I searched my soul and all I got were these boots.

So, as it turns out, models are real people. 

Go figure.

But watching them strut their stuff on Tuesday really forced me to do a wee bit of soul searching - the product of which became this semi-obvious revelation.

Because that's not melodramatic at all.

Truthfully, though - after attending the model training session for the UWFW Friday fashion show, I came away feeling a little big strange, and questioning why I wanted to start this blog in the first place.

I think the word "Fashion" has gotten a pretty bad rap. To a lot of people, it's a petty, materialistic, relatively useless line of work in which narcissistic girls flatter themselves as fervently as they do the narcissistic men who they hope will flatter them back.

And after watching Shit Fashion Girls Say, I was kind convinced.

Truth be told, I sort of wish that there were another word for exactly what part of all of this I find so appealing.

It's not that I don't enjoy watching clothes come down the runway, or reading the obscene number of fashion blogs that I have bookmarked in my browser (because I do - I really do), it's just that those are only really a means to a different sort of end.

I'm not out to replace the need for a personality, or to create some alter-ego that I'm most certainly not. I want to epitomize - to try and supplement what I'm actually feeling.

So when Tuesday's talent coach told the models that it's not about them and that they should have "no personality", I started to feel sort of like a phony (Catcher In The Rye, anyone?).

 

Convincingly morphing into a faceless being is obviously not my intention - nor do I think it is for the billions of other people who love "fashion" (with a lower case "f").

Anyhow, my point is that models, far from being perfectly proportioned pieces of moving plastic, are really funny, dynamic and charismatic people who put all that aside in pursuit of some Fashion norm. 

KJ Lyn, coach and model (She's awesome, by the way. Far from faceless.)

I understand the premise - by focusing on the material itself, you allow it to be adapted in whatever way the consumer sees fit. I just wish that there was some way for a model's personality to be amplified by the clothes, rather than just erased altogether.

I didn't say they weren't beautiful people, though. Obnoxiously beautiful people. ;)

Cheers.