By Lauren Staub, Model
Modeling has always been viewed as a superficial line of work, where the young and beautiful get compensated on their features rather than their intelligence. As a model for the past four years, I disagree with this sentiment. I have gathered a collection of connections and have created a business off of my work ethic and extroversion. Because of this I am currently represented by agencies in Nashville, Atlanta, Chicago, and Orlando.
The World of Modeling. The modeling industry has always been brutal, as agencies rarely care about your resume of experience. An agency visit is most often like this: you walk into their office, they take a look at your pictures, a look at you, then they send you off. Within this short period of time they are able to determine if you are too tall, too short, if your hair color is desirable, etc. The list of assessment is long and invasive. But recently a new critique has arrived: how many Instagram followers you have.
The Invasion of Instagram. Modeling is all about visual stimulation, what better way to exemplify this than through a photo sharing service? In a new effort to glamorize the modeling world, agencies have recently started inspecting social media outlets to see the amount of people who are interested in your life. When applying to agencies, many now ask about your Instagram and if you have over 10,000 followers. The question is, why does this matter? The more followers an agency’s models have, the better they look. If these models keep posting high quality content, it reflects highly on them and creates a sense of elitism. So not only does a model need to have “the look”, they now need the popularity. The issue here is that followers can be bought or created through software. A model can have 10,000 followers, but how many of them are actual interested individuals? How many of them are software robots created specifically to make the follower count go up? Despite the shakiness and stressful nature, a larger following is still something I must strive for to keep up. To fulfill this demand I make sure to post photos 3-4 times a week, but this also means having enough content to post, which I dedicate much of my free time compiling.
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