Other women want the lifestyle, but one former international fashion model says the glamour is not what it’s cracked up to be.
by Liz Hogarth
Last month Sydney was centre-stage for an exotic collection of designers, buyers, models, fashion journalists and photographers. Together they generated a lot of frothy publicity and made sure Mercedes Australian Fashion Week went off with a bang.
But, as the razzmatazz fades, former model Lucy Barry, who found success in Milan, London and Zurich, is only too aware that for many of the young models strutting their stuff on the catwalks, it was not all glitz and glamour.
Twenty-seven-year-old Lucy Barry, nee Harrison, is not your stereotypical model or even ex-model. When I met her at the Maroubra Junction apartment she shares with husband Mark and baby Samuel, she was casually dressed and wore not a scrap of make-up. Her chief concern was that the interview might take her away for too long from her duties as a mother.
“Being a mum is much more fulfilling than modelling,” she says cheerfully. “It is more my pace. I am not really into being groovy and keeping up with the latest trends.”
This is a surprising admission from a woman who, in 1994, won Elle magazine’s Look of the Year. A fashion spread from this time shows her looking glamorous in a snappy little outfit and proclaims: “Lucy Harrison proved she had The Look of the Year. Now she is the talk of the town, in strappy shoes with skyscraper heels, Capri pants and halterneck tops that take style to the city limits.”
Face to face it is easy to see how, even if she is not obsessed with being ‘hip’, she found success as a model. The first thing one notices is her height: she is 5’ 8”, and slim.
“Often people who want to be models are not actually model material,” she says. “The model scouts tend to look for gawky, gangly types, which I was. I wasn’t one of the babes at school.”
Predictably, she confirms model agencies consider height to be of prime importance. “Then they look for a slender figure, regular features and good bone structure,” she says. “Oh, and full lips and a straight nose.”
Her particular ‘slender figure’ was first spotted by a talent scout when she was 16 and still at school. “A lady just came up to me in the street while I was doing work experience in the city,” she says. “She said, ‘It looks like you could do some modelling; this is who we are and here is my card’.”
At first she was unsure about contacting the model agency. “At school I was quite academic and competitive,” she comments. “I had some thoughts of studying law or medicine.”
However, the glamorous allure of life as an international model proved too much and at 18 she embarked on her new career in earnest.
Her look was ‘dark and mysterious’ and she was much in demand for catalogue and editorial work. “I spent two years in Europe, mainly in Milan, but also in London and Zurich,” she says. “I liked going overseas and I enjoyed the actual work because I have always been a bit of an extrovert and I like acting. Modelling is sort of like working on a film. It requires some of the same skills. You need to know how to move and relate to the camera.”
However, she wasn’t so keen on the other aspects of being a model. “I hated having to be really thin,” she says. “And I didn’t like the culture very much.”
The ‘culture’ involved parties, drug taking, being seen in the ‘right’ places and getting to know the ‘right’ people.
She soon realised the emptiness of the lifestyle on offer. “I did my own thing and made my friends in other areas,” she said.
Inevitably, many of her fellow models, average age 16, with whom she shared the flats and apartments owned by the model agencies, were less discerning.
“A lot of wealthy men are set up with models,” she says. “It is not overt or talked of, but it definitely happens. In some ways it is a bit like a very cleaned-up version of prostitution.”
Another pressure for these young girls was the constant battle to stay thin. She claims that the majority of models have some sort of eating disorder. “Most models are naturally thin,” she says. “But once you get past a certain age most women have to watch what they eat. The weight required of a model is definitely underweight. If a model started to eat normally and started to weigh a normal weight, that would be considered fat.”
At the end of two years Lucy had had enough of modelling. “You can get stuck in it and then it is difficult to stop and do something else,” she says. “It can really start to wear you down and destroy your self-esteem.”
However, she still appreciates the opportunity her job gave her to travel and, perhaps more importantly, to think and reflect. “I did a lot of reading while I was overseas and one book in particular was pivotal,” she says. “The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky started me thinking. I came to understand something of my own sinfulness and the sinfulness of other people. I just realised something was wrong and that I needed to fix myself.”
She kept these thoughts to herself until a friend from the university course she had embarked on invited her to a Salvation Army church at Bondi. “I went,” she says simply of that first step on the road to her decision to follow Christ.
She has now been a Christian for six years and her life and aspirations are a world away from the photo shoots and glamorous locations that once preoccupied her. In 1999 she married Mark, who works for the Christian mission organisation, Ministry Training Strategy. The couple worship at Wild Street Christian Church, Pagewood (formerly a ministry of St Matthias’, Centennial Park).
I ask her what advice she would give to a young girl who had thoughts of becoming a model. “I would say ‘Don’t do it’,” she says. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if they still wanted to, even if I explained all the pitfalls. It’s so alluring and exotic and it does put you at the pinnacle of the social hierarchy in the eyes of most other women.”
For herself, she is grateful to have been through so much that many people spend a lifetime hankering after. “I’ve done a lot of things that people covet,” she says. “And I have seen how hollow those things can be.”
