Last week, New York Fashion Week hosted hundreds of catwalks, showcasing emerging designers alongside established fashion houses in America’s Fashion Capital. While New York Fashion Week can give birth to the careers of many aspiring models, it always helps if said model was already born to parents who can give them the industry connections to get a needle foot in the door.
These lucky few are babies of nepotism, and New York Fashion Week is packed with them. Every clue seems to feature at least one. Some, like Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner, have managed to step out of the shadow of their parents’ and siblings’ profiles to be taken seriously as models in their own right. Other new faces in fashion, like Kaia Gerber, Sophia Richie and Ella Emhoff, still have their families to thank for their swift rise to the most coveted runways.
While having wealthy, well-connected parents has been one of the most profitable paths to success in most celebrity professions for decades, nepotism and high-fashion modeling are a perfect match. In the heyday of ’90s supermodels, models’ appeal came not only from their long limbs and perfect pouts, but also from the illusion that anyone could be them. Cindy Crawford, arguably the pre-eminent supermodel of the ’90s, was spotted by a local photographer while she was shelling corn during her high school summer job. She dropped out her first semester of college and soon found herself gracing the cover of Vogue magazine.
This story hit the perfect alchemy of relatability and aspiration. Young people latched on to this Cindy-rella story and others like it because it began in such an accessible, everyday setting—remember, she was shelling corn—but quickly rose to glamorous heights. Young people and the media alike latched onto this narrative that anyone from anywhere could be a star with a little luck.
With social platforms democratizing media, traditional media sources have lost control of pushing similar aspirational narratives. Now, many people become obsessed with stories that do not instill hope but instead reinforce inequality. These rags to runway narratives have been replaced by the less encouraging reality that to be successful in modeling, you can’t just be Cindy, you have to be her daughter.
It makes sense that modeling is filled with daughters and sons of A-listers. Modeling is often far from financially sustainable, and when you get paid in designer t-shirts and exposure instead of money, it helps to have parents who can supplement your income.
It’s daunting to face the reality that most celebrity-oriented professions are nearly impossible to break into or profit from without the support of rich and famous parents. But it’s also demystifying: isn’t it better that we at least know how the machine actually works rather than cling to carefully selected and embellished origin stories that give us a false sense of proximity to celebrities? Perhaps, with new clarity, young people will look beyond professions that have a history of underpaying and exploiting their workers.
Maybe we should leave those lines of work to the Jenners, Hadids and Gerbers (via Crawford) who don’t need the extra money anyway.
Source: news.google.com