Ever wondered while watching ramp walks that why those models never smile?
Some of the models shared why they never smile:
“You don’t smile. It is just not done,” said model Ty Ogunkoya. In his decade as a top model, the 26-year-old Nigerian-born Londoner has never once allowed himself a smile.
“I have modeled for everyone, and no one has ever asked me to smile,” he told. “To be honest, it would feel weird if I did.”
But do models really need to be so blue and dull?
“Never forget it is the clothes they are looking at and not you,” Victoire Macon Dauxerre, a former model for Celine and Alexander McQueen, said.
“They want to show the clothes and not our faces. If we smile we focus attention on our faces and not the clothes,” said the 22-year-old medical student.
“Men have never smiled on the catwalk because they never have had to smile to please,” Neri insisted.
“In the 1950’s models smiled all the time, in fact they were kind of living dolls,” she added. “With emancipation and designers like Yves Saint Laurent you get more a androgynous look, and women became more masculine and powerful.”
Contemporary designers have an “even more minimalist vision”, Neri argued. “They want the most neutral faces and bodies possible to show their work. “They do not see their models as an ideal of beauty any longer. That is something that the public has not quite understood.”
Every few years, however, iconoclasts like French designer Jean Paul Gaultier send models out smiling.
Indian creator Manish Arora also cheers things up by casting his bohemian friends. And several models ended up beaming through British designer Paul Smith´s last Paris menswear show.
“I didn’t tell them to smile,” he told AFP afterwards. “I have nothing against smiling. If the clothes make them happy, go for it,” he said.
Villot, who took part in that show but didn’t dare a smile, said models are often afraid to look too happy in case they end up looking ridiculous.
“The serious face you can do every time, but if you smile you don´t know how you are going to look.”
Ogunkoya agreed. “It is easier to just walk and zone out. Smiling is definitely more of a challenge.” But would he smile if asked? “Why not? You get asked to do the most random things in this job.”
