Age Appropriate

Stories of burnout—and worse—are rife in a modeling industry filled with vulnerable mid-teens. So isn’t it time for the fashion world to commit to working with models old enough to vote? asks Maya Singer.

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Pasha Harulia was fifteen when strangers began reaching out to her on Instagram, asking if she was interested in modeling. She wasn’t—but at her mother’s urging, she agreed to give it a shot.

Weeks after signing with an agency in her native Kiev, the then-sixteen-year-old was en route to Paris, booked for the Balenciaga show. “I didn’t even know what Balenciaga was,” says Harulia, who is now nineteen. “People told me it was good.”

After Paris came Tokyo, where Harulia shared a models’ apartment with several Russian girls, the youngest of whom was thirteen. It was an intense few months, much of the time spent in a van that shuttled the young models to castings. “I had some fun,” she says. “But mostly I was thinking about the money.” Guangzhou, China, was different. Modeling for e-commerce sites, she says she’d sometimes shoot up to 100 looks a day. “It was like, how do you say it—like someone wiped the floor with me,” Harulia recalls. “And then threw me away.”

How did we get here? How did the fashion industry become so reliant on the labor of teenagers? What’s striking about Harulia’s story is how typical it is. Cara Taylor began modeling at fourteen. Imaan Hammam was thirteen when she was spotted near an Amsterdam train station. Andreea Diaconu was an unusually tall eleven-year-old when scouts started circling. These girls are a few of the lucky ones; resilient Harulia signed with blue chip agencies in New York and Paris and walked for Miu Miu in March for the fall 2018 collection, but many of the roommates with whom she shared flats in unfamiliar cities were discarded or burned themselves out—“broken from the inside,” as she puts it.