No, dressing as Lady Gaga for a day didn’t go to my head. My head was like this already.

For lots of my life I thought that something that really sucked about the world was that I could never be a supermodel. Seriously it is my ideal job! Probably my two favourite activities in the world are:

1. Having my picture taken

2. Wearing other people’s clothes

However. I am 5’4″, curvier than your average runway model, rather large of nose, and for the last, oh, 10 years or so, have been too old to be a contestant on ANTM. Oh also I hate the fashion industry and its horrible restrictive beauty standards.

You know what though? Turns out you CAN be a short, curvy, big-nosed, mid-30′s model. Here’s how you do it!

You become friends with a super talented photographer in Halifax. He takes pictures of you, because he’s building his portfolio. It is a crazy amount of fun, so you keep doing it. Another friend is building HER portfolio, so you put on your wedding dress and pose as a bride for her.

Look! Suddenly YOU have a portfolio! (no more second-person narrative, that was weird) I moved to Toronto and joined a networking site called Model Mayhem because hey why not, and photographers started contacting me!  Model Mayhem is a free site for models, photographers, and hair/makeup artists to find each other and because anyone can join it’s not just conventional models on there. But it also means you have to be careful, since anyone can be all “hey I’m a photographer and you are a pretty girl come on up to my studio baby.”   Also 90% of the photographer and model portfolios are really boring bikini pictures.

But every now and then, a photographer gets in touch with me who is talented and not creepy and we get together and do a shoot!  I figure if someone actually has an interesting portfolio, and wants to meet me in a public place, then we’re A-OK.

And then my friend Audra put me in touch with her friend Jason, I looked at his photos and they rock, he looked at MY photos (My “book” maybe? Heeee!) and wanted to shoot me.

No, I’m not making any money at it and I can’t see flying to Paris any time soon. The fashion industry still sucks.  But man, it feels great to have a camera pointed at me.   It’s incredibly fun to do silly poses and wear clothes that I might not normally wear and know that the photographer is going to throw out everything where I don’t look fabulous.  And the model-photog dynamic is really neat, too – I’m getting better at responding to direction, knowing how to pose without being told what to do, and what to do if I can’t figure out what to do with my hands.  AND I’m SUPER excited that I have a tiny possibility of actually getting to model some clothes that are for sale in the near future.

You should make friends with some photographers, too.  Even (or especially) if you think you’re not photogenic – I bet you’re wrong!

L-A: I wasn’t going to add anything today, but I have to comment on Brian’s photo of Eden with the hat on: is it just me, or is that total 80s Vogue? I mean 80s Vogue in an awesome way.  I have tried to find an example of what I mean, but my google image searches were in vain. If I find it, I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, I need to share this video with you, because they do sing about fashion and posing (this one is for you, Rawlsy):