While the world reckons with the America’s Next Top Model franchise thanks to a new Netflix exposé, Alex Casey finds the New Zealand version to be an equally disturbing rewatch.
It was while rewatching New Zealand’s Next Top Model this week that I realised just how closely I have held lessons from that wretched franchise since I was a teenager. As the young aspiring models race around Auckland visiting local designers for “go-sees”, they are repeatedly scorned for the “incredibly embarrassing” misdemeanour of wearing bright coloured bras and black underwear. “The number one rule for models is always wear nude underwear,” says Anna Reeve from Showroom 22. “An agent can ring anytime,” Colin Mathura-Jeffree advises.
Since that episode in 2009, my underwear drawer hath overfloweth with fetching salmon coloured gruts and bras, rendering me nothing more than an oversized Sea Monkey on the daily, and yet my phone has stayed resolutely silent. If American Idol sold the myth that any Joe Blogs could wander in off the street and get a record deal, and Survivor convinced us that anyone could outwit, outplay, outlast on a desert island, Top Model dabbled in a much more dangerous fantasy – that anyone could be a model if they just worked hard enough.
The franchise has been re-examined recently in the Netflix documentary Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, in which Tyra Banks goes on the PR offensive in a trenchcoat and refuses to apologise for the show’s many scandals. There’s the photoshoots in which young women were forced to swap races, appear as strangled corpses, and simulate bulimia. There’s the non-consensual sex captured on camera and framed as a cheating scandal. There are teeth ripped from skulls during makeovers, and endless comments about the contestants weight.
When the judges weren’t cooing over being able to put both their hands around one contestant’s entire waist, they were berating them for gaining weight during the competition (“get a burger, take the bun off” Tyra tells Keenyah in cycle four). It reminded me of a viral post from writer Lucy Huber: “if any Gen Z are wondering why every Millennial woman has an eating disorder it’s because in the ’00s a normal thing to say to a teenage girl was ‘when you think you feel hungry, you’re actually thirsty so just drink water and you’ll be fine.’”
Indeed, the entirety of popular culture in the mid-2000s was centred around an obsession with thinness. Magazines like Girlfriend and Dolly were lined with pictures of Paris Hilton, Mischa Barton, the Olsen twins and Lindsay Lohan, interspersed with at-home workouts for tweens and healthy lunchbox snack swaps (replace everything with cottage cheese). Trinny and Susannah barked endlessly about apple and pear-shaped bodies, and movies like Bridget Jones, Shallow Hal, and Mean Girls framed weight gain as the worst possible fate a woman could ever meet.
America’s Next Top Model rode this toxic wave of lemon juice and cayenne pepper (Victoria’s Secret model Gisele Bündchen’s juice cleanse of choice) and eventually spawned international versions of the franchise, including here in Aotearoa. The first season of New Zealand’s Next Top Model arrived in 2009, the same year that Kate Moss infamously said “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. I was 17 years old, had Mari Winsor’s Advanced Body Slimming Workout DVD on high rotation in my bedroom, and was hooked on every moment of the series.
While the seasons of America’s Next Top Model that aired here had been savage, including forced weigh-ins for contestants, there had always been an air of distance between our humble island nation and the over-the-top American-ness of the franchise. But to suddenly see thousands of local girls flood to auditions, excited to win a “Covergeehl” contract in their little Glassons waistcoats, brought a new proximity to the alluring, and deeply toxic, ideas in the show. One of the finalists went to my primary school – the call was now coming from inside the house.
In the very first episode (the whole first season is available on NZ On Screen), the girls have to strip down to their bikinis for the judging panel of Sara Tetro (then-owner of 62 Models) Colin Mathura-Jeffree (international model) and Chris Sisarich (photographer). “Go put your swimsuit on, I’m dying to see it” says Tetro of Christobelle, a 16-year-old from Auckland, soon complimenting her “killer” body. Rhiannon from Blenheim, also 16, walks in awkwardly, admitting she normally prefers to wear shorts. “Go home and throw your shorts out,” says Tetro.
The spectre of weight and dieting looms over the series from the opening montage, when the girls order a pizza – “models eat too!” they cackle. In an early aviation-themed photoshoot purporting to be a tribute to Jean Batten, 17-year-old Ruby, a size eight, receives the following critique from the photographer: “she looks really good on camera… she could lose a tiny bit of weight.” And at the judges table: “I do think that she could lose a little bit of weight and she’d do a lot better for it.” Just as our Jean would have wanted to be remembered, no doubt.
Other times, the critiques come from the contestants themselves. Teryl-Leigh, a 23-year-old beanpole, hates her Snow Planet photo because she thinks she looks fat. “Maybe I could be more toned?” she says to the judges. “If you feel that you aren’t toned, then tone,” Tetro nods sagely. When the girls get delivered bags of chocolates, Hosanna refrains, admitting privately that she’s gained weight in the Top Model house. In the next scene, an Elite Fitness van arrives, and the girls hug in elation as two men offload cross-trainers and exercise balls.
It is hard to overstate just how fucked up it is to absorb these scenes as a teenager, especially when an adult male photographer advises that a 17-year-old girl “just needs to get on that treadmill”. The final six are eventually flown to LA to meet with Next Model Management, at which point the agent brings out the measuring tape. “The ideal measurements would be 34-24-34, that’s really what you need,” he says, singling out a few of the girls to “work a bit harder” to bring down their numbers. I was shocked to realise I had those measurements memorized about as well as my childhood friend’s phone number.
The next morning, Teryl-Leigh chooses wedges for breakfast over her usual shoestring fries. “I was trying to make the healthy choice,” she shrugs.
I’d love to say that times have changed, but just look at the return of cottage cheese into the culture. While we don’t have weekly appointments to watch grown adults tear apart women’s bodies on TV anymore, the Ozempic era has emboldened a wild new kind of body surveillance. This season of Married at First Sight Australia has seen not one but two grooms declare “no fat people” in their audition tapes while, at the other end of the spectrum, the ever-shrinking Kelly Osborne has had to beg people to stop dehumanising her after her rapid weight loss.
All I know is that a whole generation of women really could have done without being let inside the cursed tips and tricks of the modelling industry, complete with a panel of judges externalising all our self-hatred in primetime. The most twisted thing of all is that the Next Top Model fantasy of being discovered strolling the streets actually does happen sometimes. I was once in a homewares store on Ponsonby Road with my exceptionally beautiful friend, when a woman with spiky hair and statement glasses sauntered up to ask if she had modelling representation.
Halfway through the conversation the woman turned to me, as I pretended to be deeply absorbed in a pineapple-shaped candle, and produced the look of pity one might afford a cat with a tin of beans stuck on its head. “Oh,” she said. “You’re cute too.”
Before I could even tell her I had been swapping wedges for fries, and had my nude go-see undies ready to go, she had already turned her back on me.
