Teenage kicks: breaking into Reading Festival, smoking spliffs and being defrauded by rogue modelling agencies.
I never thought being a model meant getting your boobs out, cohabiting in fetid houseshares and spending days running to and from ‘go-sees’ where lewd men and catty gays would ogle and photograph you. To me, it meant a very important person had decided you were not just supremely attractive, but worthwhile. Being a model meant being chosen.
At 17, my best friend and I pranced about with a certain sense of superiority. We weren’t like the other girls, because we were into indie music, had fake IDs and were friends with boys in bands. We curated our coolness on MySpace, and one Reading weekend we ran into Peaches Geldof three times. So when a stranger approached us outside Oxford Street’s Topshop to ask if we’d ever thought of modelling, it felt like all our many efforts to be noticed had finally been noticed.
Now, we were savvy in a way no young woman should ever have to be. We’d been raised on diet fads, makeover TV, laddy radio hosts, and a rising tremor of fear around paedophiles from the very same newspapers that delivered Page 3’s teenage tits. Yet this time our confidence counted against us.
We remembered that Sarah Doukas found Kate Moss at JFK airport and Isabella Blow discovered Sophie Dahl crying on some steps. Now it was our turn to be plucked from obscurity and cast across a new lens. The man from the agency told us we’d get to style ourselves, and that the ‘studio’ wasn’t far away, so we gave him our absurdly phrased email addresses.
A couple of weeks later, we lugged bags of cool clothes up to the studio just north of Oxford Circus. We shared the dog-ends of a spliff then headed into the glass-fronted office. After some girls made us up with off-brand ghds and clumpy makeup brushes, we were led to the shoot just ten paces away. I remember the woman in charge being so thin I could see her hip bones from behind, and the camera flash hurt my eyes.
Shoot over, we met a man with a grumpy attitude and a large Mackintosh coat. He said the photos looked great and we could have one each for free, but that the rest would be £900. Each. We didn’t have that sort of money, we said. But maybe our mums did, he wondered, pushing a black landline telephone towards us.
We called, but neither mum budged. We walked away dejected, disheartened but also relieved. Finally, we could confide in one another about how weird we’d found the whole process. But we stayed cocky, agreeing that that tacky studio would never be our starting point, that fame would find us some other way.
Since then, I’ve spoken to other women who experienced this exact scam. One woman was ‘desperate to be scouted’ when she was approached by a scammer, also near Oxford Street’s Topshop, ‘I was unattractive at that age, but I think they spotted someone with some of Dad’s money to burn.’
‘They told me I had “what it takes to go all the way”,’ she laughs now, ‘that once I signed up and paid £1,000 for the photos, I could be part of the agency, that they’d represent me. I went home to my mum and dad and asked for this money, telling them so earnestly, “my life is about to change in a big way.” They immediately refused, thank God.’
Another friend said the Harlequin Centre in Watford, 2003, was her moment: ‘I was 14 and was so excited for the shoot. I wore a Wonderbra with gel-filled cups and a Jane Norman dress. They asked for money but I didn’t have any, especially after buying those new clothes.’ These girls were never stupid, just hopeful, and all it would have taken for them to be truly scammed, to have parted with money, is just having a bit more of it in the first place.
An unknown number of people have been affected by these scams. In 2010, the Department for Business investigated rogue modelling agencies using employment law as their guide. A tribunal found that Irfan Khan’s Platinum Models charged models fees before ‘any work-finding services were provided’, and Michael Brown’s Target Models issued models with illegal terms of employment.
You might have thought social media would kill off this whole malarkey: after all, who needs a portfolio when you can self-promote online? But no: the lure of being selected by a modelling agency is still powerful enough to young women that scammers and paedos continue to imitate them. In 2016 it was reported that someone had posed as Base Models on Snapchat to target girls aged 14–19, telling them that they could earn up to £50,000 in modelling, then requesting that they send indecent images. In 2022, a talent agency warned that its likeness had been imitated by someone who’d posted in search of models on the job site Indeed. The agency’s owner, Abbie Hills, said at the time: ‘The industry is so oversaturated and competitive that if you see something too good to be true, and you have no knowledge of the industry or no education towards model safety, you might think to apply.’
Earlier this year, it was found that 6,000 people were defrauded a total of £13.6 million by a modelling scam led by Philip Foster, a former Brookside actor. He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison after running a scam pretty much identical to the one we went through. Tech had helped tweak it, though. The young people were targeted via social media, payments were demanded via payday loans and credit arrangements and he operated the whole thing remotely, from Spain, where he is still at large.
When the line between legitimate and scam businesses is so thin, it’s particularly tricky to make out fact from fiction. A former modelling scout tells me that my friend and I weren’t even far away from actual scouts that day: ‘Topshop was the biggest place for scouts and agencies to go to. My colleagues found so many amazing models there.’
Since Topshop closed, scouts have moved on to ‘wherever young teenagers are going to be’, she says, adding that, when scouting in real life, she was rarely doubted by would-be models. The tools of the trade might have changed over time, but so long as teenage insecurities endure, so will any ploy that tells them that they, too, could be one of the chosen ones.
