The Model Turning the Camera Around

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There’s a particular irony in asking a model to look beyond appearances. Anya Marcon gets it. She loves fashion. She loves a great photograph. She loves clothes, glamour, a fabulous runway, and the peculiar alchemy that occurs when the right model steps into the right look and suddenly makes a designer’s vision come alive.

Marcon also knows none of those things tell you much about the woman wearing the clothes. That contradiction became the starting point for Model Life, the book Marcon created and published through her company, Aury Collective.

Twenty-two women ultimately appear in the book, including Eugenia Kuzmina, Yaya DaCosta, Eva Sita, Maxime Nova, Michaela Vybohova, Charlotte Reardon, Julia Carolan, Emily Perez, Skye Stracke, Riley Woodell, Sarah DeAnna, Bentley Mescall, Xenye Pretorius, Irina Loginowski, Anastasia Drinevskaya, Polina Shkapenko, Eugena Washington, Anastasia Bogushevskaya, Lovisa Fåhræus, Michelle Pritts, Zarina Yeva, and Marcon herself.

There are beautiful images, naturally. But the pictures aren’t really the point. The lives are.

Before The Runway
Marcon’s own story has enough plot twists for several careers. By 18, she had attended 13 schools, lived in six states and three countries, and acquired three passports. Russian and French-Canadian by background, she learned early how to enter unfamiliar environments, read the room, make friends, and project confidence even when she didn’t necessarily feel it.

In retrospect, that sounds remarkably like early training for fashion.

Her fascination with modeling began more conventionally: with a runway show she happened to catch on television as a girl. What Marcon remembers most wasn’t the designer or collection. It was the movement.

Models strode down the runway to a deep house track, and she was mesmerized by the combination of fashion, rhythm, confidence, and attitude. So, as one does, she got up and started practicing the walk in her living room.

By 14, she was approaching agencies trying to get a foot in the door. But it was years later that she would walk for Dennis Basso during New York Fashion Week, interestingly, just days after launching her compilation book, Model Life.

“The girl who wanted to get into fashion probably wouldn’t have believed the book part could materialize,” she has said, “or how much life would happen before the runway walks.” And perhaps that is the real story here because Marcon’s relationship with modeling didn’t follow the clean, straight-line outsiders sometimes imagine a runway career should, yet few do.

Photographer Credit: George Tichomirov

What Models Know that Others Don’t
One of the more refreshing things about Marcon is that she doesn’t feel obligated to romanticize the business to love it. Modeling is subjective. Brutally so. She reflects, “Your look can be exactly what someone wants on Monday and completely wrong by Thursday.” Marcon has arrived at castings only to be told she was “too white” for one job and, somewhat improbable to believe for a model, “too skinny” for another.

The lesson extends far beyond fashion: Sometimes rejection contains important information.
And sometimes it contains absolutely none. “I wish I’d understood earlier how little of that rejection is personal,” says Marcon.

That realization also helped shape Model Life.

When Marcon began interviewing women for the project, she discovered stories about leaving home, rejection, motherhood (and body changes), ambition, reinvention, confidence, career detours, financial independence, identity, and figuring out what success looks like when somebody else isn’t defining it for you.

Marcon also came away from this curation process convinced that one of fashion’s most persistent assumptions, namely that exceptional beauty automatically produces exceptional success, is, at best, incomplete.

“There’s no doubt that beautiful people have an advantage in life that might lead to offers and opportunities in the many avenues of fashion, entertainment and more,” she says. “Yet from my observations, and as a result of interviewing more than 100 models for this book, many of the women considered ‘the most beautiful’ were not necessarily the most booked.” A fact that she highlights regularly in interviews and conversations with those aspiring to appear on the pages of magazines and runways.

Personifying depth and intelligence, wrongly often disregarded as traits of models, Marcon has some keen observations about what separates a working model from someone who simply photographs beautifully. She points to less ‘Instagrammable’ attributes: Character assets such as consistency, grit, professionalism, preparation, self-advocacy, resilience, and the ability to hear “no” without allowing it to become an identity crisis, are all high on her list.

Then, there is the piece outsiders occasionally forget: Modeling is a business. “The job of a model is to sell,” Marcon says. “Whether it’s clothing, cosmetics, an event, a destination or everything in between.” Looking fabulous is nice. Moving product for the client that hired you is nicer, and will get you more work.

The Business of Being Your Own Product
The business side presented Marcon with another lesson. Before pursuing modeling seriously, she worked in luxury real estate. In that career, she was hardly unfamiliar with negotiating or discussing money.

“Being comfortable in front of a camera doesn’t mean you’re comfortable asking for money,” she says. Not every model is represented by an agency. Plenty of successful models, including, presently, Marcon, choose to self-represent for a variety of reasons. Still, she notes that when the product includes your image, time, personality, reach, and creative contribution, negotiating can suddenly become personal in ways that selling a house does not. And this is why Marcon notes that the professionals with longevity learn to understand industry booking and contract lingo including tangible terms like usage and compensation, along with less tangible aspects associated often with the dark side of fashion, such as self-value: where enthusiasm ends, and business begins. Marcon bluntly notes: “I’m so excited about this” and “What is the fee?” can, and probably should, exist in the same conversation.

That pragmatic streak may help explain why Marcon didn’t stop at modeling. She created Aury Collective as a broader platform focused on fashion, media, and storytelling. Model Life became one expression of that idea. And, creating it also provided an accelerated education in the difference between having a concept and executing one. At the book launch, Marcon recalls that contributors Yaya DaCosta and Eugena Washington gave her what she considers one of the greatest compliments about the project: “You actually did it.” Three words every founder understands and values.

Photographer Credit: George Tichomirov

Beauty And Depth Are Allowed to Coexist
Marcon also seems particularly uninterested in falling into another trap: the idea that women must reject beauty to prove they have substance. “I love clothes, glamour, and the work that goes into creating an image,” she says. “I don’t think I need to pretend otherwise to have something meaningful to say.”

It’s a deceptively relevant point.

Women are still regularly sorted into strange cultural binaries: beautiful or serious, mother or ambitious, sexy or respectable, fashion-focused or substantive. Marcon’s work pushes in the opposite direction. Model Life argues, implicitly and explicitly, that a woman can care deeply about aesthetics and still have a complicated, ambitious, thoughtful, evolving life behind the image.

In fact, that tension may be exactly what makes the project interesting. The book doesn’t ask readers to stop looking at fashion. It asks them to look longer.

The Story Behind the Image

That idea became central to the book’s structure. Marcon was not interested in creating a traditional portfolio book or a glossy compilation of fashion photographs. Instead, each image becomes an entry point into something more personal: A turning point for one woman, a professional lesson for another, a setback, an ambition, or a reinvention and so the stories go. The result is a portrait of an industry that is often seen from the outside almost entirely through finished images.

For Marcon, those unseen parts matter. They are also what make the women interesting. Her own philosophy behind the project came together one morning around 4:30 a.m., when she woke up with the phrase: “The life of a model. A life worth modeling.”

The double meaning became the framework for the book. The first half is literal. The second is bigger. What makes a life worth modeling, she proves within the pages of Model Life, has little to do with height, measurements, cheekbones, or whether someone can walk in six-inch heels.

It has much more to do with how a person navigates uncertainty, takes ownership of choices, develops resilience, builds a career, and decides who she wants to become.

Now She’s Turning the Lens Again
For Marcon, Model Life doesn’t appear to be ending with the book. She is exploring and collaborating on a variety of projects designed to go deeper into the lives of some of the women featured in the project. The extension makes sense. As Marcon exemplified: A single essay can reveal a great deal about someone; a full editorial treatment can reveal something different entirely.

And another idea is already taking shape: Designer Life. This time, Marcon wants to shift the lens from the people wearing the clothes to the people creating them, particularly emerging designers and members of the CFDA community. The question is essentially the same one that inspired Model Life: Who is the person behind the work everyone else sees?

That may ultimately be the thread connecting all of Marcon’s projects. Fashion is exceptionally good at creating images. Marcon is becoming increasingly interested in what those images leave out. And in an industry built around being seen, asking to be understood may be refreshingly modern.

The Daily Front Roweditorial team was not involved in the creation of this article.