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Drugs and fashion

As the girls who enter modelling get younger so the pressures on them become greater. Catherine Wilson reports on how the fashion industry turns a blind eye to the temptations facing young models

'I HAD a friend. She was 15. I met her in New York when we were both models doing the fashion shows for the first time. Her apartment was done up like a little girl's bedroom. She was from Florida and had only been in New York for a month. She was a little plump and shy, but I liked her. Three months later I came back to New York to do the shows and she was like a mad skeleton. She had started to do loads of cocaine. It was really frightening that someone can lose themselves to drugs that quickly.'

Model Iris Palmer talks about models and drug use with a candour that is rare in her profession. We sit in silence for a second. Coiled around a Marlboro Light, Iris is sitting on the floor of her Portobello Road flat in West London. Two years ago Palmer was a supermodel for a while, one of the new breed of well-bred, aristocratic models with more up top than the average model's 32A. Aged 20, Iris has a love-hate relationship with modelling. 'I can't stand all the empty bullshit,' she spits. 'There is such a myth about how wonderful it is. The people who run it have no understanding of all the young girls they have in New York. Drugs are everywhere. Models can get into them very early now. It took my friend a couple of months.

'She was so naive, she didn't know what she was doing. She would come home tired and instead of just having a cup of tea, she would order loads of coke because she totally thought that was what everyone did. When I came back to New York I arrived at her apartment and she was like, "Hi!",' shrieks Iris, exaggerating a New York accent. 'Then she jumped into a huge white limo that was waiting outside. Inside was a video camera and lines of coke all racked up. I was like, "Excuse me!" Anyway, we drove around the block for a while and I was thinking, this is quite funny.

But then she started doing the drugs and videoing herself and I realised she really had lost it. I was like a totally shocked, uptight English person, but she didn't understand and started to get wound up. She was from a small town in Florida and suddenly she was a model living on her own in New York. What do you think goes on?'

Talk to anyone in the fashion business, and they know what's going on. Drugs and alcohol are part of the scene and always have been. In Britain - where it is estimated that by the time they're 24, almost half the population have taken illegal drugs - models growing up in fashion have more opportunities than most to experiment. Go backstage at a fashion show, and champagne is commonplace. Something for catwalk nerves, darling. Or would you prefer something a little stronger to put a swing in your hips? Or try this to keep the hunger pangs at bay.

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But what makes the stories doing the rounds today much more chilling is not so much the drugs that are being done, or even the amounts, but the ages of the girls doing them. To set the scene, it is necessary to realise that models as young as 12 and 13 are no longer unheard of. In the fashion world, models are always referred to as 'girls'. Girl suggests, as it is meant to, someone more beautiful and less complicated than a woman, yet over the past three years the term has become fitting.

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'Girls are getting started in the industry really young,' the American model James King told one magazine. 'They're not spiritually or emotionally evolved. They're not even women yet.' King, 19, was the girlfriend of Davide Sorrenti, the 20-year-old New York photographer who died a year ago from complications arising from heroin use. King herself has been through drug rehab. She first tried drugs at the age of 14 when she was on her debut modelling assignment: one of the photographer's assistants offered her heroin.

'When girls start making lots of money there's so much pressure, they might start getting a little stoned to take the edge off,' says King, talking on a payphone from her hometown of Omaha, Nebraska. 'I've been on shoots where people smoked pot and drank beer. I've been at shows where people were doing drugs in the bathroom. I know that if you work at a bank and you are putting in overtime, you don't bring in a bottle of gin. I think this is the only industry where this is allowed.' When asked if agencies have contributed to the problem, King is adamant. 'Totally. If a girl becomes a star and she starts to do drugs, no one does anything to stop it. As long as she keeps making money, it's fine. It's New York - they don't care.'

New York is the capital of the modelling world. If you want to make it as a model, you have to make it in New York. Everywhere else - Paris, London, Milan - is just a vein that leads there, and to the big money. As I researched this article, everyone I spoke to in the modelling agencies in London denied that their models had anything to do with drugs. 'Our models taking drugs? It's not happening here. It's in New York. It's only in New York' was the message. 'In London we're much more caring. We look after our girls.'

But one model, who was Yorkshire-born but has moved to London, has a different story to tell. She is 18 and has been a model for two years with a major agency. When I ask her about the reports of a growing tide of drug use in the fashion industry, she is furious at how the underage fare in the business, particularly in London. 'I know there have always been drugs in fashion,' she says, 'but the age of the girls taking them is gradually getting younger. I know a couple of girls. One is 17 and comes from Birmingham, the other is 16 and comes from Plymouth. They are both addicted to cocaine. They got into modelling, did a few jobs and started to sort of change. It all went to their heads.'

Often when a model first moves to London and starts to work, she has few if any friends of her own age. A model's booker - her day-to-day contact with the agency - can take on the role of surrogate parent and new best friend. 'My friend from Plymouth didn't know anyone in London apart from the modelling people so she got really involved with them,' she says. 'She started to go out in the evenings with the bookers. They say to you, "We're going to the Met Bar, Momo's, the Cafe de Paris. Why don't you come?" '

The fancy restaurant and nightclub scene, which for most of us entails queuing outside club doors or making table bookings three weeks in advance, presents to models nothing but the best tables and instant admission. 'Some agencies have tables at London nightclubs,' explains the model. 'They'll say anyone who wants to come along, can. So all the young models go along. And of course the management, who want to see beautiful girls in their clubs because it pulls in more people, lay on free drinks, bottles of vodka, bottles of champagne. And of course the older modelling people have always got charlie, grass - whatever you want - and they spread it around to the younger girls.' When I ask her if she has ever been offered drugs, and by whom, she replies, 'Yes. By my London booker.'

In the current issue of The Face, the magazine asks what all those pills, powders, tabs and joints really do to your body, and comes up with some very disturbing answers. But ask some models, and they will tell you that sometimes the side-effects of drugs can actually be quite useful. Cocaine is the drug of choice if you want to shrink the supply of blood to the eyes, making them brighter. Heroin-using models practise 'grouching out': a photographer will prop a girl up before her eyes roll back into her head and she passes out. Then, as she comes to, she's photographed with a faraway, sexy look in her eyes. And then there are the 'Model's tips' that don't get written up on the beauty pages: shooting up under toenails or between toes to hide any tell-tale track marks. One photographer told me, 'The more faint-hearted cover up needle marks with body foundation, while the make-up artist looks away.'

Someone who didn't look away was Michael Flutie. The president of New York model agency Company Management, he is suing the top model Amy Wesson for breach of contract, alleging that the 20-year-old spent much of last year's spring season too strung-out on drugs to work, and resisted rehab. The $10 million suit was filed last June, though news of it didn't break until October. Wesson, who was that wan-looking blonde with the wide-set blue eyes and unsmiling mouth in last year's Versace and Valentino ads, abandoned Company in favour of a rival agency, Marilyn Inc.

'There was nothing else I could do,' says Flutie. 'I didn't want to bury her - I wanted to be her agent. Enforcing the contract was my own way of tough love. It's like a parent who stands in front of a son or daughter and says, "This is the kind of love I can give you, and you cannot live in my house if you are going to do this." ' However, as was pointed out at the time, he neglected to add the hypothetical parent's clincher: 'And if you do leave, I'm going to sue you.'

Wesson has denied ever having a drug problem and doesn't buy the 'tough love' line, saying the lawsuit is motivated by 'bitterness, vindictiveness. I don't have a problem with drugs. I never have. And I never will,' she told The New Yorker magazine last year. 'It's just not my thing basically.' Flutie, she said, 'has never come up to me saying, "OK Amy, you are partying too much." He would never care as long as he was getting his money.' Allegations that she missed numerous bookings and that she once had to be propped up in front of the camera are, she says, wildly misleading. 'I had a kidney infection, but I still worked until 12 that night with a rope tied round my waist. They were jerking me into weird positions. I felt really faint for a second, and they were like, "Go and sit down." ' And Polly Mellen, the stylist, 'took me and laid me down on the couch and she gave me this, like, Helmut Lang puffy wrap coat, and it folded out into a little blanket. And they woke me up in two hours, and I got up.'

After three months off at the end of last year - spent learning t'ai chi in Jamaica - Wesson was ready to work again. She has dyed her hair brown and is looking on the bright side of being sued, waiting for her case to come to court in New York. 'All this press, whether it is good talk or bad, everyone knows my name now in Middle America.'

Flutie had found Amy Wesson, at 16, chewing gum in a shopping mall in Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis Presley. He brought her to New York, 'a raw and undeveloped teenager', and two years later she was charging $25,000 a day, had appeared on more than 100 magazine covers and was ranked one of the top-20 models in the world. It was at this time that Flutie says he began hearing rumours that Wesson was taking a serious amount of drugs. People in the industry, from make-up artists to clients, began asking him, 'How can you charge that much when she can't even stand up?'

Marion Smith, the managing director of Company Management, had a close working relationship with Wesson. Smith has 28 years' experience of the modelling business; before joining Company, she was the president of Ford Models Inc, where she was responsible for the development of such supermodels as Bridget Hall, Rachel Hunter, Jerry Hall, Naomi Campbell, Christie Brinkley and Elle Macpherson. In a sworn affidavit made to the court in the case of Flutie versus Wesson, she painfully recalls her first-hand observations of 'Wesson's drug affliction and use'. She describes the weeks of suspicion and then complaints by players in the industry that Wesson was using drugs, leading up to the morning in February last year when Smith went round to the apartment Wesson shared with her boyfriend, Brady Hart, because the model was not answering her phone.

'I arrived at Wesson's apartment at about 11am to be sure that she was getting ready for a trip to Paris for a booking with Vanity Fair magazine. Wesson was in bed and quite undressed. She announced that she did not think she could get on the plane to Paris. In fact, she told me that she expected to pass out shortly because she had taken 15 Valiums. (Later she admitted it had been only 10.) I immediately began trying to walk her around to wake her up and to try to get the drugs out of her system. It was also my purpose to get her out of the apartment, and away from Brady Hart, her live-in lover. She was crying hysterically. She told me she was in the midst of a horrific fight with Hart. Apparently, Wesson had accused Hart of sleeping with another model while she was out of town. In the course of that fight, he had gotten her to admit to sleeping with one of his friends, who apparently was one of Hart's drug clients. This enraged him and he was throwing and breaking televisions, telephones, CD players, CDs and anything not tied down.

'This heated and often physically violent exchange continued for several hours. Hart forced Wesson to disclose to him each aspect and detail of her sexual activities with his drug client. This enraged him even more. During the course of these ongoing discussions, Wesson and I were asked to hide in the bedroom several times, because Hart was receiving drug clients who were picking up drugs. It became clear to me that I had to get Wesson out of the apartment for her own safety, and in an attempt to get her lucid and free of drugs.

'While these arguments continued, Hart brought out a sandwich-size baggie, half filled with cocaine, removed a picture from the wall, dumped the coke on the glass, and he and Wesson proceeded to do numerous "lines of coke". Hart told her that this would help clear her head from Valium. I told her that that was ridiculous, very dangerous, and that she needed to stop taking these drugs and get her act cleaned up if she had any hope of maintaining her career. Nonetheless, the entire bag of coke was finished between Hart and Wesson in the course of the next few hours. I continued to attempt to get her dressed and out of the apartment. However, this was a scene of total chaos, and non-lucid thought patterns and expressions. My task was long and arduous, and was only finally accomplished upon the application of calm and patience.

'I checked her pocketbook [handbag] to be sure that she had her passport and other necessities for her trip to Paris. In the course of that examination, I found approximately an ounce of pot in her bag. I literally screamed at Wesson, warning her that she shouldn't even consider taking these drugs through customs, and that she needed to clear her head.

'With much effort I finally got Wesson sufficiently sober to get her on a plane to Paris at approximately 7.45pm that evening. Apparently, after I left her she got off the plane and called Brady Hart, who told her he would come to the airport to give her a hug, after their continuing fight, because he had refused to hug her before she left. This had disturbed her greatly, and caused almost uncontrollable crying. Debilitated by drugs, she was childlike in her need for some show of affection. She had called to tell me she had gotten off the plane to meet Hart and I then went back to the airport and had her reboarded for an 11pm flight.'

The following week, the affidavit continues, Wesson cancelled a trip to Key West because she told Smith she was 'so incoherent with drugs that she could not work'. In the following months clients such as Harper's Bazaar and American Vogue began to cancel on her. Flutie then began his campaign to get Wesson to 'clean up her act'. Shortly after, Wesson left Company Management. Carolyn Kramer, Wesson's new agent, has said, 'What is in the past, is in the past. I've never done drugs with Amy, and neither has anyone else at this agency. If you're not at the table doing drugs with someone, how do you know they've got a problem?'

When I ask Flutie how models get exposed to drugs at such a young age he asks me to imagine I am 15 years old. 'You come from a little town and you are star-eyed because you believe fashion and modelling are your window to freedom. All of a sudden you are surrounded by people older than you and they have the means and capabilities to do anything they want. You are at a cocktail party, and everybody is drinking and smoking and having a fabulous time. What are you going to do? Are you going to say, "Goodnight, it's 11 o'clock, I'm going to go home now"?'

Flutie pauses expectantly. I say no, probably not. What are you saying happens next? 'What do you think, Catherine?' replies Flutie. 'You play out the whole scenario.'
So why don't you send these girls home? 'I don't think it is intended to be vicious by us. No one says, OK, let's do this because we want to screw this girl up. I think we forget the age and the youth that we are surrounded by. We look at a girl and she has make-up on, she is wearing a beautiful sexy dress, and we forget she is 15 years old. We sell that dream for billions and billions of dollars to the public.' Flutie said that he has never supplied drugs to models. However, when I ask him if he has ever taken drugs himself, he is frank. 'I'm no angel. I experimented with drugs as a teenager, I'm not going to deny it. But I wasn't 15 or 16 years old, I wasn't making 10 thousand dollars a day. Money is freedom and our industry gives you the accessibility financially to have any kind of drug you want, anytime you want it, to excess.'
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On the evening of Monday, February 3, 1997, Davide Sorrenti told his mother he was going out to a local hip-hop club. He assured her he would be home by 3am. A few hours later, Francesca received a phone call from the New York Police Department. Davide had been found lying on the living-room couch of a downtown drug dealer, dead of complications arising from heroin use. Brady Hart, Amy Wesson's boyfriend, was in the same room.

'In a million years as a parent you don't think, because your child is entering the business, they are going to be harmed in any way,' says Francesca Sorrenti. 'You think, "Oh wow! This is a beautiful glamorous business with lots of money and my son or daughter is going to do really well." And then the bomb falls, and people say, "How did this happen?" '

Davide Sorrenti was a sensitive, gifted young photographer who, when little more than a child, would take his friends up on to the roof of his mother's Manhattan townhouse and photograph them gazing at the sky. Through his mother he grew up surrounded by models. When he was 19 he was featured in Interview magazine's 'Ones to Watch' column. He listed his Beauty Top 10, which included Carolyn Murphy, the Prada model; the Leica M5 camera; Levi's jeans; nail varnish for boys and the 13-year-old model, Filippa, because, he said, 'She's like 13.'

Yet even Sorrenti - a sophisticated, streetwise homeboy from New York who had virtually grown up in the fashion business - could not cope when his career began to take off and he started to use heroin. When he was 17, Davide started to date James King.

'They were very much in love,' says Francesca. 'But it was sort of sick - they were both heroin addicts. James has come out of rehab and looks amazing, but she is so ripped to pieces. She loved him dearly, you know. At the ripe old age of 19 she has to cope with the fact that she has had four years of heroin addiction and a dead boyfriend. Is that right that we as adults exposed her? The photographer's assistant turned her on to heroin. He offered it to her. She got hooked. We, as adults, did it.'

Sorrenti wants legislation to help protect models. But the response has not been encouraging: 'Models are not considered an empathy group,' was the reply she received from one politician. 'There is a dislike factor,' admits Sorrenti. 'They are young and beautiful, and have money. But they have a whole set of problems that come with the runway. What makes them a specialised group in need of special care are the conditions which make them particularly vulnerable to the use of drugs: isolation and a need to escape.' Or, as one model admitted to me, 'It's not as if we have time for yoga. Drugs are a quick way out.' For some the consequences are worse than could ever be imagined. A 19-year-old model living in New York was found last year hanged in her drug dealer's downtown apartment. When I rang the model's agency their response was what I had come to expect from many New York agencies: 'How do you know about that?' asked the vice-president of one agency. 'No one knows. I don't know why we are talking about a dead person from over a year ago. Things happen in life - people get sick and die all the time.'

Sorrenti has worked in the fashion industry for 30 years and she understands the pressures of the fashion world. Her elder son is Mario Sorrenti, the former Levi's jeans model and fashion photographer who dated Kate Moss for three years. 'When Mario was going out with Kate, she lived with me for a year, so I speak from first-hand experience,' she says. 'Her schedule ran her down. She was flying all over the world. There are girls out there who are working 14-hour days, seven days a week, and they fly all over the world, maybe five, six times a week. There are 15-year-old girls on runways taking their clothes off and baring their breasts. How comfortable do they actually feel about doing that? Once Kate was so totally pressurised and exhausted that I had to go to Los Angeles with her for a shoot. Luckily she is an extremely strong girl, with her own set of values. But not everyone is that strong. I know: girls call me up late at night, and these are very big girls, household names, who can't cope.'

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When President Clinton accused the fashion industry of glamorising addiction in order to sell clothes with its images of 'heroin chic', many thought the industry had finally been issued with a wake-up call it could not ignore. Fern Mallis, executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America (the fashion industry's organising body in the US), argued, 'It is unfair that the whole industry should be blamed for heroin abuses, however, we understand the responsibility of being more responsible.' Others were less enthusiastic: the American designer Marc Jacobs called Clinton's remarks 'ridiculous - fashion isn't healthcare,' he said. 'What do you want to see? A cover of Vogue with someone sipping orange juice?'

Of course, this being fashion, 'heroin chic' is now very 12 months ago. Last year the CFDA did draft a set of proposals to protect young models but they have been put on hold. Before the spring collections the council sent out a letter reminding designers, as they pop their champagne corks backstage, not to serve alcohol to minorsE' Carre Otis, the model turned actress, said, 'And they should provide separate bathrooms for girls who don't do drugs.'

In Britain, Designers Against Addiction have been quicker to respond with a fashion show benefit, and a statement vowing not to hire models who use drugs has been signed by John Galliano, Stella McCartney and Bella Freud, among others.

But for Sorrenti, and many others I spoke to within the industry who are not as fearless as she is to speak out, not enough is being done. 'What is the CFDA doing?' asks Sorrenti. 'Nothing. Designers Against Addiction - what are they doing, tell me? No one is really doing anything. I know one creative director, who is a father himself, who used a very famous model with a serious drug habit. When I questioned him, he said, "It's not our problem, we have a magazine to put out." We truly lack compassion in this industry. And maybe it's because everything was due yesterday.'

Within the industry, which seems to be in a state of denial, Sorrenti and Flutie have been criticised for their efforts to reform modelling - Sorrenti for being too emotive and Flutie for acting not out of concern, but for his own personal gain. While there are others who applaud them for being willing to take a stand. 'I actually believe Michael is suing Amy Wesson because he cares,' says James King. 'He doesn't want another girl going through what I went through, too.' Flutie has said that if Wesson were to go into rehab tomorrow, he would drop the lawsuit.

After Davide died, his mother wanted to set up a Davide Sorrenti fund for drug rehab within the arts, but, she says, no one wanted

to know. 'My husband says to me, "You know, Fran, this is a lost cause." But I won't give up. Davide's major problem was his blood illness, so I set up an Art of Photography exhibition in memory of Davide with the donations going to a thalassaemia foundation. Three thousand people showed up. No one in the fashion industry wants to go to a party regarding drugs because, you know what, drugs are too close to home. People were saying to me, "You know, Fran, stick to healthcare. Drugs are a drag." '

If you would like to contact Francesca Sorrenti, please write to her at: 201 East 16th Street, NY 10003, USA. Designers Against Addiction can be contacted on 0171-793 1011
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