child models. One of our Shenzhen agents has asked us to keep in touch with him. He sometimes casts ad campaigns in Beijing with Shenzhen-based models. He has had clients that found it cheaper to fly two kids and two parents and the agent to Beijing, give them two nights in a hotel, shoot the ad in a day, and fly them back to Shenzhen than to cast the ad with local foreign talent. Wow.
Sometimes I think I will miss Myles' modeling jobs. We got the chance to meet a lot of kids and families that we wouldn't normally get to meet. Because Myles wasn't in school, we were often cast with homeschooled kids for weekday shoots. They tended to live far from the foreigner mainstream of Shenzhen. And then there's the money. While he wasn't getting rich, he was able to use a small portion of his earnings to buy himself a toy after each job. Sometimes Chinese friends remark about how many toys Myles has. While it would really go without notice by an American, it is a lot compared to Chinese kids. I have to point out that many of them he bought with his own money.
Here are a highlight of some of the clothes and locations from the last several months in Shenzhen. While no shoot will ever go as well as this one, we've had some memorable moments.
There was the "just sweaters" shoot that all we had to do was make sure Myles wore his own jeans. When we arrived, Myles was wearing his Old Navy jeans which were deemed inadequate for the look they wanted. They were not "fashion-forward" enough. So Myles was clipped into a pair of baggy, distressed, weird-wash pants.
Then he had an in-studio shoot that had something of an urban theme. I am pretty sure you could not get away with broken beer bottles in an American kids' clothing catalog.
This same shoot used a look that I describe as the Hunter S. Thompson look. Both Myles and another little boy were decked as such for some of the pictures.
We've done a bunch of catalogs at the beach. Sometimes these were at actual nice beaches but often they were at forgotten, garbage-strewn stretches of oily sand. Somehow, with the magic of Photoshop, though, you wouldn't be able to tell. For instance, the lead picture on this post was taken at a location that was positively disgusting, not a bathing beach at all. But sometimes we were lucky enough to be on a really nice (for Shenzhen, that is) beach.
My favorite/least favorite location was a mud-slide site somewhere east of Shenzhen. I have no idea how they even scouted this place. To get there we drove down a series of increasingly narrow and bumpy dirt roads until we pulled into this almost-deserted place. Then after walking up another dirt road, we had to climb a ladder to get to the location. At this point I was several months pregnant, too.
I have to admit the mudslides gave this area an otherworldly look (almost like something out of a Kahn and Seleznick series)
Myles loved this location. Rocks, sticks, dirt--what's not for a boy to love?
A lot of friends and family have asked if we are going to continue with modelling in Beijing. I have to say it is doubtful. I have the feeling that the Beijing fashion industry is actually competitive and uses real models. In Shenzhen, the Western kids are sought after and practically begged to model. The agents walk around the foreigner neighborhoods to recruit child models. One of our Shenzhen agents has asked us to keep in touch with him. He sometimes casts ad campaigns in Beijing with Shenzhen-based models. He has had clients that found it cheaper to fly two kids and two parents and the agent to Beijing, give them two nights in a hotel, shoot the ad in a day, and fly them back to Shenzhen than to cast the ad with local foreign talent. Wow.
Sometimes I think I will miss Myles' modeling jobs. We got the chance to meet a lot of kids and families that we wouldn't normally get to meet. Because Myles wasn't in school, we were often cast with homeschooled kids for weekday shoots. They tended to live far from the foreigner mainstream of Shenzhen. And then there's the money. While he wasn't getting rich, he was able to use a small portion of his earnings to buy himself a toy after each job. Sometimes Chinese friends remark about how many toys Myles has. While it would really go without notice by an American, it is a lot compared to Chinese kids. I have to point out that many of them he bought with his own money.
Here are a highlight of some of the clothes and locations from the last several months in Shenzhen. While no shoot will ever go as well as this one, we've had some memorable moments.
There was the "just sweaters" shoot that all we had to do was make sure Myles wore his own jeans. When we arrived, Myles was wearing his Old Navy jeans which were deemed inadequate for the look they wanted. They were not "fashion-forward" enough. So Myles was clipped into a pair of baggy, distressed, weird-wash pants.
Then he had an in-studio shoot that had something of an urban theme. I am pretty sure you could not get away with broken beer bottles in an American kids' clothing catalog.
This same shoot used a look that I describe as the Hunter S. Thompson look. Both Myles and another little boy were decked as such for some of the pictures.
We've done a bunch of catalogs at the beach. Sometimes these were at actual nice beaches but often they were at forgotten, garbage-strewn stretches of oily sand. Somehow, with the magic of Photoshop, though, you wouldn't be able to tell. For instance, the lead picture on this post was taken at a location that was positively disgusting, not a bathing beach at all. But sometimes we were lucky enough to be on a really nice (for Shenzhen, that is) beach.
My favorite/least favorite location was a mud-slide site somewhere east of Shenzhen. I have no idea how they even scouted this place. To get there we drove down a series of increasingly narrow and bumpy dirt roads until we pulled into this almost-deserted place. Then after walking up another dirt road, we had to climb a ladder to get to the location. At this point I was several months pregnant, too.
I have to admit the mudslides gave this area an otherworldly look (almost like something out of a Kahn and Seleznick series)
Myles loved this location. Rocks, sticks, dirt--what's not for a boy to love?
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