Are There Real Models in the Twin Cities?

A month before her test shoot at Casket Arts, Ashley is working her regular gig for target.com. She’s at Stafford Photography, a nondescript building just off North Washington in Minneapolis. With Beyoncé cranking from some unseen source, Ashley stands on a plywood platform in front of a twenty-foot-high white backdrop in the middle of a cavernous studio. With industrial lights beating down on her, she flashes her well-practiced commercial smile on cue and shifts her legs and torso into whichever angle is appropriate (sexy, sporty, businesslike, casual) for each garment. The photographer, standing twenty feet away with a tripod and a camera wired into two computer screens, consults with the stylist about which shot to use. They tick off their preferences like they’re in the ophthalmologist’s office fitting someone for contact lenses: “Four, six, nine.” “Three, five, seven.” “One, six, eight.” The computer is hooked up to what looks like one of those laser scanners you see at a Target checkout. On the screen, each group of photos is assigned a serial number, apparently corresponding to the bar code on the item of clothing. Using what looks to be a weaponized version of Photoshop, the photographer electronically circles imperfections (a wrinkle in the garment, a hip sticking out, an arm at a weird, fattish angle) to be smoothed or trimmed later. Meanwhile, Ashley stands on her little plywood platform. If she is tired, she can lean on a makeshift railing constructed just for her. Every twenty minutes, she climbs down, takes another outfit off a super-sized rack, goes to her small dressing room with the stylist, and emerges unwrinkled and ready to shoot.

Even infused with Beyoncé, it’s a long, tedious day. Seven hours, and that’s only because Ashley’s being allowed to leave an hour early so she can coach Benilde–St. Margaret’s volleyball team. The money is solid: $100 an hour, $150 for lingerie. But it is below the local standardized rate of $187.50 an hour. Target gets the dot-com discount because Ashley is being photographed from just below the eyes down. How the minus $87.50 was calculated is somewhat puzzling; even accounting for the above-average aesthetic value of Ashley’s soul windows, the distance from the top of her head to the tip of her nose is definitely less than roughly 47 percent of her total frame. And though this crop is becoming standard for many online catalogs, it gives the image a somewhat illicit quality, like those little black bars over a person’s eyes on a videotape.

Is it safe to say then that “real modeling,” at least in the Twin Cities, is far removed from what anybody would refer to as glamorous? The answer this time would have to be yes.

It wasn’t always this way. Not too long ago, six-foot glamazons roamed Nicollet Mall burdened only by their even more intimidating shopping bags. There was Dayton’s with its Oval Room shows—one in the spring, one in the fall. And the avenue was lined with independent department and high-end clothing stores: Donaldson’s, Power’s, Jackson Graves. The suburbs had Cedric’s and the Dales, and Galleria had just opened in Edina. And every Sunday pubescent boys stole glances at the lingerie ads in the newspaper inserts.

“There used to be a trunk show every day,” former Minneapolis model Angie Wicka, née Turner, recalls. After she was discovered by a talent scout while walking down Nicollet with her mother when she was seventeen, Angie was booked for her first job by Prince, who was casting a video for “Get Off” with the NPG. At forty-two, Angie still has the legs. Back in the ’80s, she and Sara Rogers were our own supermodels—Twin Cities versions of Christie Brinkley and Cindy Crawford. Splashed across every local billboard and catalog, they were not only obsessed with their book, but with their walk and their turn. “Everybody had their own walk,” Rogers says. “It was your own thing, an extension of your personality.”

Even then, there wasn’t enough money in the local modeling game to get rich (“We could make up to $30,000 a year,” Angie says) or even to manage a truly independent career. But there was enough for the essentials. “We were on the hustle,” Angie says. “We’d do our little show, and then we would go shopping—we would get first crack at the discounts.” Angie was first represented by Susan Wehmann and then by the Eleanor Moore Agency (founded in 1958), the most venerable of Twin Cities agencies, but she and Sara were also original members of the Twin Cities Model Group, an informal union intended to uphold the pecking order and to ensure they were paid the amount agreed upon, which, they say, often changed by the time they arrived at a shoot. “It was serious,” Angie says of the Model Group. “And if you wouldn’t join,” Sara says, “you were ousted.”

Both women say models had it better back then. “Modeling was a way to expand your horizons, to pursue opportunities you wouldn’t have had here otherwise,” Sara says.

Angie flew down to South Beach to try what she calls real modeling for a couple of seasons and had some success, but not enough to consider moving there permanently. But opportunity can mean more than a $2,500 day rate. Sara’s ability to develop connections within the local retail world led to a trend specialist position with the Mall of America. Angie, now married to publishing magnate Tom Wicka, is 50 percent of the most glamorous couple in the Twin Cities—she’s gone from our Cindy Crawford to one-half of our Posh and Becks. After our interview, she got into her late-model black Bentley sedan, smiled, waved, and drove away into Kenwood.

Photograph by William Clark

Cari Jedlicki

If the Twin Cities has a contemporary supermodel, her name is Cari Jedlicki. “You have to talk to Cari” was the refrain heard in every corner and corridor.

“Cari Jedlicki is our Giselle,” says Macy’s VP of events, Laura Schara. “She just has the most exquisite facial structure,” gushes William Clark. “And she’s a total pro.” Pro meaning professional, a term ubiquitous in most vocations, but a rare designation regarding local models.

Because there are so many aspirants and so few models actually working, the definition of a “real model” is a controversial topic in modeling circles. It’s probably best to leave the ultimate determination to the eyes of the beheld themselves, in which case a model hired for an editorial spread in Minnesota Bride or Mpls.St.Paul Magazine is more real than a model hired to walk the runway at Macy’s is more real than a model hired to model clothes for target.com is more real than a model hired to greet customers at Neiman Marcus is more real than a model hired to dance at Aqua. If, however, we set the arbitrary “real model” index at “earned more than $100,000 in a calendar year while living in Minnetonka,” Cari Jedlicki is the Only Real Model in the Twin Cities.