When we speak over Zoom, Cameron Russell is sitting beneath a slightly surreal sculpture of dozens of metal birds. It looks like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. ‘I’m in a hotel in LA,’ she says, laughing. During fashion month, Russell was my companion of sorts. In snatched moments I devoured her thoughtful new memoir, How to Make Herself Agreeable to Everyone. In it, she details the seedier, exploitative sides of the fashion industry: being told to lose weight, being plied with alcohol as a minor, sexual assault, surreptitious topless pictures, racism.
Russell, 36, has been modelling since she was 16; she has been a campaign face of Louis Vuitton, Calvin Klein, a Vogue covergirl and a Victoria’s Secret Angel during the height of the lingerie brand’s show extravaganzas. Raised in Cambridge Massachusetts, she moved to New York after finishing high school. Her first kiss was with a male model. ‘Photographers call me jailbait,’ she writes, ‘one invites me to drinks. Eventually I will find my body in a bed next to him. Not myself: a lot of myself will be surprisingly gone by then.’
