Picture me, at one of those tender ages of pre-teen-hood like 8 or 9, watching with unconsciously open mouth and preemptive fear while a twentysomething, conventionally attractive blonde gets her teeth pulled out on television. I wince as I see the surprisingly long teeth, framed at their roots with bright red blood, exit her mouth and are placed on a tray next to her. I want to cover my eyes, or leave the room until the next commercial break, but I cannot. I am in absolute solidarity with poor Joanie in this moment, and to turn off the TV now would be to betray her unknowing trust in me, the 8-year old ally of the process of getting veneers on a reality exploitation show masquerading as a modeling competition.
A few years later, I run my tongue around my perpetually loose canine and slightly bulging front teeth as I watch another conventionally attractive blonde get the gap in her teeth surgically widened. I press my dry lips together in anticipation as the camera closes up on a tiny saw inserted between a tiny gap, tiny streaks of light and white cascading away from it with a brutally metallic sound and sheen. I smile in relief as Chelsey appears pleased with the results. In several episodes’ time, I am brought to tears when she doesn’t win the season.
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With the loss of such a prestigious award as the grand prize of America’s Next Top Model, which is often money; a contract with a modeling agency that turns out to be only an offer of a contract; a cover or modeling spread in some magazine that might go out of business in a year or two, or an unmemorable ad campaign; and bragging rights – but only after your final episode airs; comes the loss of innocence.
In total, America’s Next Top Model ran for 24 seasons, called “cycles” for some inexplicably menstrual reason, and 315 43-minute episodes, between the years of 2003 and 2018. It featured 324 largely female contestants, not including the probably tens of thousands more who auditioned and never made it on, perhaps lucky in retrospect. Of all the lives that Top Model touched, helped ruin, destroy, uplift or otherwise, many former contestants are still professional working models in “The Business” today, while others have chosen different career paths such as law, real estate, art, education, motherhood and housewifery. Unfortunately, a few have died and at least one is in prison. (For the record, whether the experience of participating on the show has anything to do with the chain of events that regretfully plague some young lives, is not for me to truly conjecture here.)
This is a group of women and men who, in the famed annals of televised history, are remembered only as winners and losers. They are people who are threatened to be defined, at least in the popular cultural realm, by their brief, heavily dramatized, edited and censored experiences in a highly manipulative, intentionally humiliating, and psychologically and physically grueling competition that perhaps once began as a serious attempt to televise the struggles of Modelland to the yearning masses, and quickly digressed into peak reality show-era chaos.
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Picture me again, 8 years old. I had just begun learning to sew, taught dutifully and beautifully by a cozy blonde woman usually draped in sweeping skirts and a cardigan. Her sarcasm, ever-French-tipped fingernails, and wit easily imprinted upon me early on, and her presence in my childhood and adolescence for nearly a decade corresponded with the height of my adoration of America’s Next Top Model as one of many examples of the mythical, seemingly infinite world of fashion I so desperately wanted to inhabit for myself. She, if I remember correctly, vaguely disapproved of my dedication to the program, and we often preferred to discuss in class the technical values of Project Runway challenges instead.
As a child, I was shy, but not too shy. I had a short, messy bob of dark hair that I swore was black up until I realized it was brown somewhere in high school. I experimented, accidentally and periodically, with bangs before thankfully giving up one day. I had facial hair and acne. I didn’t shave my underarms for a couple of years after they first grew (again, what I assured myself was jet black) hair. I wore interesting, if not sometimes misguided, outfits and shoes, and declared in the midst of sewing one day that, “I only read fashion magazines to see what the trends are, and then dress the exact opposite.” I was curious about young adulthood, precocious mainly through the 19th-century novels I read, but was not, I think, that eager to get to it.
I remember a low-placed bookshelf with a handful of my father’s old paperbacks on it, one of which was lamentably, National Lampoon’s The Job of Sex, a first edition published in 1974. I read it in secret spurts of time, not quite ever enjoying myself, and eventually completed it cover to cover. I don’t think I realized it was my earliest introduction to sex, and that it was very possibly a traumatic one. My new knowledge did give me a slight edge over my still-innocent young friends who practiced kissing on their fists and pillows and argued with me over whether or not you moved your head side to side when a boy kissed you. It also allowed me to approach the morally ambiguous, ever-borderline sexually offensive photo shoots and treatment of women on Top Model with a heightened sense of concern, and steered me away from ever desiring to be in their exact shoes; and yet, I kept watching, deep in childhood schadenfreude.
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There was always this really weird double standard of contestants being shamed for not wanting to do nude photo shoots – for reasons varying from religious values to personal traumas to body image issues to just lack of aesthetic or professional interest – yet in each reprimand given by their host and apparent god Tyra Banks for it, they would be taunted with the fact that she herself does not do fully nude shoots, preferring to wear nude-colored underwear that is later digitally edited out; underwear that is rarely seen being offered to the contestants, and digital editing that, as they are reminded when and if a pimple peeks through their airbrushed beauty shots, costs thousands of dollars, precious professional time, and possibly, a model’s reputation.
There were shoots and challenges where women with past experiences of sexual assault or violence would be forced into posing intimately and often scantily clad with male models, conveniently hypermasculine, shirtless and oiled at all times. The judges would obsess over certain contestants’ proclaimed virginity or lack of, and constantly brought these sociological concepts up when judging photographs as if they mattered, or was at all their (or the audience’s) business. Cameramen watched and filmed as contestants cheated on their boyfriends while perhaps too drunk to realize it, were nearly pressured into having sex with discomforting foreign men at parties, and sobbed after being given no other option than forfeiting, to kiss an openly racist male model while filming a commercial.
I witnessed girls in lingerie speak heartbreakingly about eating disorders. I witnessed girls making assumptions about skinny girls having said disorders, and then the skinny girls being told to lose weight by the judges. I heard quaalude jokes made by industry professionals toward 20-year-old women posing “lazily”. I saw young women faint from stress and starvation. I saw wide-eyed explanations of documented sexual harassment by male models and how it affected not only the performance of a contestant, but the psyche, and saw those explanations smacked down with disapproval, distaste, and disinterest by supposed mentors.
In episode 1 of cycle 1, the contestants are all given Brazilian bikini waxes on camera. Their genitalia are censored for television, of course, but not for presumably male cameramen. In another season, a contestant is brought to tears when she is told her outfit of choice makes her “look like a hooker”, but just a few episodes away she is made to pose in her bra in the windows of Amsterdam’s Red Light District for a challenge.
I will always remember the violent shaking of the girl who nearly got hypothermia from a pool allegedly made cold on purpose, and all the girls with the fear of heights who were pushed to their physical and mental limits during photoshoots on the edges of tall buildings, sometimes in the rain, and were later told that they “should have spoken up sooner” about their obvious discomfort. I once dismissed the tears of the long-haired-turned-pixie-cut makeovers, too, agreeing with the judgment of unnecessary hysterics, but only because the tears were edited to look like tantrums, and because I think most people would cry if they were made bald manipulatively and fairly against their wills.
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Anyone who has ever watched TV has been a victim of brainwashing, that’s just a fact that we should accept by now. I was brainwashed into thinking that in order to achieve one’s dream career, one must be prodded like cattle by those who were apparently hazed in the exact same way once, and that in order to reach the ultimate goal of becoming a sentient idol in one’s chosen profession like Tyra, Nigel, Mr. Jay et al, one must win the hazing rituals and proceed to pass them down to someone else. I don’t think America’s Next Top Model ever once acknowledged that there are often ways to reach one’s goals without being (complacently) abused, tortured or emotionally altered in and by the process.
For a show that emphasized the versatility, resilience and conventional or specifically unconventional attractiveness that a top model required, it also hated anyone who tried to reach that point without dedicating their complete and utter soul and self, all at the tender age of 19 or 22 – the latter considered a little “old” for the industry – to the gorgeous devils of fashion, beauty, and Tyra Banks. One contestant was eliminated from an early cycle for suggesting that in addition to modeling, she was also interested in fashion merchandising, or textile design, or something of that related-but-not-the-same thing. The judges shook their heads at her “ungratefulness” for having been given a spot in a competition that could have gone to someone more absolutely devoted to the elusive art of modeling. But in later seasons, contestants were asked to become singer-songwriters, makeup and perfume creators, cameo TV actors, and were shamed for their lack of multi-talents if they failed to master such random crafts as well as take a good photo.
And while we’re on the subject, what is modeling? We are often reminded that it’s “not just about having a pretty face”, or looking sexy, or just standing there and posing. We are reminded of this time and time again, as contestants are asked why they deserve or want this “more than anyone else”. We are told modeling is about “having It”, but as usual in life, are never told precisely what It is. “You don’t seem passionate enough,” or “You don’t seem like you want to be here” are common phrases told to girls with mascara running down their faces as they stand awaiting their weekly final judgment, the prospect of elimination in the bottom two. They sob and sometimes embrace their immediate rival when their name is called, leaving them “still in the running” for something I, and perhaps they, don’t quite know what.
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I don’t pretend to be able to know any of the Top Model girls, not really, in any genuine sense. I can only attempt to understand these 18-25-year-old young women, now a decade or two older than that, from the sickly extravagant production of a TV show which did not care about
them as people, only as character tropes and lean bodies. Their pathos and personalities are presented to us through a lens somehow both rose-colored and the very darkest of black (like my hair), simultaneously. Many of them shone far brighter than their caricatured confines; Mercedes, cycle 2 runner-up, and her relentless, smiling optimism in the face of a debilitating medical condition; cycle 1’s Adrianne and Elyse, the mock-goths of the early 2000s who charmed the hell out of my teenage atheist phase and probably a hell of a lot of other teenage atheist phases across the years; Allison of cycles 12 and 17, with her refreshingly kind and Tim-Burton-eyes loveliness; just to name a few.
Top Model did, oddly and abstractly, teach its young viewers something about life, girlhood, and lessons in maturity. The 8-year-old me took pseudo-philosophical life advice and commentary from college-age demigoddesses who seemed so old, so wise, so beautiful and so free – to those only a few years away from 18, at least – without blinking an eye. The tragic and awesome legacy of the hundreds of girls and guys we met through our television sets is a big part of the tragic and awesome legacy of their viewers’ coming of ages behind them. The impact of ANTM made female young adulthood appear interesting, fascinating, dream-rendering and -inducing to those who hadn’t reached it yet, and witnessing it within a structure so unhinged and inflammatory as a reality show was like revolutionary avant-garde psychedelia for little 2000s girls like me.
It was a skewed post-adolescent reality, as I learned later; but that, of course, as always, like an off-brand enlightenment, would be later.
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Picture me in another day of Covid-era restlessness. I google Nicole, the awkward and tall red-haired freckled winner of the ironic “petite” season. I don’t know why I am so shocked to see staring back at me an image of the now thirtysomething artist, and an Instagram full of her lovely, imaginative, and Surrealistic paintings. Maybe I am stunned because I come full circle for a moment, as a young woman now slightly older than Nicole was when I first “met” her, and as a proud undergraduate art historian with the oddest sense of déjà vu. It is like I am suddenly being reflected within the world of a show which only ever tried to reflect upon me, and it feels good for both of us.
I look through Nicole Abuhamada’s paintings for a long time. Her work is playfully skillful and strategically dreamlike. I see influences and traits of Kahlo, Dali, and Rousseau, but her intricacy and artistic experimentation surpasses identification with a single movement or artist as inspiration. I even find a video of her reading some of her poetry, déjà vu subsequently exploding.
Nicole was once chosen by fashion “elites” to be America’s Next Top Model. She did not become that. She became something infinitely better: herself.
May I be so lucky.
Claire Marie Anderson is an Art History undergrad and writer from Houston, Texas. Her prose, poetry and drama has appeared in KAIROS Literary Magazine, Bridge Eight, The Fabulist, and The Showbear Family Circus, among other publications and podcasts. She serves as Fiction Reader for Landing Zone Magazine.