Anna Bondareva - Supermodel Forever

© Anna Bondareva, 2020

ISBN 978-5-4498-6059-0

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

In the dangerous whirlwind of events where one has to constantly adapt to new sceneries, behind the veil of glamour and dreamy bohemian setups, hides a harsh reality – the glittery world is full of cunning mazes.

This sensational book sheds light, for the first time, on the most secret facets of the world’s finest profession, that of the fashion model.

It’s not only a memoir, but the frank confession of an incredibly brave woman. In order to survive in an eccentric scene where all the actors change rapidly, this brave woman made herself. She created her own universe. She won the right to always remain natural, desired, feminine, and talented and became her real self.

I came to get my classmate at the entrance of the auditorium, where her classes were held, and then we went to the opera. I was attending music school, and Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Boris Godunov was on the program. My classmate said that she had enrolled in paid modeling classes offered at the National Fashion Center of the famous Tamara Agency . I loved looking at magazines and watching fashion shows. I was hip, but I had never really thought about a modeling career.

“Miss, how old are you? Are you at least fourteen or fifteen years old?”

The velvety voice of Tamara Viktorovna had a magical effect. A few minutes later, I was leaving my phone number for the director of the agency, Gontcharova. The director called me the next day and offered me a free professional modeling course. To become a real swan and spread my wings, I would learn how to hold the correct posture, walk gracefully on heels, and apply all the subtleties of makeup.

The beauties standing on the podium were very prestigious and tall. They seemed like real goddesses. My size was considered average, one meter seventy-five.

“Your growth is not over,” said Natalia, the choreographer. “You have to install a pull bar in your apartment and hang on it to lengthen your spine!” she said.

I installed a pull bar in the apartment, and sometimes I worked there at night, without really believing I would be successful in the business. But after the first official and fruitful photo shoot for the fall collection of a local fashion house, I was chosen as a model among confirmed models for the main fashion shows. The girls were all very different, and our interests rarely converged. My punk rock period was over, the music had changed, and our outings to underground dance parties with friends became regular.

The first person who noticed my potential for a modeling career was the beautiful Italian, Tony. A year earlier, we had been sent by a Christian Organization, like child victims of the Chernobyl disaster, to Italy for the Christmas holidays, and we had gone with our schoolmates to an incredible event organized by Catholic Charity Funds.

“Anna is a model, Anna is a true model” said Tony to the guests of her pizzeria, run by a big family north of the Adriatic coastal town.

At our special English school, I had a friend named Ilya, a big fan of the British band, The Cure, Ilya asked us to call him Robert, because it was the name of the band’s soloist. Ilya told me that if I were black, I would look like Naomi Campbell. During our walks and phone conversations, he used to sing to me the Kraftwerk song from their 1978 album The Man-Machine :

Yoyogi Park is a large park near the Meiji Shrine. The subway station adjacent to the park was the closest to the apartment where I was staying, by the contract with the agency. I had come from Paris to Tokyo for six weeks. My driver was called Hiro, and we started each morning with a ritual of listening to the song “Don’t stop me now” by the group Queen.

“Without this divine music, I cannot run the engine of this guy,” joked the driver-manager caressing the wheel of his minibus.

Hiro’s job was not just to bring the girls to the rendezvous, but also to present each model during the casting, to tell the client about her latest achievements, and to describe in a few words the nature of her character and her closest modeling plans.

There were hardly any days of rest. Days without filming were full of castings, and weekends were devoted to photo shoots. Up to three shoots could take place in one day: the first from six in the morning to eleven o’clock, the second at noon, and then an evening shoot. It was our youth that saved us. It’s no secret that Japanese brands and magazines preferred very young doll-like girls with marble skin. Any tan was formally forbidden, and there was a separate paragraph in the contract on this subject. One girl was sent back to Canada and was forced to pay a fine after tanning on the beach one weekend.

The Japanese lexicon does not contain abrupt expressions. Customers and photographers called the models they liked “my sweet girl,”“my pretty lady,” and “ kawaii.” The Japanese language is designed in such a way that there are practically no curses in it. They were always flattering and difficult to refuse. Just answering “no” was a problem. It was this circumstance that turned one of my incidents into an unexpected urban adventure. Usually, we were brought by the agency’s minibus to the castings, but for the morning shoots, we had to take the tube. This was the era before mobile phones or GPS, so all we had to go by was a map, drawn either by the manager or the client, and after getting out the subway, the only directions were the big billboards where the station names were written in the Latin alphabet. For example, one of our drawn maps might say, “Go on foot to Honda, then to the left of Motorola.”

One morning in May, I was rushing to arrive on time for my client, but when I got out of the subway, I found myself in a labyrinth of nameless streets, each one just like the other, trying in vain to find at least one passerby who could point me in the right direction. But each one I asked, looking at my map and address, sent me in the opposite direction of the previous one. After an hour and a half in this maze, with no place from which I could make a phone call, my rescuer finally appeared.

“Hai, hai!” he said.

A little Asian man in an elegant suit with a metallic briefcase in his hands made an affirmative gesture with his right hand without looking up. He walked in front of me and looked back every ten seconds to see if I was following him. I do not know why, but I trusted him and followed the stranger in silence. We walked on like that, for about twenty minutes, winding the labyrinths of the busy Roppongi district, until the man stopped in front of a small two-story house.

“ Hai!” he said again.

This part of my story was really inexplicable, and it ended very unexpectedly. It was a sort of initiation. Subsequently, I never had any orientation problem in the cosmopolitan megalopolis, and by the end of my stay in Tokyo, I could even speak a little Japanese with taxi drivers. The stranger in the elegant suit took a pair of traditional Japanese knives out of his slim briefcase and, by kneeling like a knight, offered me the relic as a gift, then disappeared immediately After a long delay, I arrived at the studio for my photo shoot, where, waiting for me was an excellent green tea, an assortment of sushi, and a Japanese shiatsu massage.