Esmeralda Seay-Reynolds had just turned 15 years old when she was scouted by Click Model Management in New York. But the agency told the 5-foot-11, 130-pound hopeful that she wasn’t right because she looked “too mature,” code in fashion for a teen girl deemed “too heavy” because she has already developed curves. So she dropped 20 pounds and immediately signed with NEXT, an even bigger agency. Her ascent was swift, with the Pennsylvania native landing in the pages of Vogue and shooting campaigns for top couture brands like Chanel.
But the red flags emerged just as quickly. At 16, she was booked on a shoot with a photographer who had been publicly accused of sexual coercion. That same year, one of her representatives offered her some dangerous advice on how to stay catwalk thin. “I remember my agent saying, ‘Cotton balls are organic, so it’s fine if you just swallow them to make yourself feel full,’” she says. Around that time, Seay-Reynolds was runway ready and made the Fashion Week cut for Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Saint Laurent, Fendi and Marc Jacobs in New York, Paris and Milan. At her first-ever show, the backstage bathroom scene was troubling. “On either side of me were size zero girls puking their guts up,” she recalls. There was also a financial shocker. She says she received just $130 for the six weeks of grueling work. “I don’t know if that is how much I should have made or if my agency just took that money. I have no idea because they don’t give you receipts,” she explains.
But all that paled in comparison to a spur-of-the-moment two-day shoot in Reykjavík in 2014 – an editorial job that her NEXT agents hyped, calling the vision ethereal and Lord of the Rings-esque. “We pull up to a glacier above freezing, ice-covered waters. And [the photographer] parks the car, and he’s like, ‘Climb!’” She and another model spent the next 30 minutes ascending a glacier in heels and gauzy slip dresses in a hailstorm, while the photographer and his assistant wore fur-lined parkas. “He made us change up there. We had to get naked. His assistant grabbed my arm when I [protested] and was like, ‘You’re not leaving. You will take too much time,’” she recalls. “The photographer even asked us to jump over a crevice on top of the glacier, which plunged at least 20 feet. Luckily, the stylist on the shoot was like, ‘That’s not happening. She will die.’”
The second day managed to be even worse. More cold, storms and laying on frozen lava beds in the snow. The photographer then led the small group to the country’s famed hot springs. “If you step on one, it will melt your flesh off. So, you have to stay on this marked path for safety. But he says, ‘Get off the path. And watch your footing,’” Seay-Reynolds remembers. “You’re told to do it, and you do it. And he is the adult, he is in charge.” Terrified, she sat in silence as they drove on to another extreme locale, pulling up beside a massive hole in the ground with a “Danger. Do Not Enter” sign. The photographer removed the sign, and they marched down into a cave, with stalactites covering the ceiling and stalagmites stretching across the floor. The photographer directed the two models to climb over to a desired spot. “Ice that will rip right through you if you slip,” she says. “There was no help, no medic. If you don’t do what they say, they will blacklist you. And that not only will eff up your future career, but everything that you’ve done and suffered up until that point will mean nothing.”
When she returned to the U.S., she complained about the photographer to one of her agents and was dismissed with a casual, “‘Yeah, he’s known for this.’” One of the resulting photos graced the cover of a fashion magazine, with other images featured inside its pages. Variety has viewed the photos. They are exactly as described. Seay-Reynolds was 17 at the time. She says she was never paid for the 18-hour days of work amid highly unsafe conditions.
When asked to comment, NEXT co-founder Joel Wilkenfeld says, “When we send models to photo shoots, we vet the people, and we hope that that model would call us if they were exposed to conditions such as this. The unfortunate part is we’re not on every shoot.” As for the cotton ball incident, Wilkenfeld adds, “If a model would have brought that to our attention, that agent would have been fired right there on the spot.” The photographer and the shoot’s producer pushed back on Seay-Reynolds’ claims and said conditions were safe. The photographer shifted some of the blame for the situation on NEXT, adding: “At the end of our shoot it was made known to me that she was refusing to eat anything. We immediately called her agency NEXT Models to express our concern she might be dealing with … an eating disorder … I was upset that her agency would have sent a model who had such concerns on any shoot, not to mention a destination project.”
Seay-Reynolds’ story is not uncommon. Variety spoke to more than a dozen models and people familiar with the inner machinations of the industry, several of whom say they were exploited financially and sexually while working. Though models fuel the $2.5 trillion fashion industry, they struggle to survive in its epicenter, New York. Unlike Hollywood talent agencies, which are licensed, regulated and place a 10 percent cap on commissions, modeling firms like NEXT and Wilhelmina are considered management companies and enjoy a unique carveout when it comes to the state’s labor laws. Among the industry’s most egregious practices, agencies typically wield “power of attorney” over their models and can legally accept payments on their behalf and deduct expenses like wildly inflated rent for substandard housing with zero obligation to detail their accounting. Even worse, the top agencies, which are said to scour refugee camps and eating disorder clinics in the quest for fresh faces, employ multi-year, auto-renewing contracts whether or not they book their models any jobs. As a result, even models who work regularly find themselves in debt to their agencies, leaving them vulnerable to predators like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, who were both deeply entwined in this world. (Weinstein is a convicted rapist, while the late Epstein served 13 months in prison for soliciting sex from a 14-year-old girl.)