Behind The Fairy Tale

GERREN TAYLOR was still playing with Barbie dolls when she walked the runway for the first time at Los Angeles Fashion Week in 2003. Just 12 at the time, she was the youngest person ever to be represented by the runway division of L.A. Models. Although most agencies require girls to be 14, it's not unheard of for 12-year-olds to get work. Actress Milla Jovovich made the cover of Vogue at 12, and Brooke Shields, Gisele Bundchen and Kate Moss were all stars before they turned 16.

With her long legs and confident walk, Taylor looked as though she would follow in their footsteps. Then, during Richard Tyler's show, the last one of the week that April, she stepped onto the runway in a wedding gown and stumbled hard. She tripped once, then again on the train that was in front of her, because the dress was accidentally put on backward. When her eyes welled up with tears, even the most hardened fashionistas wanted to give her a hug.

I wrote about that moment, the one that made Taylor a novelty -- the 12-year-old, plucked from the crowd on an L.A. street corner, who tripped on the high-fashion runway. It made for a good story. Other people thought so too. Oprah came calling, and designers lined up to book her.

That September, she went to New York to see if she could make it on the world stage, and walked in the Tommy Hilfiger, Betsey Johnson and Tracy Reese shows. Hilfiger even paid to have her teeth fixed, telling Taylor she was going to be a top model. Making enough money for college seemed a sure bet after she became the first African American in a Marc Jacobs ad campaign. "We're all expecting her to be a big star," Jacobs said.

Then she disappeared. A year later, Taylor didn't book a single runway job. The advertising work dried up too, and so did the magazine editorials. She went to Europe to try her luck at the fashion weeks there, but was told by booking agents in Paris that 38-inch hips on a pole-thin 6-foot frame made her too big to model. (They wanted her to diet down to 35 inches.) In less than two years, her career had come to a halt.

That's where the story ends for most. Fashion designers and editors move on to the next girl and the next. It's just the way of an industry built on selling a fantasy that depends on novelty and impossible ideals. Women try to intellectualize the constant stream of airbrushed images, skinny models and too-expensive products, but the allure is too strong. So we go on searching for some notion of beauty that is always just out of reach. And we don't think much about what happened to last year's model.