Model and Words: Jasmine Alleva
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“It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends.” Joan Didion wrote this with regards to New York, a place that had been her home for over a decade and a place she was parting ways with.
It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends. I remember wanting this. I remember getting it. I remember how overwhelming and underwhelming both instances were. I was both enthralled and disappointed, elated and anxious in the worst way.
Ford Models took several weeks to send a contract after giving me oral confirmation. My hope traipsed on those words, waiting like a dog in a shelter. When the contract did arrive, I had been crying on the carpet of my parent’s basement floor because I thought I had blown the opportunity. My pen couldn’t stain binding quick enough to feel at ease, but once it was done, a sense of accomplishment overtook my body in a way I hadn’t felt before. This was the beginning of everything.
Everything meant something else to me then. Everything meant Vogue and gabbing with the models I had once looked up to. I was entering a world that seemed to exist in the deepest parts of my psyche. I was a girl out of Alaska, so foreign to anything fashion; I dried my Xtratuf boots upside down after fishing in the summers and had never worn a sundress. But the hours labored on treadmill paring down my waist and rendering my arms and legs fawn-like brought me to different hours. These hours brought me daily commutes in foreign cities, allowing my legs to carry me into buildings with tall, frosted glass walls bearing the names of all the publications I spent reading growing up. Cosmopolitan, Elle, Seventeen. A younger tomboy me would sit at the hot bar tables in the local grocery store, eating food I would never eat in my future career and consuming the pages of those publications with it. I wanted to be a model. At that time, I knew I wanted to be a model. I also wanted to be a lawyer and an engineer and an undertaker and a writer.
“In the world of modeling, nothing is permanent. Hair changes with seasons, friends are flowers with quick blooms.”
Looking back on my much younger self, I can see that those were happier times, but most of us (the lucky ones) have happier childhoods. Adulthood is hard. Everyone tells you this but you’re too busy being a happy child to pay attention. And even looking back at simply my younger self – the one who signed the Ford contract – the times seem happier then, too. In a way I can not quite put my finger on except to say that there was much hope in my bones. The expensive things seemed like they would be in reach someday and every casting held the possibility of being the one casting that would launch superstardom, that would be the big break. I would get to where I wanted to be, and there I would find all the gold its glitter had promised.
My efforts were in earnest and I did my damnedest to try valiantly. My career has taken me from the shores of Sydney’s beaches to the homeware trade show in Chicago and there is very little I feel remorse over. Of course, these experiences all come with their own nuances and ambiguities, forcing me to consider meaning and future repercussions. I have made my body survive on tuna and garbanzo beans and dined at lavish restaurants boasting Michelin stars at their host stands. And most of the time, none of this felt like real life. I never considered my skin aging or time going by. Some days were so barren of activity that I felt like the whole world stopped on my account. Gray hair has sprung on one section of my head now, proving my entire younger self’s naivety to be in vain.
In the world of modeling, nothing is permanent. Hair changes with seasons, friends are flowers with quick blooms. Inches are added to skin and then subtracted again and again, either by diet or photoshop. The girls change every year, younger and spritelier; they have not gotten their hearts broken yet. I do not envy them.
“Everything changes all the time. At one point, everything meant something else to me, but everything changes all the time.”
At a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit casting, I said with the most assuredness my voice could embody that I would be on those pages, either as a model or a writer. I am praying for the latter. I am working for the latter.
At the beginning of this year, after half a decade of bouncing between markets and feeling nothing but transient, I moved to Los Angeles. I felt hope again, but this time for something else. I have acted. I have used my voice. I have used my own words. I wanted climate and not weather. I wanted to feel the sun shine on my face after soaking it with saline springs of rejection.
One day, I might look back on this move the same way I look at my younger self. In fact, I know it will happen so, just as I know life moves differently on Sundays and there is always time to dream a new dream.
My portfolio still carries the photos of the girl who used to be me. I still go to castings. But it has changed. A lot of people tell me that I’ll make it someday and I get the satisfaction of telling them that I already did and I have and I will continue to. Because I signed to Ford Models. And I moved all over the world. And I have worked on the shores of Sydney’s beaches and at the homeware trade show in Chicago.
Everything changes all the time. At one point, everything meant something else to me, but everything changes all the time.
“It is easy to see the beginning of things, and harder to see the ends.”
This is the beginning of something. This is the beginning of everything.
