Catwalk
This set didn't co-operate as well as the Aeries set for some reason, but still didn't work out too bad. I have the Evelyn set done and that looks as good as the Aeries set. Same for Cynthia. Did some concepts for Scarlett-Morgan, Maddy and Erin. All look incredible, so stay tuned.
I decided to write a short story about Alexia. It is written in the first person perspective, as if it is the Athoughts of Alexia. This story is totally fiction and as far as i know Alexia has never done what is in the story. If there are any similarities to real events and real people, it is purely conincidence.
My rule has always been simple, and I mean it the way other people mean "I'll try to be in bed by ten": try anything at least once. It's not bravery, exactly. It's arithmetic. There are an infinite number of things a body can be asked to do in front of strangers, and if you never try any of them, your life is just a smaller version of the one you could have had. So when the message popped up on my phone that morning, a catwalk slot, big brand, good money, I typed back I've done plenty of those, sure before I'd even finished making my coffee. Catwalks are my whole personality at this point. I walk in a straight line and look expensive; it's not rocket science.
Then the second message arrived, and with it a small, cold feeling in my stomach that I chose to ignore. The catch, it said, is that you'll be modelling the lipstick range fully nude for the duration of the show. I stared at the screen. I read it again. I read it a third time, slowly, the way you'd read a bill you were hoping was a typo. Nude. For the whole thing. Not a tasteful "artistic" topless that leaves you a strategically placed feather or a very confident hand, no, fully, from here to here, while some woman in the front row decided whether my left breast was worth the price of a tube of pigment.
That is nuts, I thought. That is genuinely, objectively nuts. And then the other voice, the one that has carried me through every "are you sure about this?" since I was nineteen and said yes to a photoshoot in a working bakery, went quiet and reasonable: But it's only once. Try anything at least once. So I said yes. I said yes before I'd even brushed my hair.
The next day the venue smelled like hairspray, gelatin, and the particular metallic panic of two hundred people who have not slept. Behind the curtain it was chaos in varying states of undress: girls in robes arguing with stylists, girls in nothing but a towel checking their phones, and then, there she was, at the far end of the corridor, completely bare, leaning against a wall to tie a shoe that wasn't there, looking for all the world like she was waiting for a bus. That first glimpse did something to me. Up until that second, "nude" had been an idea, a word in a text message, a hypothetical I'd filed under someday. The moment I saw another woman just... existing naked, mid-sentence, it stopped being an idea and became a fact with a face. It got real very suddenly, the way a cold pool gets real the instant your toes touch the water.
The stage manager appeared out of the haze, slid a call sheet into my hand like a waiter sliding in a menu, and pointed down a corridor to what a small sign cheerfully labelled UNDRESSING AREA. I smiled at her. She did not smile back.
I closed the door and stood there for a moment, just breathing, before I started peeling myself off. And here's the thing people misunderstand about this: it was never really about my body. I know what I look like. Five-ten of blonde, toned, sun-freckled "I probably do yoga" — I've been photographed in a bikini on a beach and I have a perfectly reasonable relationship with my own shape. That wasn't the issue. The issue was audience. A handful of people, my sister, one very patient boyfriend, the occasional photographer who'd seen me before the lights came up, had known this body. It was ours. But this? This was four hundred strangers in a dark room, and my body suddenly felt like something I was presenting, a specimen under glass, every inch of it on display for a verdict I hadn't asked for. I undressed slowly, almost apologetically, the way you'd take a painting off a wall.
A makeup artist materialized and began fussing over my lips with a brush while I stood there like a very exposed Renaissance sculpture. "This shade's called Coral Confidence," she announced, as if naming a small dog. I tried not to think about the fact that I was, at that moment, a nude woman whose only clothing was a smear of orange on her mouth. It is, I have since decided, the funniest professional situation in existence.
Then: "You're up, love. Go wait at the start."
So I walked to the wings and stood there, naked, and peered out through the gap in the curtain. And God, there were a lot of them. Rows and rows of heads, all turned toward the black runway, all waiting. A sea of eyes. My stomach did a small, undignified flip.
The music started, low, thumping, the kind that makes your shoulders want to move on their own. The house lights dropped. And then a single spotlight snapped on down the length of the catwalk like a finger pointing at me, and a hand gently bumped my shoulder from behind. Go.
And I went. One step, two steps, three, and somewhere around step four, before my brain had finished catching up with my legs, I realized I was walking completely naked in front of several hundred people who were looking at absolutely everything. Not the flattering angles. Not the "editorial" version of me that exists only in retouched magazines. Everything. The little asymmetry in my shoulders. The freckle on my hip I'd never once thought to look at. Even the bits the sun has, statistically speaking, never shined on before, which is a phrase I now own and will be using for the rest of my life.
It was terrifying. It was also, this is the part I didn't expect, it was electric. A rush poured up through my chest like something lit a fuse, and my face did that thing where it stops being nervous and starts being present, all business, all "I am worth looking at." And then, because I have walked this exact runway so many times that my hips remember the rhythm even when my mind is screaming, the tempo of the walk just... took over. In-out, in-out, the same metronome I'd done a hundred times in a dress, and suddenly it wasn't a naked woman in a spotlight anymore. It was just another catwalk show. My body had filed the paperwork on my behalf while my head was still having its little crisis.
I hit the turn, I came back, I made it to the curtain, and before I'd even fully re-entered the chaos behind it, a hand was already at my lips with a fresh brush. Next shade: Cherry Ambition. And out I went again. Before I knew it, I was walking the length of that runway a second time, naked as a jaybird, modelling what was essentially a different tube of the same red concept.
And then a third time. A fourth. A fifth. It became less an event and more a conveyor belt: out, walk, turn, back in, new shade, out again. I was a human swatch card. By the end of it I'd cycled through so many names, Coral Confidence, Cherry Ambition, Sunset Surrender, one that was just called Big Decision, that my lips were more of a rainbow than a face. Thirty minutes of this, and then the music swelled to its finale, the lights came up all at once, and the room erupted in applause that I felt in my bare shoulders before I heard it with my ears.
Wow, I thought, standing there in the bright, blinking afterglow, still wearing nothing but a smear of Big Decision. What a buzz.
A friend I'd known from art school was waiting on the other side of the curtain, and her mouth opened, closed, opened again. "You just walked naked," she said, in the tone of someone describing a small miracle or a minor car accident, "in front of all those strangers."
I looked at her. I looked down at myself. I thought about the four hundred pairs of eyes, the spotlight, the bits the sun had never seen, and the fact that my only actual product was a tube of colour on my mouth. And I smiled, because it was true, and because it was also funny, and because both things can be true at once.
"Yeah," I said. "It was a job." A beat. "But I'd do it all again."
I already was, in fact, mentally checking my calendar for the next one. Try anything at least once. The arithmetic never lies.
Yes Alexia does have a model profile page, which you can find HERE.
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