The first time I was scouted was in London’s Piccadilly Circus, outside the Trocadero Centre. It was 1996 and I was 17 years old and working at SegaWorld – an interactive theme park that’s biggest claim to fame was that it had the largest above-ground escalator in Europe. A student from Saint Martins asked if I would model in his fashion show (years later, he would tell me that as he watched me walking away, looking like a geezer who’d just won 20 quid at the bookies, he thought he’d made a huge mistake).
I did the show and signed with Select, who then cut my hair into a very fashionable “reverse mullet” style, which looked absolutely mental. So I shaved it off – and was swiftly dropped. The second time I was scouted was two years later, once my Afro had grown back.
This time, I was allowed to keep my hair and sent to New York for a couple of weeks to see if I might find any work. No one, least of all me, thought anything would come of it. But two weeks turned into two months, which turned into nearly two decades.
There is something you learn early on when you become a model and it is this: you can only bitch about the job to other models. (In fact, let me clarify: you can only bitch about the job to other models .) No one wants to hear that it’s hard being paid to travel around the world in order to be photographed wearing clothes that cost thousands of pounds.
See, I can already feel the first eyeroll. So let me get this out of the way. Yes, it’s amazing.
