A few days before Fashion Week began, the avant-garde label Eckhaus Latta held a casting call in a Chinatown basement for its runway show. Women with pink hair, men with full-back tattoos, plus-size and transgender models, and not terribly tall civilians—all were fair game in the eyes of Rachel Chandler, the casting director who’d summoned them.
Chandler was reviewing the day’s snapshots as a few stragglers showed up. A lanky woman with a short Afro and an unplaceable accent sauntered in and handed over her modelling card.
“Where are you from?” Chandler, who is thirty years old and petite, with blond hair, asked. She is a new mother, and she wore a hoodie and baggy jeans.
“Panama,” the woman said.
“Cool,” Chandler said. “I’ve never had a model from Panama before.”
Two years ago, Chandler and her business partner, Walter Pearce, who is a twenty-two-year-old downtown It Boy, created an agency called Midland, which aims to cast real people (with an emphasis on the eccentric or the unpolished) in fashion shows and ad campaigns. Their clients include Adidas, Gucci, Barneys, and the C.F.D.A.-winning designer Telfar.
Pearce explained, “I’m drawn to women who seem like they’re deer in the headlights, parents-as-cousins, and ‘Are we uptown or downtown?’ ” He described the look Chandler is going for as “grown, scary women who will yell at you if you drop something in their house.”
For Eckhaus Latta, Chandler hoped to cast a mix of working models and “nodels,” as nonprofessionals are called. Some of these are friends of hers and of the designers, and some are people whom she stops on the street. Last year, a friend she cast walked the runway with the middle buttons of her dress undone to reveal a pregnant belly. Eckhaus Latta’s line often features gender-neutral sizing, and a recent series of ads pictured models having sex. For another campaign, Chandler cast her assistant and the babysitter of a stylist friend; both were topless and wore clown makeup.
When it comes to casting models, the line between “real” and “too real” can be tricky to discern. The label’s designers—Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, thirty-year-old graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design—were worried about coming off as gimmicky this season. Some agencies had misinterpreted their aesthetic and sent over candidates with obvious shticks, or with too many tattoos.
Chandler and the designers pored over a pile of head shots, frowning. Eckhaus, who has tousled black hair and was wearing a white turtleneck and black jeans, picked up a photo of a young woman with white-blond hair and sunken eyes. “No, no,” he said. “She looks like a piranha.”
Chandler held up a shot of a classically beautiful woman with thick brown hair parted down the middle. “She’s so pretty,” she said.
“We could shave her head?” Eckhaus joked.
Chandler’s phone vibrated with a news alert. “This mutant crayfish clones itself, and it’s taking over Europe,” she read. “She’s fabulous,” Chandler said, holding up the phone to show the crustacean to the others.
A panicked voice from the hallway intruded. “Oh, it’s not over? Thank God!” the voice yelled, in a thick French accent.
“Well, it’s technically over,” Chandler told the pouty-lipped woman, when she walked in. “But we’ll see you.”
The woman removed her jacket and posed for a head shot, still breathless. “I don’t know if you know my story,” she said.
“What’s your story?” Eckhaus asked.
“I’m transgender,” she said.
“O.K.,” Chandler said.
“I was going to miss the casting, but I love your brand so much,” the model said, as she scurried out.
“I liked her, but she’s too sexy in the face,” Eckhaus said.
Latta, who is tall and blond, with rosy cheeks, stood in front of a wall of head shots and scrunched her mouth. “It’s feeling very white right now,” she said.
Chandler leaned in and began counting. Toward the bottom of the wall were three young black men, all shirtless. “It’s actually not that white,” she said.
“It’s unbalanced to me,” Eckhaus said.
“It feels too model-y,” Latta added. “It’s not as strong on the nodels.”
“That’s because we don’t have any friends anymore, because all we do is sit in the studio,” Eckhaus said.
They mulled the idea of casting Thea Westreich, an art adviser in her seventies, who’d modelled for them before.
Latta looked at the board. “These girls are so pretty,” she said with disgust.
“Maybe that’s good,” Chandler said.
“I’m thinking we need more of a vibe of a masc woman,” Latta said.
Eckhaus pointed to a photo of a woman. “She’s butch,” he said. They thumbed through the pile, stopping at a model they’d liked earlier.
“She was great,” Chandler said. “She’s trans!”
“Cool,” Latta said. “And she didn’t say, ‘So do you know my story?’ ” ♦
