Are There Real Models in the Twin Cities?

Ashley Hawks is curled up with her brand new blue Chihuahua on a windowsill in Northeast Minneapolis. She’s on the third floor of the Casket Arts Building, trying to expand the happy section of her portfolio. “I do so much commercial work,” she says, “so you would think I would have something fun and happy.” Evidently she doesn’t. Or she’s just not happy with her happy shots. “I’m more known for fierce and sexy, I guess,” she says, but that’s not what most local art directors—her potential clients—at Target, Tay Mark, and Best Buy are looking for. They’re looking for the idealized, happy young mom. Neighborly. Approachable. Be me! Buy me! In person, Ashley seems plenty happy, plenty fun, but right now, despite a mouthful of perfect teeth and her trademark dimpled chin, she’s struggling to produce. In fact, she’s suppressing a pout. “I just feel so . . . cheesy.”

Ashley and her photographer, Jennifer Cress, have been e-mailing each other back and forth for the last few days. Ashley saw a picture of a beaming Kate Hudson in a vintage wedding dress on the cover of Vogue, and “I just needed it.” Now, after she gets teased out at Denny Kemp and dressed upstairs in Jennifer’s studio, they’re finally set up and moving. Cress is snapping away, moving back and forth and barking directions at Ashley and her little prop pooch, Milo—“Oooh, kind of kiss on him and stuff. Oooh! So cute!” (Milo is Ashley’s first puppy with her husband, Mitch. “We bought him at a pet store,” she says. “Which is totally not my thing—we’re not pet store people—but we just fell in love with him!”)

Even on a guerrilla shoot like this, there are always more than two people in the room. A videographer is prowling around the impromptu set, silently filming Ashley’s feet, or maybe the floor right beneath her feet. “Can we borrow your sweater?” Ashley puts her arm through one of the sleeves and snuggles for Cress. Ashley’s phone is blowing up in Milo’s canvas carryall. She hurries over to answer it. “Hi, yeah, I’m at the shoot. I love you too”—it’s Mitch, a building supervisor she married in August. (“He loved the idea of dating a model,” she says, “but we had some issues in the beginning.”) She hurries back into position. Maintaining a locked focus on her subject, Cress warns, “Don’t touch that pipe—it’s hot,” before resuming her professional coo. “Very nice, Ashley. Very nice.”

Photograph by William Clark

Ashley Hawks

At twenty-three, Ashley is one of the few working models in the Twin Cities. There are hundreds of girls listed with local agencies, but Ashley is one of the dozen or so who works regularly, weekly or thereabouts, most often for the city’s largest modeling client, Target. She grew up in Edina, and her mom, Mary Kay, owns Mary Kay’s Bridal in Richfield, where Ashley still works part-time selling gowns to young brides and bridesmaids. But Ashley has been on the runway since she was five—her first gig was at a big bridal show in Chicago. Mary Kay is extremely supportive: A former part-time model herself, she bankrolled the expensive pictures necessary for an aspiring model’s career with only two caveats: One, Ashley, a college dropout, had to promise to return for her degree and, two, no nudity.

But today Ashley is posing in a silver satin camiknicker—alternating between a perch on the sill in front of the drafty old warehouse windows and a spot on a cold wooden bench—for free. The type of shoot she’s on today—called a test shoot, or a “test,” by the photographers, models, casting agents, and modeling agents in the business—is a simulation of real work. The plan is to get one, maybe two, usable shots, and to add them to Ashley’s almighty “book.” Ashley’s obsessed with her book—a bound collection of various posed pictures not only from all her past gigs, but also from test shoots like today’s. She’s constantly working to keep her book fresh—developing new shots, the latest looks and concepts, not only because the pictures will ensure new opportunities, but because too often, according to the same group of professionals, test shooting is the only “real modeling” consistently happening in this town. “Real modeling” meaning the creation of a more three-dimensional character than the woman on a Cub billboard or in a Polaris catalog, meaning having a little fun, even if fun entails leaning up against some drafty warehouse windows in a teddy and smiling like you mean it on a dreary Tuesday afternoon.

As John Wagner, one of the most seasoned local fashion photographers in the Twin Cities, says, “This market does about 40 percent more testing than [the photographers and models] on the coasts.” Money still moves around on most of these tests—whether it’s the cub model paying the photographer or, down the line, the photographer paying the more experienced model—but it seems a little too entropic to be real.

At this point, Ashley issues a prediction: “My butt is going to be sore.”

With only a thin layer of satin between her butt and a thin ledge of cold brick, a little whining should be forgiven, right? What’s that? Not if it’s coming from a five-foot-ten-inch, size-two brunette with skin and lips calibrated to an ideal osmotic pressure and disproportionately large hazel eyes for which “almond-shaped” is a cliché best left to the humble drupe? Really? Does this creature not deserve to whine even a little?

The answer, of course, is no. Maybe in New York or California or even Chicago being gorgeous is a viable commercial enterprise and intellectualized phrases like “the designer’s muse” and “the photographer’s vision” are bandied about like so much lip gloss and mascara, but here in the Twin Cities you’re expected to work for a living. This is a DFL town, and Ashley Hawks is just another laborer.