Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Ashley Brokaw: Fashion’s Most Unlikely Power Player

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts
  • 1994
    Member
    • Jun 2014
    • 69

    Ashley Brokaw: Fashion’s Most Unlikely Power Player

    Ashley Brokaw: Fashion’s Most Unlikely Power Player
    T Magazine, By Alice Gregory June 9, 2015

    -------------------------

    As the fashion industry’s leading casting director, Brokaw, 41, is arguably the person most singularly responsible for what — or, more accurately, who — we think is beautiful. “She has a foresight. She has a stamp of approval,” says Anderson, creative director of Loewe and J. W. Anderson. “She finds faces, and she takes risks on faces. All the faces that we see today are passed through Ashley.” Proenza Schouler’s Lazaro Hernandez agrees. “If you want to be a working model,” he says, “get on Ashley’s radar"....

    Today, that person is less conventional and arguably odder-looking than ever before. Brokaw favors the kind of model more memorable than she is pretty. What fashion editors have long euphemistically called jolie-laide, she calls “strong.” The faces she chooses are sometimes merely a bit off-kilter but often undeniably weird and in some cases visibly asymmetrical. In print, they can seem outright radical, especially when compared to the burnished Brazilian goddesses and feline Russians of the recent past....

    And yet even the new, seemingly more inclusive beauty standards might themselves be an expression of a certain strain of exclusivity. The fetishism of unusual facial features could be read as a trickle-down effect of our contemporary notion of one-of-a-kind luxury, a resistance to the ubiquity of mass merchandising. From a designer’s point of view, personifying a collection with a not obviously gorgeous model can imbue the clothes with an artisanal, avant-garde edge. As Brokaw herself concedes, “There’s a fine line between fashion and beauty being democratic and an anything-goes mentality. Fashion should be rarefied"....

    LIKE ANY MAJOR shift in taste, the new tolerance to stranger models can be attributed in part to practical, even economic, factors. Over the 20 years she’s been doing it, Brokaw’s job has become both harder and far more interesting. In the past decade, the number of fall shows at New York Fashion Week has doubled, and with the rise of e-commerce and photo-documentation (Instagram, street-style blogs, backstage slide shows), the demand for modeled content is greater than ever before...

    Meanwhile, the very idea of what a model is has expanded as well. “It used to be that you could kind of get away with just going down a runway. If you could fake it for the 45 seconds you needed to walk, that was good enough,” Brokaw says. “But there are so many other jobs now. Think about it: Almost every campaign has a video component, and video is very, very different than still photographs.” Increasingly, Brokaw is being asked about models’ personalities. Social media surely plays a role here. Thumbing out clever captions about your acne, having fun in public and knowing to display your most irreverently inexpensive possessions are contemporary skills whose value cannot be exaggerated. “I like somebody who could be your best friend’s sister. You know, the girl who’s not on the cheerleading squad.”

    While she isn’t at all nostalgic for high-school-style prettiness — the past era of remote, traffic-stopping beauties — Brokaw does wonder whether the progress made in pushing the boundaries of what is attractive may be ephemeral: whether the industry, so famous for its antic, pendulum-like movements, isn’t poised for a return to “a very normal beauty aesthetic . . . the girl who walks in and who everyone agrees is beautiful, not the one where you have to convince everyone she’s beautiful.” But isn’t that always the threat, the pretty girl who returns and forces everybody to forget the interesting one?
Working...
X
😀
🥰
🤢
😎
😡
👍
👎