Are There Real Models in the Twin Cities?

According to Cari, making $100,000 modeling in Minnesota is a lot more work than it is in New York or LA or Tokyo. She’s worked in all three cities—starting as a teenager, moving from the little northern exurb of St. Francis to New York all by herself and living with two other models (one of whom was dating Mike Tyson) in the Village. During high school, she alternated between St. Francis and New York: one semester with Mike Tyson’s girlfriend, one semester with the smokers in the St. Francis High School parking lot. After graduation, she lived in Tokyo for a few months, then left the game to work as a flight attendant for Northwest Airlines (her family persuaded her to concentrate on something “steady”). Laid off by the airline, she made an aborted stab at acting (landing a role in the reality TV show Hot or Not? ). But she eventually returned to modeling and decided to base herself in the Twin Cities for the same reasons many transient professionals choose to stay here: lifestyle and cost of living. Now twenty-seven, Cari recently married her high school boyfriend (the wedding was in Jamaica) and moved into a house in Minnetonka, which they are currently gutting. “It gets old living in a 400-square-foot apartment,” she says. “Even if you’re making a lot of money in New York and drinking and partying for free, it’s still hard to save anything.”

Cari just booked a $200 gig at Envy, a downtown nightclub, walking around in a tight black dress and tall black boots, introducing the public to a new brand of Bacardi rum. Her facial structure truly is exquisite: A mane of dyed blond hair frames high delicate cheekbones and soft brown eyes. In some ways, models are like athletes, with their specific, superhuman physical gifts. Kevin Garnett has incredible, long, graceful arms and legs; Adrian Peterson has incredible, strong, high-performance-fast muscle twitch. Cari Jedlicki has incredible, seemingly poreless skin. Is it genetics, or is she hoarding some cosmetic dark arts? “I used to drink green tea,” she says, impatiently snapping directions in her thick, Palinesque accent to a makeup artist redoing her eye shadow. “And my skin looked great! But I’m back on the Mountain Dew.”

When asked why the Only Real Model in the Twin Cities would take a $200 nightclub gig, she gestures toward some of the other models dressed in skimpy “samba” outfits similar to the metallic number Carrie Fisher wore in Return of the Jedi. “I don’t do jobs like this too often,” she says. “No offense, but dressing like that isn’t good for my career at this stage. But this money will go toward new siding.”

Like every working local model, Cari is “multilisted,” that is, she’s booked through multiple local agencies. This is a unique business model relative to other markets—in most cities, a model is booked exclusively through one agency. The Bacardi gig was booked through Karen’s, the agency Cari started with here, but she also gets work through Moore. In practical terms, being multi-listed insures a wide-open playing field on which a model fights for her own gigs, makes her own contacts, keeps up her own reputation, updates her own book, makes her own way.

Cari understands her strengths and weaknesses. “The runway is death for me,” she says, “because I’m pigeon-toed.” She has a body and a face that work beautifully with print, however, and in this market, as well as in Chicago, she’s been tremendously successful. Her latest big payday was a $5,000-a-day Chicago gig she booked for a Jockey underwear campaign. But Cari says her most important gift is the ability to react naturally to things that aren’t there—an essential skill for catalog work. She demonstrates with a big surprised smile at an imagined proffered Thanksgiving turkey. Later, at a Polaris catalog shoot, she horses around blowing fake snow in the face of a male model while sweating through a gigantic snowmobile suit that has been tightened with a series of large clamps running down her back.

“And sometimes,” she says, “I’ll answer the phone as if I’m living in Chicago. Or I’ll take off my wedding ring when I’m in LA.” She doesn’t consider this lying, and she’s not delusional either. She sounds as if she rarely trusts her clients, especially the men. For instance, she describes a recent shoot in LA: “I’m not the smartest person in the world, but I’m pretty sure [the client] was just looking for girls he could screw.” Although she draws a firm line on the job, she knows she’s selling a fantasy. “You have to do what you have to do to get work,” she says. “I think of it as a costume I put together to get a job. It’s like acting.”

Maybe Cari is the Only Real Model in the Twin Cities because unlike the other aspiring models in town—girls who heard “You should model!” from their favorite auntie after their first dance recital and later on became addicted to America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway —Cari understands she’s selling a fantasy, not living one. She doesn’t have a backup gig at her mom’s bridal shop. She loves her husband and is grateful for the times he has driven her back and forth between here and Chicago or collated photographs at the last minute for a prospective casting, but she’s the breadwinner. She’ll risk turning down a steady target.com gig for a tryout in Chicago and a possibly bigger payday. She’s intensely pragmatic and is critical of her peers who don’t show up for a shoot prepared.

“I save my receipts and read all the local magazines to make sure I’m getting my usage fees—because they will screw you,” she says. “You have to go to the salon and make sure your hair doesn’t look like shit, get your nails done regularly, get ten hours of sleep so you have the most energy in the room the next day. I have a good shoe bag, with a pair of pumps, heels, and boots. You have to have a pair of sheer leggings. And all kinds of bras, even if you’re showing up for a lingerie shoot.” She pauses to laugh. “I dropped my purse at the Home Depot last week and there were bras all over the place.”

The problem with being The Only Real Model in the Twin Cities is that the art directors, ad directors, editors, and local photographers are obsessively looking for that “fresh face.” A model, as the cliché goes, is a hanger—something on which not only to hang clothing, but a concept.

“When I’m hiring a model,” says Stephanie Davila, a former fashion editor at Minnesota Bride and Metro who has gone on to work as a fashion editor in New York, “I’m trying to match the skin tone, the right hair color, and the body shape to my concept.” It may seem impersonal—like picking out swatches at Hirshfield’s—but both the creatives and the models seem to agree with the protocol. So as beautiful as Cari and Ashley are, many editors and art directors are sick of them. As Davila says, “I don’t want to see the same girl in Minnesota Monthly a month after we used her.” But it’s a catch-22 because the same creative management class is also looking for “experience.” They want a model who knows how to move, who can take direction because she’s taken direction.

The obvious solution is to get on the phone with an agency in New York or Chicago and fly in a commodity that the local market struggles to counter: a fresh face with experience. “If we’re spending our budget on the photographer and the studio and the assistants and we’ve pulled all this product,” Davila says, “I can’t take a chance of not getting the shot.” Understandable, but that leaves us with a real model trade deficit. We have great raw materials—check out the Minnesota blonds such as Cheryl Tiegs and Stacey Klimek, who have gone on to Sports Illustrated —but we have an eroding manufacturing corridor.

Take Glamorama, the canary in the coal mine as far as the local market is concerned. When it started in 1990, as Fash Bash, our local supermodels, Angie Wicka and Sara Rogers, both took part. But as all the indie department stores shut their doors, the demand for models who could walk cratered, so now we have a situation where Laura Schara, the Macy’s exec who hires the models for Glamorama, is forced to bring in women from the coasts because that’s where you find models who can walk. Of the twenty-five models who performed on the last Glamorama tour, only two were local.

Consider Target. While the bull’s-eye hires more local talent than anybody else, according to former creative buying manager for soft lines Sheila Leiter, who hired models between 1995 and 2005, “Target is a national brand with national concerns, and the talent pool is just so much bigger in other markets.” Never mind that it’s too cold to shoot outside here for nine months of the year.

There’s a burgeoning indie fashion scene, which mirrors the local music scene in some respects. A local designer mounts a runway show seemingly once a week—sometimes in the name of art, sometimes for the sake of getting models in their underwear on a catwalk to fill a club with drinkers. But that world is far removed from the commercial one that the three traditional agencies—Moore Creative Talent, Karen’s Modeling School, and The Wehmann Agency—dominate. All three of those agencies are run by established, middle-aged women. They don’t pour an overwhelming amount of resources into finding and training the freshest new faces, perhaps because they don’t have to: They’re the only game in town that counts. It’s been that way for more than a decade.

And then there’s Teqendama Zéa-Aida. Teqen, as he’s known to friends and enemies, founded his agency, Vision Models Group, in 1996 with former model-turned-photographer Nathan Yungerberg. Born in Bogata, Teqen was adopted by a family in Forest Lake when he was young, but still cultivates a distinctively musical Colombian accent. He wears his Afro and his fingernails long and dresses colorfully— fitted cardigan and coordinating skinny knit ties and patent leather hi-tops. His agency is as aggressively downtown as his personal style—Vision has been located in the Warehouse District almost since its inception. He is given to pronouncements like, “No matter if you love us or if you hate us, nobody else is doing anything like us.” “We have a tendency to move toward the aesthetic of what most people would consider to be a real model as opposed to a commercial model.” He is arrogant and possibly downright anti-Minnesota or at least anti-traditional Minnesota. (“We want to change the definition of what it means to be beautiful, what it means to be American, what it means to be Minnesotan.”) But he has an eye for beautiful women and quite possibly “real models,” as well as a gift for finding them in unlikely places.

Vision’s business model really is unlike the other agencies’. Teqen is more involved in the local indie fashion scene than his competitors, sending models gratis to the local Voltage Fashion Show, a rock-meets-design extravaganza held at First Avenue every spring, and various other charity runway shows catering to a young, downtown crowd. In addition to scouting for local models and earning 40 percent of their bookings on catalog and billboard shoots here at home, he looks for “home runs,” women he can send to the home run markets—New York, Paris, Milan—and act as their “mother agent,” making 10 percent of their much richer paydays.

His latest home run is Diane Johnson, whom he found working at a Forest Lake auto parts store. Diane is striking, but not in the same heightened Minnesota way as Ashley or Cari. Her skin is wan to the point of translucence, her dishwater blond hair hangs limp against her skull and over and behind her ears. Her delicate arms and legs can be described as ornithological. She is late making it here from Lindstrom, where she lives in a house with her janitor-father and sanitation-worker boyfriend. “Just wear something pretty,” Teqen had instructed her. “I want you to look like a professional lady.” But she shows up in faded black jeans and a gnarly sweater. Her black nail polish looks chipped. During the interview, she squeaks about how modeling isn’t that big of a deal if you don’t think about it and shares her experience in Seoul this spring. “The happiest moment was talking to my mom on Skype,” she says. “She was sick, and I was sick too. I dunno.”

Later, at a fashion show for Twin Cities Luxury and Fashion at the W, Diane is transformed. Her hair looks as though it’s been blown out to Oz—swooped up with what must have been canisters of hair spray into a nest of thin red gauze. She still looks undead, but somehow, in the bright satin cocktail dress she’s wearing, the look is stunning. This is what the models in the magazines look like—they aren’t our smiling, chipper Minnesota blonds. They look—like Diane. How sophisticated, how real! She goes down the catwalk twice, walking with a blasé indifference that, despite all the talk about “experience” on the part of the creative class, looks as though it could never be taught. Here is a real model, on a cheap runway, in a ballroom in the Midwest.

It doesn’t look as though she belongs here, but the professionals all say she does. They say she’s the next big thing.

From Diane’s perspective, it’s something of a surprise. “I don’t know,” she says. “All the kids that picked on me in high school . . . .” She drifts off, thinking about what to say. “I’m a real model now.”