Model Casting Quotes

With 'America's Next Top Model,' I've always cast girls who the industry might call 'plus size' but I like to call 'fiercely real.' That was always important to me.

While choosing a fashion show, I take into consideration the designer and the collection. Then only I said yes to do a show.

You know, what's popular? Okay, vampires are very popular. Let me make my vampire movie. I'm not saying you can't make a vampire movie. But if you're going to do one do something crazy. I mean don't just get a bunch of, like I said, models and make them into vampires so you'll get an audience. You know maybe get some ugly vampires for a change.

I was a model scout. I was never a model, but they just dropped the scout.

When I first started to do fashion shows I didn't have the budget to hire top models so I would cast women who inspired me, and ask them to walk how they walked. I was doing a mise en scène, which for me was normal. I love for people to see my clothes, but it was more about the attitude of the girls. The revues of the late 19th century/early 20th century were very much a reflection of what was happening in society and politics, and for me that is also the role of the fashion designer.

I was shopping with my mother in 2006 and saw that there was a model casting going on. A couple of months later, I was one of the fifteen finalists in an international contest.

Going to a fashion show is almost as painful as being in one.

I think all races are represented in America much more than in many other places, but it's also nice to remind people about that ethnic mix. I would like to see more black models and women from different ethnic backgrounds, but I also think that when you are casting, you just choose the most beautiful girl you can find.

When Ralph Lauren creates a collection of clothes, he's not really worried about a single tie or a single shirt or a single belt... he's creating a movie, and the characters that he casts in his advertisements or the people that work in the stores are the actors in his life.

There's definitely been times when I've been on sets and I was the bigger model in the room, where they're casting girls.

About 200 girls went into a room and there were two casting agents and they asked you to say your name and where you came from and then they picked two or three out of that. And they sent you into a room and I was really nervous and kept dropping things and I was going the wrong way and everything. Then she gave us a script and you had to learn it.

I was recently in Israel doing my work and casting for models in the streets of Haifa and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, meeting young Israelis and Palestinians and Falasha, Ethiopian Jews who had migrated to Israel in the '70s. They're obsessed with Bob Marley. They're obsessed with Kanye West. They're obsessed with resistance culture, people who find that they're not necessarily comfortable in their own personal and national skin.