Erin Wasson: “An actor called my agency to ask for my phone number after the Victoria’s secret parade. It made me feel bad” | Fashion | The USA Print

Erin Wasson (Irving, Texas, 42 years old) talks non-stop with an unmistakable hoarse tone on the other end of the phone. It’s the second day that we’ve tried to talk: the first day I couldn’t because I was surrounded by the hustle and bustle that builds up throughout the day at Cecile, the cafe with vegan options that she has opened with her husband, the French entrepreneur Barth Tassy, ​​in Marseille, his hometown. “It was a very difficult decision to move. In New York I knew absolutely everyone, I knew how to move, I knew the dynamics, what to expect. But even so, I had the courage to come and start from scratch”, says this model who started in the profession thanks to a contest organized by a small agency in Dallas (Texas), the state where she is from and where she still has the proverbial open character that characterizes his countrymen and a liquid and nasal accent with which he continues to explain: “I have lived in New York for many years and, of course, getting used to the routines of a smaller, more provincial city, where the shops and bars They close at normal hours, in contrast to another one that literally never slept, which is a challenge. But business is going great, much better than I expected and I’m very proud of us. Now that we have achieved it, they will never take it out of our hands ”, says this woman without fear of epic language, who takes her work very seriously and at the same time does not.

A recurring presence in the most important parades of the first decade of the 21st century (the list of firms for which he has walked the catwalk is unbeatable: from Balenciaga to Givenchy, from Giorgio Armani to Gucci, from Calvin Klein to Louis Vuitton), Karl Lagerfeld’s muse, John Galliano’s favourite, her lanky, rocker image, her defiant attitude, defined a time when models liked to play with the limits of what was morally acceptable. That is why she posed for the big names of her time, some of them canceled due to attitudes that today have been agreed as intolerable. Wasson has looked directly at the targets of Steven Meisel, Nan Goldin, Mario Testino, Peter Lindbergh, Patrick Demarchelier or Ellen von Unwerth and, she says, she has never taken it as a job in which she had nothing to say. “I have always liked to get creatively involved in all the sessions that I have been a part of. In some of them I knew that I was entering the universe of a creator, in the mind of her ”. She does not want to make sexist distinctions in her experience: “For me there has been no difference if the photographer was a man or a woman. The important thing is to set the tone of the session very clearly from the first moment and if you are clear about what is going to happen, what the story wants to tell, what kind of clothes you are going to wear, if it is sexy, how sexy, why… if you say ‘this is how far you want to go and it doesn’t go from here’, then it’s strange that there are problems”.

Be very clear about the limits

Which is not to say at all that there never were. Wasson admits bluntly, almost proudly, that she once (in 2006) walked out of a Vogue photo shoot (she prefers not to say who the photographer was) because she didn’t feel comfortable: “There was a male-dominant dynamic going on that didn’t It seemed to me that it expressed nothing intellectually interesting.” The model has no regrets: “I know that this type of attitude on my part, this way of setting limits and having things very clear sometimes earned me a reputation as ‘problematic’ in the sector, but I also believe that, thanks to that, so many years later they keep calling me and I’m still in the trade”, he explains. This brave Texan does not deny, however, that there are some past works that have been re-evaluated in the light of new times. For example, her parade for Victoria’s Secret in 2007. “That was an experience that I didn’t like at all: it didn’t come with parading. You had to be bubbly, take photos with celebrities. After the parade, a very famous actor called the agency to ask for my phone number and that made me very angry and I sang them forty. ‘According to my latest information, this was not a dating site,’ I told them. The fact that I am a pretty woman does not mean that I automatically become part of an economic transaction as if I were an object”.

None of these anecdotes mean that Erin Wasson regrets having chosen the path of fashion: “It is an amazing profession, very well paid, thanks to which I have learned languages ​​and which has given me access to worlds that I could not even imagine” , she explains, recalling her beginnings when, without social networks or cell phones, landing in New York from a small Texas town could be terrifying for a 17-year-old girl. “I am a person in a permanent state of gratitude. I have taken every opportunity that has come my way and have never felt anxious when the phone hasn’t rung. I have always known how to look for my life”.