By Jessica Frost
@jessicaxfrost
In part two of the insane costs of being a model, expenses just continue to rise…
Transport
Getting around New York, Paris, London or Milan isn’t exactly easy. These major cities suffer from extreme congestion on the roads and have public transport that can’t really be relied on to a fault. When you’ve got four back to back castings to go to on opposite sides of the city, you don’t want to be slowed down by a broken down bus or someone who’s jumped in front of the tube (god bless their soul).
Owning a car is impossible because A – where do you park? B- peak hour traffic… and C- where the fuck do you park?! Also, cars take maintenance and you can’t take it with you when you go abroad so all of that hard earned cash being spent on services goes down the drain when you leave it parked on an NYC back street for a few months.
Thank fully, agents understand all of this and happily book their models transport. Whether it’s a town car, an uber or an old school taxi, they’re more than happy to have one waiting to take you between castings because they’ll charge it back to you at the end of the day. The biggest problem with that is that a lot of models aren’t actually given the choice to take the cheaper option of walking somewhere or getting public transport. She could end up having a couple of hundred dollars being charged to her each week for her transport costs but never actually book a job during that time.
And then there’s overseas trips. Some agents require, others just encourage their models to do a 3-month stint abroad to chase each cities peak season. As a young model being told that going overseas will book you lots of jobs and make you money, you happily agree with the thought that you’ll easily make back any cost of the travel with a pretty penny on top of that. Unfortunately, though, when agents are sending models overseas and charging the flights and accommodation back to them, they’re not sending them with guaranteed work lined up. There’s as much chance as ever that a model could get to Paris and spend weeks running to castings without making a single cent.
Dieticians
Yet another encouraged rather than required expense. Countless models have shared stories about being given an appointment date and time by their agent and being told they have to attend. Even with no real idea of what the appointment is for, the model shows up to find that it’s a dietician or nutritionist or health coach they’re seeing. It’s only when they’re given their next statement that they see the exuberant costs taken out of their earnings that they realise they have to foot the bill for an appointment they didn’t necessarily want in the first place.
