The curious case of the fainting models

At the New York Fashion Week: Men’s shows last February, more than a dozen male models gathered in a building in the West Village for a presentation of the California-based line CWST. The
label’s designers, Joe Sadler and Derek Buse, had been inspired by the Pacific North-west and grunge rock. The models stood on high podiums, dressed in multilayers of wool and shearling, including beanies, with hot lights shining on them for more than an hour.
For one young model named Logan Flatte, it was too much. As Sadler was showing the fall collection to an important buyer from Saks Fifth Avenue, Flatte tried to get the designer’s attention before succumbing and collapsing like felled timber.
“He fell into my arms — I had to catch him,” Sadler said afterwards, surprised and concerned.
“Sorry, man. I had tunnel vision,” a woozy Flatte explained once he had been spirited to a chair in the back of the room and given a bottle of water.
Though fainting happens with some regularity at fashion shows, and will likely happen again this week during New York Fashion Week: Men’s, each time it shocks. These are healthy young men and women, in their cardiac and respiratory prime, hired specifically for their freakish physical gifts. What gives?
“You think it’s an easy job to just wear the clothes,” said Devin Carlson, creative director of the menswear label Chapter. “It’s actually a pretty crazy thing to ask somebody to stand in a certain position for an hour and not move.”
Carlson was referring to standing presentations like the CWST show, where fainting occurs more often than at runway shows, perhaps for good reason. At presentations, models are asked to be living mannequins, posing under bright display lights for one to two hours without a break.
Summer shows can be physically brutal with the heat and humidity, but so can shows that take place in February, when the models, wearing clothes for the next fall season, may be dressed indoors like they’re outside on a ski mountain.
Then there is the stress of the buyers and editors gawking at them, and the flash of cameras in their eyes.
“We had one model pass out within five minutes of us starting,” Carlson said of a presentation a few seasons back. “She got wobbly and passed out, and some dressers caught her before she hit the ground.”
Though presentations are a cost-effective and increasingly common way for designers to show editors their clothes, many models dislike and even dread them, said Drew Linehan, who produces, casts and styles fashion shows.
Linehan remembered one menswear presentation in New York a few seasons back in which models were on a rotating turntable, wearing heavy wool coats and cashmeres. The concept did not go over well, he said: “After the show, a very well-known model, the nicest guy, said to me, ‘I just want you to know I’m a model, not a rotisserie chicken’.”
Maurilio Carnino, a casting director, said in his experience fainting happens more frequently among female models, partly because they work more. “For women, fashion week lasts a month, worldwide,” he said of the gruelling schedule.
But for all the rigours of the job, many say it is what happens outside of the shows that leads to wooziness: Staying out late clubbing the night before, spending the morning rushing from appointment to appointment, forgetting to eat or hydrate.
Teenagers and early 20-somethings living on their own in a big city are not the best at caring for themselves. It has become customary before shows and presentation for models to receive a pep talk on basic human functions.
“Right before a show I say, ‘Make sure you go to the bathroom, drink some water’,” said Philip Gomez, a freelance stylist and art director. “I make it clear: If you’re feeling the slightest illness, please step off. Because the worst that can happen is a model faints in front of the editors or photographers.”
For his part, Flatte explained that he had been running around all morning and had done another show earlier that day and was feeling stretched thin. “A lot of us don’t get to eat much,” he said.
Sadler and Buse, the CWST designers, were nothing but sympathetic. “Are you OK? Are you hydrated?” Buse asked, during one of the many times he came back to check on the model.
Still, for the remainder of the presentation, Flatte sat in the back of the room looking dejected and self-castigating, like a pitcher who gives up five runs in the first inning before being yanked from the game.
A woman was overheard whispering to a friend: “There’s the model that passed out.”
Perhaps models are not as physically superhuman as popularly imagined, even when, like Flatte, they are 6-foot-3 (1.9m), blond, blue-eyed, long-haired Thor look-alikes.
As Carnino put it: “They’re humans. They’re fragile creatures.”

Source:THE NEW YORK TIMES