Why I Wrote About The Dark Side Of Fashion

The fashion industry, as seen from the outside, has a bad image and reputation. It’s all shine, puffery and surface. Is fashion only about beautiful women in stunning clothes?

I wrote Wildchilds because I wanted to delve deeply into that other side, the one which, as a player for four decades, knew so well.

I worked in this industry since 1979. I began my career as a model and then became an agent for fashion photographers and artists in music and dance. Dozens of kids came to me and I took them under my wing. But like them, I was very young.

Aspiring talent, hopeful dreamers, unique but reckless personalities, ready for anything in order to further their careers. This can turn into bad things. We had our share of magical moments and crappy ones too. The industry is a dangerous but exciting world where youth and innocence are easily exploited by the predators that roam. In 2013 I found myself writing and pitching fashion fiction content to Hollywood digital platforms and TV. At these meetings I would always be told: ‘Why fashion? No one cares about fashion,’ or ‘your content is too dark, could you make it light and funny’?

Their vision was the extreme opposite of what I had experienced since my first internship at age nineteen at the press offices of Yves Saint Laurent Couture. While living and working in Milan, London, Paris, New York and Los Angeles, I have encountered hundreds of kids who were drawn to the industry for the right reasons: their passion for the art of fashion, the fast creative pace marked by the eight seasons each year, the unique collaborations. There is nothing repetitive about this industry, it is in a constant flow, using and then discarding; collateral damage, the show must go on.

With my novel I wanted to underline that aspect of it: the multi-billion and very professional industry I knew. I also wanted to explore the transformative power of fashion, as a tool of self-expression and identity, which is at everyone’s reach. I could not write about the clichés and caricatures, the frivolity and love of the surface. I was never motivated nor inspired by that.

After many attempts to re-write my content to please everyone, I decided I had to tell the stories that I was familiar with. Uncensored.

I loved writing but I had never written a novel. I bought a bunch of manuals on how to ‘write a best seller’ and ‘writing for dummies’… that kind of thing. I spent two months doing the homework. My head spun. I started writing in January 2015. I wrote every day of the week, six hours a day and weekends too, weekends I wrote. Phone and email off, I had to give up my job. It was only because of the support of my boyfriend that I was able to continue at this pace. Some days I was happy with just the perfect paragraph, while other days I could not write a line. One hundred words, or a thousand a day, I was merely content when I could find my voice to tell those tales.

The story I told was from the POV of a photographer and his model and muse. They were young when they started in Paris, as young as I was then. I exposed them to the same dangers I was exposed to when I lived alone in those cities. Soon I found myself in character with my characters and I could no longer leave them. Many chapters were difficult because to write about their agony I had to suffer their pain. At times the writing made me feel sick. As I wrote I would tell my boyfriend ‘no one will believe these stories and no one will care.’

I finished my first draft in May 2017. I did a first edit with the help of my friend Nicanor Cardeñosa, a sharp Spanish journalist who knew my world. We edited over Skype every day for three months and I began to have hope.  After, I took the advice from Stephen King’s fantastic On Writing, and sent my edited draft to eight readers who diligently sent me back their notes.

Between September and November 2017, the scandal of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual harassments in the Hollywood industry broke. The #MeToo hashtag was created and in January 2018 another big story about the abuse of power and sexual harassments in the fashion industry made the headlines of the New York Times and the Boston Globe. I had to find a way to publish Wildchilds. It was time.

After plenty of research, I sent the book to twenty literary agents. Eight turned it down and twelve did not reply. I knew that they receive hundreds of submissions a day, but I could no longer wait. I have many author friends, they told me how long it would take. ‘Self-publish’ one of them said. More research, my list of pros and cons was long. Self-publishing is overwhelming but I found a fantastic company in Seattle who helped me with the process. Editing, formatting, distribution, marketing, they held my hand and guided me until completion. I also hired a wonderful publicist and a nimble digital advertising company.

After I shot my cover and finally held a sample copy in my hands, I nearly wept. Wildchilds was published in September 2018.

‘Now comes the hard part,’ my author friends say.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Since the early 1980s, Eugenia Melian has worked as a model, agent, producer, and music supervisor in Milan, Paris, London, New York and Los Angeles. She has discovered, managed, art directed and produced some of the most talented artists of our time, with career highlights that include launching the careers of iconic photographers Tony Viramontes and David LaChapelle, and co-producing Malcolm McLaren’s cult album Paris. Catherine Deneuve, Françoise Hardy, LouLou de la Falaise, Sonya Rykiel, Rocco Siffredi, Helmut Newton, David Bailey, Faye Dunaway, Marlon Brando, Prince, Tilda Swinton, Guerlain, Vogue, Daft Punk, Blur, Stella McCartney, Janet Jackson and The Face are among the long list of luminaries and brands she has collaborated on projects with and represented. 

WILDCHILDS

The loss of innocence, the death of beauty, and the price of success…

Seventeen years ago, Iris was forced to abandon Gus, the love of her life, and her career as a top model in Paris. She has created a new life for herself and her daughter,  Lou,  in California. However, when the news of Gus’s unexpected death reaches Iris, her tenuously reconstructed life is thrown into chaos.  A  celebrated art and fashion photographer,  Gus  has left his estate to Lou, with one condition: Iris must travel to Paris and recover a missing collection of his work.

Iris soon discovers that she’s not the only one after the photographs. An old enemy is staking claim to them, and a notorious tabloid is threatening Iris with brutal–and very private–images of her past life. To protect her daughter from scandal, Iris needs to confront the demons that caused her to flee Paris, her career,  and her life with Gus.

Iris embarks on a suspenseful journey through the closed world of the fashion industry,  where the beautiful people do ugly things.

Will she expose the industry’s dark side and shameful secrets?  Can she shield her family from the consequences?
Wildchilds  is a work of fiction based on the truth.
 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing