Do Models Even Have Teeth? The Secrets Of Smile-Proof Supermodels
According to some marketing researchers, the average American sees almost 4000 ads a day. Granted, this is debatable. The vast majority of the ads that happen to enter our field of vision never get fully processed by our visual cortex - our brains are bombarded with far too much sensory information at any given moment - over 11 million bits of data every second. Considering that the average person’s working memory can process a maximum of 40 to 50 bits at once, the brain is forced to prioritize what to take in; needless to say, irrelevant advertisements flickering near the limits of our peripheral vision seldom make the cut. However, even if we adjust that “4000-5000” figure to represent the advertisements we’re cognitively aware of, what I find perhaps even more perplexing than the fact that I’ve become accustomed to finding out about 9 new brands of “Authentic Greek Yogurt” on a daily basis is the fact that we’re all willing to be the victims of a couple hundred death stares every day.
The death stares come at us from billboards and bus stops and storefronts and from the screens of our smartphones. 26 million people visit Times Square every year to experience models glaring at them on screens that are even bigger! I’ll pass an angry model in jeans plastered on a pay phone near the subway entrance, swipe my metrocard, pay 5 dollars to have a model glare at me from the glossy cover of InStyle magazine and get on the train. I’ll enter my building, open my mailbox, and sift through a pile of catalogs filled with scowls and prominent cheekbones. Sound familiar? That “look” we’re all far too familiar with is a curious phenomenon. The expression falls somewhere between “Don’t Even Think About Talking To Me,” “Your Credit Card Has Been Denied,” and “You’ll Never Be On My Level,” and “I Just Found Out My Car Got Scratched.” We rely on the most beautiful people in the world to sell us our pants, our cars, our shampoo, and our beer, all while powering a hundred billion dollar industry. So, why do all of these beautiful people look like we just stepped on their foot? Or like their dog just died? Why do supermodels never smile? Do they all just have horrific teeth?
The listless gaze of models has an interesting heritage. Some in the fashion advertising industry point out that it’s really no different from the look of “aristocratic disdain” that we’ve seen in centuries’ worth of royal portraiture. Granted, for most, this month’s cover of Vogue doesn’t land itself in the lineup of history’s great portraitists, following Reynolds, Gainsborough, Titian, and Van Eyck. However, portraits are undeniably our traditional choice make a statement about wealth, glorification, power, and heroism. Portraiture as a medium has, for centuries, also been restricted for centuries to the very wealthy or very powerful: royalty, the aristocratic class, powerful rulers, and members of the clergy. The past few decades may have brought us artists and photographers who dabble in “real people portraits” and street photos, but you and I are both painfully aware of the essential financial fruitlessness of this industry. The portraits that us “plebeians” actually see still depict a “social elite” - we’ve simply replaced the Dukes of God-Knows-Where with Sexiest Six-Foot Blondes. We’ve shifted from palaces and museums with halls of glaring noble portraits to kiosks with rows of glossy covers of glaring supermodels. Perhaps it oughtn’t be surprising that the dreaded “selfie” has grown so popular: for most, the alternatives for “face photos” are limited to yearbook photos, passports, and perhaps a crappy corporate ID headshot.
The painted portrait, and later the photograph was, for centuries, the only method of visually preserving a person's visage and affect. Even as photography made it possible to capture the image of a person in a mere second, the aim of the portrait remained not so much to capture the “moment,” but instead a “moral attitude” of a person. People rarely looked like their portraits, and no model gets out of bed looking the way she does in a catalog, but the portrait is how the individual “appears” for all to see and to remember; makeup gets removed, faces age, and people die - it’s the image that has permanence.
So, why not be captured in a permanent smile? Even as early as the sixteenth century in Europe, it was socially affirmed that smiles were a classless breach of propriety and etiquette. In 1703, one French writer frowned upon "people who raise their upper lip so high... that their teeth are almost entirely visible." Not did he only find this discourteous, he even asked: “Why do it at all? After all, "nature gave us lips to conceal them!” A quick perusal of the art of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even nineteenth centuries confirms the notion that this was a time when the only people who smiled broadly, both in life and in art, were “the poor, the lewd, the drunk, the innocent, and the entertainment.” Seeking a fun game to play in the Met? If you see someone who actually looks happy in a painting, go ahead and figure out whether they’re poor or doing something “inappropriate.” As time went on, the rules of etiquette have relaxed as the importance of the aristocracy fell, hemlines rose, and people finally decided to admit that sex exists. And yet, even centuries later, in 1900, the words of Mark Twain excuse my “bitchy model photos” perfectly: “A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.”
I know history can get boring to some, so let’s get back to sex. Got your attention again, haven’t I? Now, we’ve got endless wonderful and slightly terrifying online dating services to help us get laid - fill up a profile with some mirror selfies and cross your fingers. So, how did the rich seek love before the days of Tinder and the duck face? Surprisingly, well-to-do seekers of romance in the 1850s had their own version of awkward profile pictures. Carte de Visite photographs--small albumen prints mounted on cards 2-1/2 by 4 inches--were wildly popular as “calling cards.” These small portraits were among the first photographs that could be casually carried around and sent by mail. They were intended to be distributed to friends, family, and - most importantly - to a romantic interest. Stern, almost “unapproachable” expressions on cartes de visite were in vogue. This “cool” stare was considered to display being both of high-status and “hard-to-get,” both elements that made one desirable.
Anything too expressive or earnest was deemed “gaudy” and “awkward,” and was perceived as either a sign of immaturity or desperation. Essentially, this look says: “I am better than you”, because it refuses to offer the open, smiling face of welcome that we conventionally use to engage someone we wish to interact with. Anything too expressive or earnest was deemed “gaudy,” “awkward,” and was perceived as either a sign of immaturity or desperation. The inexpressive face also conveys the self-control, stiff upper lip and nonchalance of the European upper classes – “civilised” qualities which the “jolly old working classes” in those days supposedly found hard to convey. Such profile photos of high-status individuals and celebrities were considered the “ultimate” in cool and became highly-valued collectibles. Unsurprisingly, they bear a striking resemblance to the headshots on today’s magazine covers.
Commercial fashion photography became technically possible as a form of media as in the late nineteenth century, at the same time as the fall of nobility turned social mobility from being logistically impossibility to being just possible enough to make millions willing to give anything for a taste of climbing the social ladder. The industry jumped on a money making opportunity: ever since, fashion photography has used the haughty, arrogant, and almost condescending look to suggest the status that the right clothes could bring to the wearer in a more socially mobile society.
However, let’s return once more to sex appeal. We’ve discussed that the right “stare” can scream “status,” but even the greatest gold-digging social climber can tell you - it’s not just about the money. You’ve got to have the confidence.
A restrained, ostentatious expression also suggests a certain level of emotional containment - the ability to remain contained and in full emotional control while staring down a fancy camera - a position that for whatever reason leads most people become clumsy, jittery, and cringeworthily awkward. In a modern society that has fallen in love with heartless business moguls and in which sociopathic TV characters have terrifyingly strong Tumblr fandoms, the ability to appear “unshakeable” is the epitome of sexy. The detached, cold-blooded face is a sort of dare: I could have anyone, and yet I’m still unimpressed - can you make me fall for you? We can’t resist a challenge.
A regal level of “stillness” has even been proven by psychologists to be a high-status and high-confidence behavioural tell. The asserted, unbudging, composure sometimes described as “poise” is characterized by how few movements an individual makes - an ability to entirely avoid extraneous, superfluous gestures. Such movements, for instance fidgeting, preening clothes and hair, and inneccessant nodding, are associated with the submissive and low-status. If one were to observe the vast majority of social situations, be it corporate meetings, cocktail parties, or dinner parties, one can discern the person with the greatest influence by simply noticing the individual who makes the fewest needless movements. Poise truly accents power.
If I’ve gotten you to agree with me that the ability to appear unflustered in the face of a challenge is sexy, then we’re getting somewhere. However, the argument might arise that “just fashion” isn’t exactly “fateful.” So, allow me to adjust my mirrored sunglasses and ask you not to judge me till you’ve walked a mile in my stilettos - in front of a couple thousand people, too.
Navigating the world of flashing cameras, mini skirts, ever-changing trends and size Double Zero is a taxing, demanding business - the phrase “when the big lights come on” didn’t come from nowhere. High Fashion Wonderland is a magical world in which one can go from feeling like “the shit” to feeling “like shit” in the matter of a single season, single casting, single runway walk, singe review, or a single set of measurements. It’s easy to dismiss the world of high fashion as some fantastical, pompous, parallel universe that exists elsewhere by its own ridiculous rules, affecting us only when it drops an issue of Vogue or a celebrity outfit scandal onto the earth every so often.
““You think this ‘stuff” has nothing to do with you. That you can make fun of it because you’re, clearly, above it all. You go to your closet and you select... I don’t know... some lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de la Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent... wasn’t it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of ‘stuff.’”
Let’s say you decide to try a new trend. Make a whole new you - Sexy, Smart, Stylish - with an edge! The sort that feels at home shopping on Fifth Avenue and definitely has her shit together. Starting Monday, of course. The whole “reinventing yourself” business is exhausting, but you’ve actually got an advantage here. You see, the everyman can crack open Glamour Magazine, scroll through Pinterest, and stroll into a Forever 21 or a Club Monaco, where mannequins and racks display hundreds of pre-selected, pre-styled items that scream “I’m in-season, sexy, and socially acceptable!” Those flare-leg silk “brunch pants” may have made you scratch your head when you first saw them on a leggy, waifish model in a full-page photo printed in the paper the day after fashion week. You may even have wrinkled your nose and said to yourself: “I wouldn’t be caught dead in that - what if someone thinks I look ridiculous.” But, when one encounters the pants a second time months later, in a Forever 21, the style-seeking consumer can afford to be fearless. No matter how ridiculous a fashion fad might seem to you, you can go about your “trendy transformation” comforted by the understanding that any style that’s survived long enough to be made in sweatshops in Wheretheheckistan has been deemed “cool enough” in some way. By the time a look is available in a size Extra Large for roughly the price of a burrito bowl, you know it’s been done hundreds of times before - you’re safe to Instagram your Outfit Of The Day because the everyday consumers of fast fashion follow a well-trodden path to “looking good.”
But, the first footsteps on that path have to come from somewhere, and it’s easy to forget that they’re often the prints left by the stilletos of models forced to walk the runway in something that potentially makes them feel ridiculous. We’ve donned everything from socks and sandals to hats that look like ice cream cones to dresses made of trash bags, knowing full well that a hundred pairs of eyes are watching and a hundred flashes are taking a hundred photos to be put out for the world to see. A sly smile or a small giggle could make the model appear embarrassed, ashamed, or amused by the designer’s “artistic vision.” We’re all too aware that a failed collection means the loss of thousands of dollars, months of work, and probably a couple future jobs. As I strut the runway wearing something that looks like it was made for an aging transgender stripper, I may want nothing more than to stare into the camera with a look that says “You can’t be bloody serious,” but I’m well aware that no-one can’t afford that.
We haven’t chosen our clothing, or our outfit, or our hairstyle - I don’t know about you, but I’ve never rolled out of bed with a sudden craving for green eyelashes, yellow lipstick, and a see-through plastic shirt, but I know that the face in the photo - my face - will have to represent the pride of the entire team behind it. The look in my eyes stands in for the designer, stylist, editor, photographer, and makeup artist. Unworried, unshakable, confident. My own personality and my own opinion doesn’t matter here - the job of my face and my waistline and my collarbones, my pose and my size zero hips and the stare in my eyes is to show the personality of a designer and of an industry whose job it is to sell style, originality, and sex appeal. We have to manufacture the fashion-forward of the future, operating with no precedent, which means we must exude an absolute conviction that this outfit and this look is “right.” And that conviction doesn’t look like an inviting smile or a shy giggle. The face used to create cool can afford to be nothing but a cold glare of confidence.
