Pricing Beauty by Mears Ashley

Author:Mears, Ashley
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520950214
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 4.3. Production crew unveils the catwalk before a show

Options enable investors to anticipate other investors’ actions, which leads to herding behavior, where actors decide to disregard their own information and imitate instead the decisions made by others before them. The outcomes of these herding behaviors are what economists call information cascades, and we see them in speculative markets such as art, fashion, and finance (though the effects of inflating value on fashion models are rather benign compared to overvaluing stocks on Wall Street).

This is not to say that choosing a Tatiana is an irrational decision—hardly; as behavioral economists have found, it is quite rational for decision makers to take into account other people’s actions, even at the expense of their own information or, in this case, their own aesthetic sensibilities.31 The modeling market, like any marketplace, has a degree of arbitrariness. Superior products don’t necessarily become best sellers; good products can win in the marketplace, but so can inferior ones. In place of Tatiana, the Fashion Week star of 2006 could just as well have been another model, such as Liz from Pleasantville, New Jersey or Sasha from Vladivostock, Russia.

As Sasha made her way through the London and New York modeling markets, she came to understand this well. When discussing how models rise to the top, she explained, “Your life would be, you came to a casting with Jordan Bane. For some reason he thought, ‘Oh she looks like my mother when she was twenty-three. I love her!’ And he books you for everything.” It didn’t work out this way for Sasha, who in the end was just another Polaroid moving in and out of Jordan Bane’s studio.

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