"A lot of modeling is how much crap you can take"
About this Quote
Modeling gets sold as a life of cheekbones and champagne; Lauren Hutton drags it back to the shop floor. "A lot of modeling is how much crap you can take" is blunt on purpose, a working-person sentence aimed at puncturing the fantasy that beauty automatically equals power. Hutton, who built a career by leaning into her distinctiveness rather than sanding it down, knows the industry runs less on aesthetics than on endurance: the long waits, the short tempers, the casual humiliations packaged as "notes."
The intent is almost parental - a warning dressed as a shrug. In six words, she reframes "professionalism" as a tolerance test. The subtext is that modeling doesn't just commodify bodies; it trains people to normalize being handled, evaluated, and corrected in public. "Crap" is doing heavy lifting here: it's vague enough to include everything from scheduling chaos to sexual harassment, but specific enough to feel lived-in. That ambiguity makes the line durable across generations of fashion labor, from editorial sets to influencer economies where the gaze is constant and the feedback loop is brutal.
Context matters: Hutton came up in an era when models were becoming celebrities but had little structural control - few protections, fewer voices, and plenty of gatekeepers. Her candor reads like a counter-myth to the era's glossy magazines: the real glamour is not suffering beautifully, it's surviving a system that quietly expects you to.
The intent is almost parental - a warning dressed as a shrug. In six words, she reframes "professionalism" as a tolerance test. The subtext is that modeling doesn't just commodify bodies; it trains people to normalize being handled, evaluated, and corrected in public. "Crap" is doing heavy lifting here: it's vague enough to include everything from scheduling chaos to sexual harassment, but specific enough to feel lived-in. That ambiguity makes the line durable across generations of fashion labor, from editorial sets to influencer economies where the gaze is constant and the feedback loop is brutal.
Context matters: Hutton came up in an era when models were becoming celebrities but had little structural control - few protections, fewer voices, and plenty of gatekeepers. Her candor reads like a counter-myth to the era's glossy magazines: the real glamour is not suffering beautifully, it's surviving a system that quietly expects you to.
Quote Details
| Topic | Resilience |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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