You'd Be Perfect for Ralph Lauren.
Two fashion models claim personal agency over their bodies after modeling agencies had claimed them for years.
Overview
Episode 4 of How’s Work? with Esther Perel gets up-close and personal with a pair of models who came of age in the beauty and fashion spotlight. From their mid-teens, both Jane and Fi served the demands of an industry that marked girls who had demands of their own as “difficult.” Now the two women are ready to move on while taking the good with them and leaving the bad and ugly behind.
In You'd Be Perfect for Ralph Lauren, Esther helps the two address the question of: How do you say goodbye, or change the relationship, to a profession you’ve sacrificed so many years to “making it”?
Thematics
What to listen for in this episode of How’s Work? with Esther Perel:
- Breaking up is hard to do, especially with a profession that offers big rewards in return for full devotion.
- How to identify in a positive way with a profession that is both revered and degraded?
- Leaving an ambivalent relationship with one profession to replicate it in another is as doomed as marrying a second — and disappointing — choice.
- The higher the identification with a profession, the lower the chance of dodging performance anxiety. Sometimes a low-stakes career choice is a healthy one.
- Setting boundaries around being touched in physically intimate professions can affect how we experience touch beyond work.
- Leaving a profession doesn’t have to be all or none. Our relationship to the field and the role we play in it can evolve into new opportunities to meet our new priorities.
- In professions where we create pleasure for others, how do we give ourselves permission to experience pleasure, ourselves?
