This Year's Model

Elizabeth Wissinger is an Associate Professor of Sociology at BMCC/City University of New York and Associate Professor of Fashion Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center.

• vii Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Glamour Labor 1 1. Supermodels of the World: Living the Life 35 2. The Runway: Step into the Room Like It's a Catwalk 59 3. The Photo Shoot: Strike a Pose - There's Nothing to It 80 4. Cover Girl: Managing the Model Body 108 5. The Fashionable Ideal: Looking Like a Model 141 6. The Job: Nice Work If You Can Get It 162 7. Scouting: The Hunger for New Faces 185 8. Black-Black-Black: How Race Is Read 216 9. Touch-Ups: Making the Model Better 243 Conclusion: The Affective Turn 267 Appendix: A Chronology of Modeling in the Media, 1980 - 2010 279 Notes 283 Index 339 About the Author 353

"In a thoroughly fresh analysis, Wissinger uses the fashion model as a lens to theorize changing intersections of technology and the body. With an eye for rich ethnographic detail, she takes us inside the world of modeling and skillfully back out again into the macro historical changes in embodiment and technology that modeling exemplifies.This Years Model delivers a rich and troubling history of how we have all come to manage ourselves as brands.Its the kind of book that will change how you think about your own bodys place in our high-tech world." - Ashley Mears,author of Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model "In a sympathetic yet critical view of the labor of glamour, Wissinger presents rich ethnographic work augmented with interviews and the close integration of media and press materials on the historical trajectory of the modeling and fashion industry from the mid-1980s through the present." (Choice)