Colombo Fashion Week

“I think we’re all just lost and don’t know what to do,” one girl told me at lunch in between rehearsals. I’d taken the glorious opportunity, sitting with a model, to journalistically interrogate her on the ins and outs of her profession. What always stood out to me while attending these shows was the deadness in the eyes of those who were walking, and I’ve always wanted to know more about what sat behind that void.

So she said things like that, and when I think about it more, I’m not sure what one expects in a world driven by simple aesthetics. You are judged again and again by strangers on how you look, with no need to ever contemplate what goes through your head. This conditions someone to nothingness, condemns them to feeling lost, and as a result you get beautiful people on runways far less secure than the average person on the street - which in turn makes the girl on the street that much more beautiful. That would probably be the first and most profound takeaway, now having walked the runway myself. 

In the end, the most surprising thing about the process is this: it’s in fact, exactly what you’d expect with very few deviations. There is that standard very gay organizer who, quite mercurial, screams and curses at models when they mess something up. Everyone is obsessed with photographing themselves, examining how they look, practicing their walk, and perfecting an image. People really do tell you to lose weight or slim down – this was brought up to me multiple times when an arbitrary pant selection didn’t fit. A designer does tell you to come to his room for last minute fittings, and then asks if you got laid last night in a way that suggests it happens between models all the time. You do spend hours in makeup. The transitions really are chaotic and people do yell. The clothes are mostly just plain awful. Really, I had nothing in common with this world and these people. And all of it, with the right mindset – I am sorry to admit – is actually quite a bit of fun. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some kind of allure to all the superficial prestige that comes with these mega-productions, when you stand up and take center stage, and people then compliment you after.

So between when I was asked on a Friday night after a number of beers, to when I agreed after some cajoling, to when I wound up on a ramp the following Thursday in front of 200 people wondering how the fuck that all happened, thus began, and probably ended, my career as a male model, reaching its zenith at Colombo Fashion Week in 2016.