No smile, only strut: Mantra of top models

They wear the world’s most beautiful and expensive clothes yet their faces are the picture of blank boredom.

Why do fashion models always look so miserable “You don’t smile. It is just not done,” said model Ty Ogunkoya as catwalk stars criss-crossed Paris for fashion week. In his decade as a top model, the 26-year-old Nigerian-born Londoner has never once permitted himself a grin.

“I have modelled for everyone, and no one has ever asked me to smile,” he told AFP. “To be honest, it would feel weird if I did.”

“When I walk I think about something sad, like when my cat died,” added Klara, a 18-year-old Slovakian model. “It was run over by a bus.” But do models really need to be so glum “Never forget it is the clothes they are looking at and not you,” Victoire Macon Dauxerre, a former model for Celine and Alexander McQueen, said she was told. In her book, Never Thin Enough, she tells how she was warned to “never, ever smile”. Her modelling agency’s catwalk coach taught her how to get the perfect “haughty killer look” by slightly dropping her chin and lifting her eyes at the same time. Rising young star Matthieu Villot said the reason for the unspoken ban on smiling was clear. “They want to show the clothes and not our faces. If we smile we focus attention on our faces and not the clothes,” said the 22-year-old medical student.

Fashion historian Lydia Kamitsis said it was not always so. The vogue for expressionless models is actually very recent, she said, dating from the rise of the Japanese designers Yohji Yamamoto and Commes des Garcon in the early 1980s.

“This was also the period of the supermodels (Cindy Crawford, Imam and Elle Macpherson) who very much had their own personalties, and it was a reaction against this,” she said.

“In the 1960s, when collections were first presented as shows, models often smiled, laughed and even danced to music. “Now they are seen as walking clothes hangers. It’s all about effacing their personality... The clothes are it.”