Discovered at age 14 outside her school, Sara Ziff was quickly swept up into the high-glamour whirlwind of the fashion industry, jetting to Paris and Milan for shoots and shows and getting paychecks with an astonishing number of zeros.
She and her boyfriend, a film school graduate, started taking home videos backstage on a lark, but the couple's hobby bloomed into something bigger — an inside peek behind the industry's high-gloss facade into its darker side of body image problems, drugs and even sexual abuse.
Ziff, a blue-eyed blond who walked for luxury supernovas including Louis Vuitton and Chanel, says the couple's documentary, Picture Me, shows an industry sometimes out of control.
"It's sort of the Wild West, with people feeling the rules don't apply in fashion, for some reason. I'd like to be a part of making some sort of changes in that way," Ziff, 28, said.
Regulation
Shot over a period of five years by Ziff, Schell and their model friends, Picture Me makes a convincing case for the need for some sort of regulation in an industry where girls begin their careers at age 14 or even as young as 12.
In the film, we see Ziff evolve from a wide-eyed ingenue into a harried and emotionally strung-out young woman.
She's often in tears, reeling from the sheer exhaustion of the brutal month-long fashion show calendar, or upset about a tactless comment from one of the professionals backstage. Ziff says the industry tends to see models as objects to be poked, prodded and painted, rather than as sensitive young women.
The movie also prods what Ziff calls the "sordid and salacious" underbelly of fashion, with her and her friends talking on camera about the taboo subjects of cocaine use backstage, bulemia-clogged toilets and photographers' unwanted sexual advances.
Ziff, and Schell, 35, insist they hadn't initially set out to make a tell-all documentary.
Still, the movie is not all negative. It showcases the camaraderie and the close bonds that develop between models as they turn to one another for support, and it often focuses on the lighthearted and happy moments they share.
