PREMIUM
   

Casting Couch

During my sophomore year of college, I applied to be a clothing model in a newspaper ad for a local department store. "You don't need to look like Brad Pitt," my friend the marketing major assured me, so I went to the model call and filled out a form with my dimensions and phone number. A woman took a Polaroid of me and stapled it to the form. Then I sat in a hallway and waited while a parade of Brad Pitt and Sienna Miller look-alikes were called into a studio, one by one.

Across from me, a girl with too much green eye makeup, fishnet stockings and fun, frizzy hair sat waiting as well, probably there on someone's advice that she needn't look like Sienna Miller. Eventually, she must have realized that her name wasn't going to be called and got up and left. It wasn't long before I realized the same thing about myself, and I got up and walked out as well.

Michael Sloane's models have small breasts or inexplicably big ones, and hair that's all tangled or that curls up in the back in cheeky little ringlets. They look a bit inappropriate, which is what makes them so achingly sexy. If the ratty old couch they're perched on were a seat in a hallway at a department-store modeling call, they'd be sitting on it forever. And if you happened to be the one sitting across from them, that would be just fine with you. — Will Doig


Hotel Orient by Sylvie Blum
No-Tell Motel 2 by Chas Ray Krider
Innerspace by Norbert Guthier
Fever Dream by Philippe Guillaume
Backyard Avalon by Autumn Sonnichsen


© 2006 Michael Sloane and Nerve.com, Inc.


promotion