Whats the Model LOOK?
Your “look” is not nearly as important as location and attitude.
Are you surprised that looks aren’t at the top of the list?
Is your “look” important in getting you work? Of course it is. In fact, when you show up at that go-see with your book, it’s the single most important thing that will determine success or failure at that moment. You have to look like what the client wants to hire.
But that just means that once you have the other things that are needed for success, “looks” is the tiebreaker. It’s the other things that really count. If you didn’t live where you needed to so you could show up at the go-see, it wouldn’t matter what you looked like. If you didn’t have the commitment to invest the time and money in pictures, comps, a decent wardrobe and self-presentation skills, it wouldn’t matter what you looked like. And if you didn’t have the discipline to get a good night’s sleep the night before, get up early, prepare yourself and arrive on time, it wouldn’t matter what you looked like. In all of those cases you would be disqualified from competing long before a client ever saw you.
Now, given that, what do you need to look like? Well, in the fashion world that’s pretty well understood. Tall, very thin, beautiful (maybe not pretty, but beautiful) and you have a shot. But “commercial models” generally have a different look. Clients and agencies usually want what is referred to as “generic good looks” by type of appearance: soccer moms, executives, doctors or whatever fits the role that the client is casting for in that ad campaign.
A good commercial model is a commodity: able to fit any number of roles – because that is what the client is buying: a person to fill a role. Actors can be excellent commercial models because they can easily take on the “look and feel” of the person that is to be portrayed.
Commercial models don’t have to be “beautiful” – and many of them aren’t, although they tend to be more than just “good looking”. A commercial agency always wants to have some “traditional models” (meaning young, very attractive women) in their group because that tends to attract the attention of clients to an agency. But it is the others – children, older men and women and “character” models, in all ethnic categories – who do a large percentage of commercial modeling work.