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Confessions of a Male Fashion Model

One day I was an English professor. The next, I was still an English professor.
By Willard Spiegelman |
SUNDAY FINEST: An outtake from the shoot the author did for The New York Times Magazine.
photography by Christopher Kim

The life of a model: do not believe anyone who tells you that it’s all glamorous parties, easy sex, free recreational drugs. It’s not, I assure you. You don’t even get to keep the clothes. I know. I have done my time.

It came out of the blue, the letter, from cyberspace. Turning on the computer one August morning, I found an invitation to become part of a feature in The New York Times Magazine, specifically in its annual autumn “college issue,” this year devoted to teaching. Had decades of nurturing young minds, the thousands of hours alerting them to comma splices, dangling participles, and misplaced modifiers, not to mention denser literary matters such as the nuances in Keats’ odes or the syntactic tangles of Milton’s “Lycidas,” reaped some unexpected reward? Had a student in middle age, looking back to an apprenticeship under my stern but loving tutelage, finally realized that I had helped nurture a career as a journalist and now wanted to pay homage to the master who got the ball rolling?


My mind rushed back to MGM musicals. Irving Berlin: “The photographers will snap us, and you’ll find that you’re in the rotogravure.” We have no more rotogravures, of course, no Easter bonnets or Easter parades. But I couldn’t help summoning up the picture of my Walter Mitty self, looking like Fred Astaire in a gray morning suit, with top hat and cane, strolling with Judy Garland and Ann Miller and her dogs along Fifth Avenue in Easter Parade.


“Excuse me?” I had called the Times editor to make sure that someone wasn’t teasing me. Like those people who win the Nobel Prize or a MacArthur “Genius” award and are awakened in the middle of the night by what they take to be a crank phone call, I had my doubts. “There are many thousands of male academics who are smarter, better-looking, taller, younger, more famous, and better dressed than I am. Why me?” Skepticism and vanity were running a neck-to-neck race in my mind. “You’ve got to be kidding” vied with “Of course. It’s about time they recognized my true value.”


I never found out how they found, or why they picked, me. But I was their man. Go figure. The assistant photography editor told me, “We are going to do a shoot with six professors who have made a mark as teachers or thinkers, or who have done important work in their field.” I still thought someone was playing a cruel joke, but I was game.


The following week, the fashion “stylist” phoned: “Give me a sense of your style.” Not a hard question to answer. I tell my students the four most beautiful words in the English language are “Neiman,” “Marcus,” “Giorgio,” and “Armani,” but aside from the occasional purchase of something glamorous on sale at Last Call, my style hews to the tried-and-true Anglophiliac, WASP-inflected clothing of what used to be known as the Ivy look. Think preppy. Think Brooks Brothers, Paul Stuart, the British Paul Smith, or the little Andover Shop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I have bought clothes for four decades.


At least I—unlike most male academics—dress for work. Clothes make the man, the saying goes, and I like to set a somewhat formal tone for the classroom, however much I am willing to make a fool of myself for the sake of my students. I want them to see my respect for them and the poets I am teaching them. The students always seem to like this attitude. Anyway, at a certain age, people need to have more, not less, of their skin covered. A French woman asked me whether all American male professors were born wearing jeans and running shoes. Men can get away with more sloppiness in public than women can. I want to right the imbalance.


Bow ties figure prominently. One student said on her blog that I must have embraced my inner nerd. Untrue. My inner fop is more like it. A bow tie has practical advantages: it’s cheaper than a four-in-hand, and you can’t spill food on it at the table. But basically it’s an affectation. I’m sure that more bow ties hang in my closet than in the rest of Dallas.


The stylist seemed pleased. At least it gave him “something to work with,” as he put it, and I could see the wheels spinning in his head as he prepared to raid the Madison Avenue shops, pulling together the right items in the right size for our shoot.

 

The day arrives. I take the train down from seaside Connecticut. It’s a warm but not oppressive summer morning. I bring along three of my coolest bow ties. (“We want to have a choice,” says Bruce the stylist.) Before my 2 pm rendezvous at the Times building across from the Port Authority Station, I have lunch with a former student who has worked for People and In Style, and who knows his way around magazines, celebrities, and fashion.

“Will they let me help select the best picture for the final product?” I ask hopefully.
“Are you out of your mind? You are a piece of meat, not Julia Roberts. They’ll do what they want.” (He was right.)


A big van is parked on the side street. I get in, to join the driver and his assistant, the photo editor and his assistant, the photographer and his assistant, the stylist and his assistant (I have never had so much assistance, or so many assistants, in my life), and the makeup woman and the hair woman. Off we go, driving down Ninth Avenue to the West Village, where we park on the street, near Patchin Place, where the shoot will take place.


But not yet. For two hours, I stand in the trailer with Bruce pulling things off the rack, trying them on me, taking them off, and trying others. He’s a whiz with scissors, tape, pins and needles, and an iron. We get two complete outfits, both in “my” style. He insists that I wear socks that match the shoes he’s chosen for me, even though no one will see them. (As it turns out, no one sees the shoes, either.) It reminds me of all the artists working on the back sides of sculptures in Gothic cathedrals, knowing that no one will ever see the hind parts except God himself.


After we have selected the clothes, we get to hair and makeup. The latter is especially interesting. The artist keeps dabbing stuff on her own skin (to warm it up, a woman friend tells me later) before putting it on me. I look in the mirror. “But I don’t look any different,” I protest. “I can’t tell I’m wearing makeup.”


“That’s the whole point,” she explains.


Ready for the shoot, we all go outside to the down-at-heel cul-de-sac where e.e. cummings and Djuna Barnes used to live, a nice tree-shaded enclave. This is where the real work begins.


Anyone with a memory of David Hemmings in Antonioni’s Blowup, working wonders with his camera, seducing his female models with sexual instructions, will know what I thought would happen. (“That’s it, babe. Make love to the camera.” “Give me more.” “I’ve got to have all of you.”) Instead, I feel like a 19th-century model posing for a daguerreotype or an early photograph that requires total stillness. (This is why no one is ever smiling in old pictures. You have to hold the pose.)


“Turn your head this way. Raise your arm. Look to the left. Look down. Look up.” And on and on. The crew is gathered around a computer connected to the digital camera. They are all conferring. I figure they’re saying, “Boy, have we made a mistake. He’s too old. Too fat. Too ugly. This is not what we want.”


“You look a little stiff,” someone says helpfully.


“Of course I’m stiff. I can’t hold a pose forever.” And whenever I move, Bruce darts in to readjust my cuff or my tie. Margo comes to powder my nose. Danielle to touch up my hair. Whatever this is, the camera is certainly not making love to me, and I’m sure not making love back to it.


After an hour or so, I am back in the van, out of Outfit No. 1 and into Outfit No. 2. Then we proceed. I’m beginning to tire, even to hallucinate. Danielle whispers conspiratorially, “Don’t worry. They’ll use the first shot they took. They always do. They do the rest of this just to torture you.”
I’m beginning to get giddy.


At last it’s over. The helpers all depart for their respective homes, and the photographers hail a cab large enough to carry their equipment. I sit in solitary splendor in the van, which drops me off at Penn Station seven hours after I arrived. I’m still wearing my makeup, which is still invisible to me. I rush to the darkest bar for a martini. Then home, totally wrung out.

 

For a month I waited on tenterhooks, fearing that the staff would take an Avedon-ish approach to us models and try to make us look weird. But then I remembered that the whole point of a fashion shoot is to make the clothes look good enough to be bought.

I told only a handful of friends about the deal. I alerted a batch to my new career and told them to look forward to the Sunday issue. On Saturday the 20th I caught a glimpse of myself online. Not too bad, I thought, but a kind of awkward pose.


On September 21 the issue arrived. I opened my door at 6 to see the Times in its blue plastic wrapper, and my heart skipped a beat or two. I found myself inside the magazine and sat by the phone. One friend called to say I looked like John Houseman in The Paper Chase. Another said I looked like Sir John Betjeman dressed like Henry James. A third said I looked like a Harvard classicist, circa 1950, and asked whether I was wearing my Halloween costume. My father wondered why I didn’t get a full page, like two of the other professors. Can you ever please your parents?


All in all, I was happy with the re-sponse, I guess. Soon enough, I’m sure I’ll get around to taking the makeup off.

Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English at SMU, the editor in chief of The Southwest Review, and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal. Write to [email protected].

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