How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone
A Memoir
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- ¥1,700
発行者による作品情報
“Gripping . . . a call to action—and accountability—for the entire fashion industry.”—Marie Claire
A bold memoir that explores who holds the power in an image-obsessed culture, from the model and activist who helped organize the movement to bring equity to fashion
“By elevating me for something I have no control over, the industry and economy signal to all women: there is almost nothing you can do or create that is as valuable as how you look.”
Scouted by a modeling agent when she was just sixteen years old, Cameron Russell first approached her job with some reservations: She was a serious student with her sights set on college, not the runway. But modeling was a job that seemed to offer young women like herself unprecedented access to wealth, fame, and influence. Besides, as she was often reminded, “there are a million girls in line” who would eagerly replace her.
In her fierce and innovative memoir, Russell chronicles how she learned to navigate the dizzying space between physical appearance and interiority and making money in an often-exploitative system. Being “agreeable,” she found, led to more success: more bookings and more opportunities to work with the world’s top photographers and biggest brands.
But as her prominence grew, Russell found that achievement under these conditions was deeply isolating and ultimately unsatisfying. Instead of freedom, she was often required to perform the role of compliant femme fatale, so she began organizing with her peers, helping to coordinate movements for labor rights, climate and racial justice, and bringing MeToo to the fashion industry.
Intimate and illuminating, How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone is a nuanced, deeply felt memoir about beauty, complicity, and the fight for a better world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Supermodel and activist Russell catalogs the psychic toll of a career in front of the camera in her candid and confrontational debut. Scouted to model as a naive 16-year-old in 2003, Russell quickly learned that producing the desired poses and reactions for much older photographers resulted in lucrative bookings and referrals, while questions or expressions of discomfort—in response to intimate touches from strangers, for example, or requests for sexually explicit poses—earned her a reputation as "difficult." As Russell became more well-known, she grew increasingly eager to please the industry's gatekeepers and power brokers, compartmentalizing her feelings along the way ("The way to stop reacting is to put the self away so there's nobody to offend, to blame, to ignore"). Eventually, however, those feelings spilled over, and in the 2010s, Russell began organizing with fellow models to expose abuses of power across the industry. Readers expecting a standard model memoir are likely to be surprised by Russell's forceful style and devastating revelations, which recall the frankness of Julia Fox's Down the Drain. It's an impressive and illuminating dispatch from the front lines of the fashion industry.
