If you are thinking of breaking into the petite modeling industry and wondering if you should hundreds of doll ars on modeling school or classes you need to read this article. Here are few facts about modeling schools.

==>Modeling schools will not get you jobs. Clients who are hiring petite models do not care if you have been to modeling school or not. It does not quialify your for the job.

==>Modeling schools and classes teach mostly runway modeling techniques. This type of modeling is for the fashion industry,
and if you are under 5 feet 9 inches there is a next to nothing chance that you will get work as a runway model.

==>Some modeling agencies or managers offer classes to boost their earnings. This is especially common in less populated
areas where models are scarce and the agency does not earn much money. Be ware of agencies that offer these classes, they
are doing so for their own financial gain. A reputable agency would never ask you to pay for classes.

==>You do not have to have a modeling to model for clients. You can get all the modeling practice you need by practicing
poses in front of your mirror. A client is more interested in your looks and vibrant personality than they are in whether
you’ve had modeling lessons or not.

Many times highschool and college students are approached by a “modleing scout” who offers them the opportunity to start
their career as a model. Be ware of these people, jsut because they have a business card does not make them an agency who

can get you modeling jobs. These scouts are usually paid by modeling schools on a per student basis. For each student they
convince to sign up for the modeling class they are paid a commission.

To get work from a reputable agent or modeling manager you need to find someone with a business license and who has connections with real life clients that are ready to pay models for work.

Many models in this industry end up doing tv or video modeling and you are considering this part of the industry you may need to look into acting classes.

Although modeling classes are not necissary for model work, if you plan to get speaking parts in the tv/video industry you may want to consider taking acting classes.

Acting classes are considered by many directors to be valid experience and they can make a difference in your modeling portfolio. Most of us are not born actors, so acting classes may be necissary to do the job the way a client wants it done if you have a speaking part.

So while modeling classes may be a waste of your time and money, some acting classes may be necissary if you choose to pursue this type of modeling. Many petite and average modles have an easire time in this industry becuse most of the time
size is not a deciding factor. The ability to do the job well is more important. The industry is still competative, but if you have experience modeling in non speaking background parts it makes breaking into this sector much easier.

Lingerie modeling is a traditional form of modeling in which models will only wear underwear and bra or other sexy and lacy garments. That is why this type of modeling is included under “glamour modeling.” Lingerie modeling requires much better body tone and proportions than other modeling fields. This type of modeling exposes the models’ beauty to maximum limit and also increases their charms. Models engaged in lingerie modeling come in many shapes, heights, sizes and colors. They may be petite, plus-sized, tall or thin models.

Lingerie modeling is widely present in fashion shows, catalogues, photographer’s books, websites and calendars. Today, lingerie modeling is practiced more widely as an adult entertainment event, rather than an informative event. Many sports agencies in the United States arrange such modeling events in happy hours. These lingerie modeling shows offer an opportunity for couples to watch together, which is a good opportunity to know the preferences and likes of others.

There is always a great demand for models performing lingerie modeling. Today, more and more teenagers and children are engaged in this industry. Although lingerie modeling industry wants models of virtually all nationalities, black, Latin and Asian models have greater demands. Irrespective of nationality or age, the model must maintain a good body tone, with an active lifestyle involving exercise and balanced diet.

If you want to be a lingerie model, you can either work independently or with an organization/modeling agency. If you decide to work as a freelance model, you need to track assignments and non-exclusive contracts with your own abilities. You must create a good portfolio of photos that shows your personality and earlier assignments. If you sign a contract with a modeling agency, it is their responsibility to expose you to the world. US cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami offer good lingerie modeling future to young models.

The payment for lingerie modeling can vary with modeling agency, show type and model rating. It is often the double of normal modeling rates. The payment is usually above $100 per hour, which can go up to thousands when the show is for major print ad and/or campaign.

A special showing of the world-renowned EBONY Fashion Fair recently was presented by the Auxiliary to the National Medical Association (NMA), an organization that has historically represented Black physicians.

The special showing of The Shining Hour of Fashion featured a variety of stylish creations from the world’s top designers. The entertainment fund-raiser, which benefitted the organization’s scholarship endeavors, was held in the Imperial Ballroom of the Atlanta Marriott Marquis Hotel as the association celebrated its centenniaTwo students, Za’Vette Tatum of the Morehouse School of Medicine, and Chemene robinson of the Charles R. Drew School of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, received the association’s Alma Wells Givens Scholarship Awards, which totaled

EBONY Fashion Fair’s The Power of Color packed a potent punch when the world’s largest traveling fashion show recently kicked off its 38th annual tour before a standing-room-only crowd in Matteson, IL.

Hosted by the Joliet (IL) Area Alumni Chapter of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, The Power of Color was the hottest ticket in town as patrons jammed into the Sycamore Ballroom of the Holiday Inn on the outskirts of Chicago for the recent season premiere. Proceeds from the gala event will go to benefit the sorority’s favorite charities and a scholarship fundThose attending the debut were knocked off their feet by the electrifying hues and dynamic designs that make up this year’s collection. Whether you’re into vibrant shades of red, orange or yellow or prefer the softer tones of pastel blues, pinks and greens, this collection has the ability to transform, making the ordinary extraordinary and the mundane magnificent.

Mrs. Eunice W. Johnson, EBONY Fashion Fair producer-director, is on the cutting edge of the latest trends in the fashion industry. She has assembled this year’s collection after reviewing and hand picking creations from the world’s best known designers from the U.S. and abroad such as Bill Blass, Carolina Herrera, Kemarol Gianni Versace, Laura Biagiotti, Claude Montana, Paco Rabanne and Bruce Oldfield.

Colorful attire seems to give an inner glow that radiates through to the surface,” Mrs. Johnson said. While colorful attire appears to have the power to boost spirits, build confidence and alter the way others look at us, “Few people can visualize the strength that radiates from colorful clothes,” she added.
But those who recently attended The Power of Color kick off witnessed firsthand how turning up the volume on your shades have quite an impact. Shades of green run the gamut from aquamarine to neon, reds go from the fire engine variety to the deepest burgundy. Iridescent pinks and blues and multicolored prints add sparkle and pizzazz to any design. Pastel shades of lavender, peach and green prove even the softest tints can be just as powerful as they are pretty.

Recreational, office and formal attire in a spectrum of colors gives a glimpse of what is at the forefront of the fashion world for fall/winter ‘95-96. Leggings topped with oversized jackets and kicky boots are great for an autumn outing. A multicolored jacket, slacks and matching hat for him and her are great for the couple on the move. For the career woman, there are dresses, suits and skirts topped off with silk blouses and a host of accessories to help her put her best foot forward in the business world.

For formal affairs, The Power of Color has enough bugle beads, sequins and lurex to light up the night. Or for a quiet evening entertaining at home, there are flowing gowns and palazzo pants in an eclectic mix of hues. Some of the designs featured in the show are right out of the pages of E Style catalog, a joint venture between EBONY and Spiegel, which features clothes and accessories designed with the Black woman in mind.

The troupe of EBONY Fashion Fair models will bring these fabulous creations in exhilarating colors to 185 cities during this year’s tour.

> NEW YORK-VH1 has added Old Navy, Sony Portable Electronics, 10-10221 and New line Cinema to it roster of sponsors for its VHl Fashion Awards this month. Promotional activity includes radio ads in 16 markets that award trips to the show along with a $1,000 Old Navy shopping spree. Old Navy is conducting its own in-store trip sweepstakes with additional prizes by Sony Returning sponsor L’Oreal runs a two-page spread in InStyle magazine highlighting its participation in past shows and dangling a prize trip to the even

WHEN Luisel Ramos came down from the catwalk last month, she walked backstage heading for the dressing room of the Radisson Victoria Hotel in Montevideo. According to her father, in the three months beforehand she had eaten green, leafy vegetables and drunk Diet Coke. In the two weeks before her appearance at Uruguay’s fashion week she had eaten nothing. She didn’t even make it to the dressing room before she collapsed: her heart failed, she died in the corridor.

She was 22.

In the weeks since her death, her boyfriend has claimed she had a pizza the night before the show; Spanish television has reported her autopsy found no evidence of an eating disorder. But in haute couture fashion, Ramos’s death has had a huge impact.

After the supermodels of the 1980s and the 1990s rise of heroin chic, 21stcentury catwalks are dominated by a super slim, athletically toned and tall silhouette: thin has always been “in”.

But Ramos’s death triggered an awakening in the minds of officials: is being a size zero too thin for public display?

Two weeks ago Madrid Fashion Week officials decided to ban girls and women from appearing if their body mass index (BMI) is below 18.

Culture secretary Tessa Jowell made an appeal to last week’s London Fashion Week to do the same. That request was bluntly refused in the name of creativity, and New York’s fashion week decided that to ban “too skinny” models was tantamount to discrimination and would leave them open to legal action.

Last weekend, however, organisers of Scotland’s fledgling fashion event, the Edinburgh International Fashion Festival, announced that “excessively underweight” models would not be used in 2007.

In a perverse way though, the announcement from the Edinburgh International Fashion Festival is an about-turn for its creative director Colin McDowell, a revered fashion critic and advisor. At the 2006 fashion festival earlier this year, there was a remarkable moment during an event chaired by McDowell, who was in conversation with the designer Matthew Williamson.

McDowell made his feelings about fat, or the lack of it, very clear: when an audience member asked Williamson why he didn’t make his clothes in bigger sizes, McDowell answered for Williamson, sharply insisting that “if you want to wear fashion, then get a fashion body”.

Three members of the audience walked out at this remark, and the room divided into camps of opinion: the discussion became distinctly “fattist”, with some of the young, slim girls present showing a measure of hostility towards the overweight.

McDowell is now apparently determined to showcase beautiful clothes on healthy, beautiful people, saying the show will employ “models who speak of glamour, not anorexia”, the exact criteria of which will be detailed nearer the event.

Mark Tungate, author of Fashion Brands: Branding Style From Armani To Zara, has studied the culture of models and says the outcry over banning skinny models won’t achieve as much as parents talking to their children about the power of advertising.

“I can’t see it changing - fashion is about fantasy and glamour. It’s been like this for at least 60 years, and slim has always been the key look, ” says Tungate.

“But it’s partly an educational thing - I really wonder how much do teenage girls realise that they are watching a business, an image, something airbrushed and polished. It’s not real, it’s a fantasy. I wonder if they realise that.”

Additional reporting by Leanna MacLarty

QUESTION 1: ARE MODELS BEING BULLIED INTO LOSING WEIGHT?

STORIES abound of model agencies’ “thin or die” casting couch approach to weight. Phil Collins’s model daughter Lily, 18, has said that at her first interview with top agency Next, “they told me I was pretty for a normal girl, but not for a model”. She was asked to lose eight inches from her hips and says: “I’m a lot happier now that I’m thinner.”

For Glasgow-born model Joni, 24, it’s simply the case of accepting the demands of the job. At 5′ 8″ , and seven and a half stone, she is probably under the BMI threshold of 18, but the Glasgow School of Art graduate says she has always been “very healthy'’.

“If you are getting into modelling, like any industry, you have to play by the rules, ” she says.

“I know this sounds harsh, but when you put a larger model on the catwalk it is kind of the opposite of what fashion is about: it’s meant to be about aspiration and beauty. Girls don’t aspire to be fat - they aspire to having beautiful clothes.”

In the current climate, many agencies are now going to great lengths to showcase how healthy their models are.

“From next month we are going to put our models’ BMI on their vital statistics cards, ” says Alex J of Cape London, who has responsibility for talent scouting models in Scotland. “It’s then up to the clients whether they want to book them.

“When we take new models on they get a lot of information about health, diet and fitness. If you are facing a week of 6am call times and then travel and then a shoot you need to be healthy.”

ONE OF the mavericks of fashion, Vivienne Westwood, is to be honoured next year with the biggest exhibition the Victoria & Albert Museum has mounted for a British designer. The show will include dozens of her outfits from the past three decades.

It will also highlight Westwood’s debt to the fashion collections of the V&A in South Kensington and other London galleries where she spent hours poring over designs for clothes from earlier centuries. The work of the designer, who has promoted the bustle, the corset and the crinoline in her long career, will be displayed with the clothes that inspired her in an exhibition rivalling the scale of last year’s homage to Gianni Versace. Westwood, 62, first gained widespread attention - with Malcolm McLaren, the Sex Pistols manager - as the driving force behind the punk aesthetic. But she went on to become an eccentric pillar of the British establishment as an OBE and with the Queen’s award for exports. She revitalised interest in traditional British fabrics such as Harris tweed and influenced other designers such as Jean-Paul Gaultier.

Mark Jones, the V&A’s director, said the museum had one of the world’s greatest collections of fashion, including works from figures such as Coco Chanel and Christian Dior.

But it was the work of Westwood, “a unique and extraordinary inventive designer”, which was the most requested, prompting the near- permanent display of items such as the outrageous blue platform shoes from which the model Naomi Campbell famously fell. “We hope [the exhibition] will show people the immense creativity and wealth of ideas she has brought to the world of fashion,” Mr Jones said. About 150 costumes, with accessories, designs, photographs and items from her personal archive, will feature in the exhibition, which will run between 1 April and 11 July. The show will include a gold, red and black pirate outfit from her post-punk period, which was the first Westwood item the museum bought. Claire Wilcox, the exhibition’s curator and the co-author with Westwood of the accompanying catalogue, was a young member of staff when she was sent to collect the outfit. Such was Westwood’s unorthodox reputation in 1983 that Ms Wilcox admitted yesterday: “I was pretty scared.”

Westwood said she was proud the museum was mounting the exhibition. “Fashion is an applied art and it is extremely vital and alive today.”

This season, designers from London, Milan and Paris offer exciting fashions that make you eager to get dressed up, especially when you have a special place to go or event to attend that promises to be full of excitement and fun people.

Many of the fabrics used this year are sleek with shine, and peek-a-boo laces and fabrics are so enticing that you will want to jump into them and show off your trim, slim figure to old and new friends.

Gold metallic two-piece cocktail dress by Fendi of Milan is topped with full-length brown fur coat, highlighted in beige. Accessorized with leopard purse.

White fitted three-piece suit with knee-length, three-button jacket with shawl collar and wide slanted flap pockets, straight pants and turtle-neck sweater, by Pearce Fionda.

Strapless cocktail ensemble, accessorized with an inverted bowl-like straw hat with decorative straw trim on side, by Philipp Treacy.

Two-piece cocktail ensemble with embroidered velvet T-strap top, ankle-length leather skirt inserted with net and embroidered around bottom, with lace stole in hand, by Dolce Gabbana.

Spaghetti-strap, silk satin column evening ensemble with printed brocade, three quarter-length jacket with cascading hemline shawl collar and deep cuff, by Pearce Fionda.

Two-piece cocktail ensemble with knitted mohair top encircled with long beige fringe, worn over printed velvet pants, by Emporio Armani.

The 42nd annual EBONY Fashion Fair recently made its way Tinsel Town with Fashions 2000 at the plush Century Plaza Hotel, Century City, in Los Angeles.

A sumptuous brunch was held prior to the fashion extravaganza where creations from the world’s to fashion houses and designers were modeled.

Outfits showcased colors, shapes, fabrics and styles that many fashion patrons could hardly believe were imaginable. Evening wear emphasized elegance. Casual wear focused on classy, while swim wear pushed sexy into overdrive. Male patrons also were treated to high-fashion designs in colors and styles that made them look twice.The event, which benefited the Children’s Home Society, marked Lullaby Guild, Inc. of the Children’s Home Society’s 42nd year as EBONY Fashion Fair sponsor and 50 years of service in its commitment to educating and providing a better future for children and their families. Almost $1 million has been raised by the Lullaby Guild to foster its commitment.

LAS VEGAS — “Less is more” proved the formula for success at this February’s MAGIC, as spectacle took a backseat to subdued fashion.

The apparel shown at the Las Vegas Convention Center was more low-key than in the previous few years but still revealed major trends across men’s, women’s and children’s wear for fall 2005.

There were a number of exceptionally strong design themes on the floor, but unlike the flash of the past few shows, there was a newfound focus on basic, salable product. While celebrity brands still had a presence–most notably a new women’s line from Jessica Simpson–the large number of stars trying to produce the next Scan Jean have created a glut, targeting already oversaturated department and specialty stores. The urban, skate and streetwear areas were also relatively quiet. Instead, the offering for fall 2005 builds on uptrending silhouettes and fabrications from the last back-to-school season.

Within each category, there was a standout trend. For instance, in men’s dress and casual wear, the retailers walking the floor could not stop talking about the strong wovens cycle in tops.

“Wovens are exceptionally strong; this may be the strongest men’s woven tops cycle in the past 10 or 15 years,” said Jim Cutright, a buyer for Bealls Outlet.

While there is a broad range of styles that are expected to sell well in both men’s and young men’s apparel, there was one pattern than stood out above all–plaid. All types of plaids, from classic patterns to ’80s windowpane checks, were out in force, expected to take market share from stripes across the marketplace.
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“While stripes still have their place in the market, the consumer is ready for plaid patterns, which will take visual interest to the next level,” said Dave Matsudaira, a Gottschalks buyer.

Even traditionally bottoms-driven companies are going into tops. Just in time to meet demand for wovens, VF Jeanswear is producing new tops for fall, to pair with its women’s Riders and men’s Wrangler jeans.

“The timing is right to introduce Riders and Wrangler tops; we are getting a strong retailer reaction to overall lifestyle merchandising for fall 2005,” said Angelo LaGrega, president of VF Jeanswear’s mass-market division.

Technology also continues to be a driver in men’s wear, so much so that companies are entering in non-traditional categories.

“We are introducing performance underwear with wicking properties at the waistband … and [it’s] getting a tremendous reaction at the show,” said Jim Noble, senior vp at Dickies.

While wovens are on top in men’s for fall, jeans are key in young men’s bottoms.

“Denim is an overwhelming trend in young men’s, especially in destructed fabrics…. If you are in young men’s and denim is not your primary focus for fall, you have definitely got a problem,” said Claudia Heller, a buyer at Kohl’s.

This worn look is expected to rule denim departments in women’s and children’s as well this fall, with cleaned up silhouettes taking over into spring 2006. Denim jeans, skirts and jackets remained central to the merchandise offering in juniors and misses. Women’s tops are still driven by knits into next fall, with brands like C&C California and American Apparel leading the way.

In both women’s and men’s wear, licensed apparel is still a major trend. Warner Bros. created some buzz with its expanding array of fashion-driven merchandise, including items based on the upcoming “Batman Begins.” Disney also made waves with an innovative booth featuring a perpetual runway show of mannequins on a conveyor belt, featuring different fashions each day of the show.

“We had an offer to buy our booth first thing at the show, but there is definitely … strong interest from buyers at all levels of the market for licensed apparel,” said Andrew Georgiou, director, retail marketing, North American softlines at Disney Consumer Products.

Licensed apparel from Sesame Workshop and Nickelodeon remain strong in children’s, and Hanes is gearing up to be the exclusive purveyor of Marvel licensed underwear. In general, girls’ and boys’ fashions continue to steer toward classic looks rather than miniaturized versions of juniors’ and young men’s merchandise. For example, Lollytogs-owned Healthtex is focused on traditional tops and bottoms silhouettes with an emphasis on cute appliques and patterns.

The merchandise on exhibit at the show pointed toward one conclusion: fall 2005 is about getting back to basics. After a few tough years when apparel makers had to produce fashion that screamed for attention, vendors have found that a whisper of design interest is going a long way toward attracting buyers.