Justifying Aesthetic Labor

Abstract

Based on ethnographic and interview data collected in the modeling industries of Amsterdam, Paris, and Warsaw, this article shows that the relation between work, body, and self is particularly fraught for fashion models, as they work in a “greedy” industry that demands intensive forms of aesthetic labor. Such aesthetic labor requires models to continuously reinvent and negotiate their selves in different contexts. Fashion models make great effort to justify and maintain a coherent self, through enacting different forms of “good modelhood”—natural, healthy, and pragmatic modelhood, which are interpreted as modes of justification. These forms of modelhood all relate differently to the dominant aesthetic logic of fashion modeling and, consequently, bear different degrees of legitimacy within the field. By focusing on fashion models’ subjective experiences of aesthetic labor in relation to their selves, this article contributes to existing sociological perspectives on the body, showing how the body connects to morality and selfhood in European cultural and institutional contexts.