The modelling agencies drill girls as young as five in the usual stuff. Catwalking. Dance. Weight control. "Siberia is being trawled because much of the exoticism of its putative models lies in their scarcity; unlike in the West, you can’t pick them off the shelf, during moppet beauty pageants or after high school. This scarcity seems counterfactual when you consider that Siberia comprises the entire Asian portion of Russia, or 76 percent of Russia’s land area. But, in fact, it houses less than a quarter of the country’s population of 143 million; the density is three people per sq km, and the population of the largest city in 13.1 million sq km, Novosibirsk, tops out at 1.5 million. It’s obvious why the girls here are, in any worldly sense, naifs: they’ve never been exposed to The Walk; they know nothing about Cool; they don’t yearn to grace the cover of Vogue; they haven’t the faintest about the pitfalls of the adulation that the model scouts tell them is theirs for the asking. ...For the children, the run-up to the casting can be traumatic: Siberian modelling schools—there are eight in Novosibirsk alone—are as deeply immersed in age-inappropriateness as their counterparts elsewhere, and put girls as young as four through training in pouting, dressing, sashaying, posing, dieting and cosmetology. At the scout stage, caprice and melancholy rule: the future will be decided on the evidence of a tottering sashay in six-inch heels that are glaringly irrelevant in Siberia’s geological autarchy of permafrost and sludge."
Posted on: Mon, 02 Sep 2013 09:03:54 +0000
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