Updated September 25, 2024 at 14:34 PM ET
Part 3 of TED Radio Hour's The state of fashion
This piece includes a reference to sexual misconduct.
At what point does someone cross over from an observer to an accomplice? That’s the question at the heart of model Cameron Russell’s memoir How To Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone.
The book dives into the seedy economic underpinnings of the fashion industry, from the labor conditions of garment workers, to the extreme environmental impact of fast fashion, to the sexual exploitation of models themselves — and Russell doesn’t shy away from any of it, despite her own success.
She was scouted as a teenager in the early 2000s and has spent the past two decades working for fashion powerhouses like Versace, Louis Vuitton, and Victoria’s Secret. She also became an organizer and activist, speaking out about the industry’s failings, notably giving the viral 2012 TED Talk “Looks aren’t everything. Believe me, I’m a model”.
“I want to take responsibility and be part of a group of people that try as hard as we can to transform the industry,” Russell tells TED Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi. “At the same time, to acknowledge that there are systems which have been in place that are so much bigger than us, that we cannot shoulder responsibility for.”
For Russell, early success meant being willing to ‘do anything’
When she started modeling, Russell says, women in her industry were praised for being willing to “do anything,” — and to get ahead, she had to learn to make herself agreeable, to tolerate behavior that made her uncomfortable.
She recalls her first photoshoot and how a stylist wanted her to wear a belt around her neck, for “an S&M vibe.” Not long after, a photographer kissed her on her lips; others called her “jailbait,” makeup artists told her she had “c***-sucker lips.” She was 16 years old.
“I was inside other people's fantasies that I had no understanding of,” Russell says. “And I tolerated it. I went along with it because I was thinking, well, this is a wild opportunity. And it's an industry where you are standing in a casting line with 400 other young women and you just start thinking, you can be replaced in an instant.”
From witness to accomplice
As the years went on, she writes that she saw with growing clarity the wrongdoings of the industry that also catapulted her into supermodel status. “Each day I become less of a witness and more of an accomplice,” she writes.
In one example, Russell recalls working on a photoshoot while reading about a factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,000 garment workers — workers who produced clothing for many of the companies Russell worked for. She ran to the bathroom, physically ill.
“My body was being used to make this, in many ways, really grotesque industry beautiful, enticing, aspirational,” she says. “[It was] just this really repulsive human experience of being sickened by what was happening.”
And yet, she chose to continue modeling. “I think that there's like this sort of fantasy sometimes. It feels like ‘if you don't like it, then quit,” she says. But she argues that injustices like these happen in nearly every industry. “And a solution to me anyway is not really to just live off the grid. It is to actually acknowledge I am and have been an accomplice to some really egregious things that this industry is doing.”
Today, Russell tries to right the wrongs of the industry in her own way
Rather than abandoning the issue, Russell says that she now tries to use her platform to organize models and push for ethical and sustainable practices in the industry.
In 2017, as the MeToo movement was taking off, she collected the stories of hundreds of models — stories of lecherous photographers and agents, of sexual harassment and abuse — and posted them anonymously online.
“I can see how grotesque and public this all is,” she writes, “but there is also a feeling of relief. It is painful and pleasurable to peel back, to expose, to flick a scab away and leave something raw, wet, open.”
She co-founded an organization called Model Mafia to advocate for safe and fair workplace standards for models, and worked with an organization called Remake to advocate for legislation that would regulate brands and reduce the environmental and ethical harm of the industry.
And Russell holds onto the nuance of loving fashion itself; she mends her own clothing and cites her mother’s love of textiles as one of her deepest creative inspirations.
“I see fashion as a cultural expression, as one of the most potent, beautiful, powerful life-giving cultural expressions that we have,” she says. “And it is our responsibility as people who work in fashion, as people who consume fashion, to try to hold those two things: grief at being an accomplice to the system, at working inside this, and using that as motivation to turn towards and grasp onto the ways that fashion can be really beautiful and powerful.”
This segment of the TED Radio Hour was produced by Rachel Faulkner White and edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour. You can follow us on Facebook @TEDRadioHour and email us at TEDRadioHour@npr.org.
Web Resources
Related TED Bio: Cameron Russell
Related TED Talk: The simple solution to fast fashion
Related TED Talk: Fashion and creativity
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