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Sara Ziff: In some ways, my story is pretty typical; I was walking around New York City, where I grew up, when I was about 14, and I got scouted on the street. And I was psyched—I mean, modeling seemed like a big step up from babysitting. And more lucrative, I assumed. And then I went to meet with my first agency, and Milla Jovovich was sitting in the waiting room; it was like, wow, this is incredible, I can’t believe I get to be here. I think the modeling industry relies a lot on that feeling—that sense on the part of young girls that they’re lucky to have been invited into the club. It makes them willing to put up with a lot.
When there are a lot of people competing for the same job, it makes the workers who have those jobs very compliant.
Yes, totally. And probably the key reason I could kind of see that, and begin to articulate a sense of powerlessness, is that my story was also very atypical, in that I came to modeling from a position of privilege. I come from a family of academics; my parents were here, in New York, so I never felt stranded; I went to good schools and had varied interests and always knew that modeling wasn’t my only ticket to success. So I was less vulnerable than girls I knew who were, like, sending half their paychecks back to their family in Lithuania, or wherever. adidas superstar womens But at the same time, even with all my advantages, I was subjected to abuses no one should have to endure.
I came across Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein myself, as a teenager. When those names came to the fore, it wasn’t surprising. To me, at least.adidas stan smith mens I didn’t have a language back then to describe what was going on, but now I recognize, there’s a system of trafficking in the modeling industry. I mean, it’s funny—because we looked so interchangeable, all these skinny white blonde girls, I got treated in the same way as my peers, but the difference was, I was in a position to speak out. Which made me feel like it was my responsibility to do so.
Which I guess brings us up to the official beginning of this story—the creation of the Model Alliance.
Well, almost. The two things in-between are, one, that I enrolled at Columbia and immediately gravitated toward classes about the history of the labor movement, and two, I made the documentary Picture Me [2010], about my experiences as a model, and that inadvertently became an organizing tool. At screenings, models would approach me in tears, saying they could really relate to the issues we talked about in the film—like, one of the stories that made the film’s final cut was from a model working in debt to her agency, and she talked about a casting adidas stan smith womenwith a big photographer where she was asked to perform a sex act. So the movie wound up giving me a platform to begin.
I’m struck by the fact that so many young models are bedeviled by issues of both sexual and financial exploitation. The former tends to get a lot more airtime than the latter—but I tend to see the financial end of things as an even more widespread and critical problem. Like, if you don’t know how you’re going to pay your rent, you’ve got a lot less room to say to your agent, no.
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