A shift in the model force
Instead of using professional models, San Francisco-based online fashion line, Betabrand has gone wild and has opted to use only women with PhDs to model and advertise their clothes.
Betabrand Co-Founder, Chris Lindland said they chose to seek out women with doctorates, after asking friends and neighborrs to model, only to discover that one of them was a PhD candidate in neuropsychology at Stanford, which gave him the idea to only use PhD candidates to model their brand.
Lindland rushed to Facebook to seek out other PhD candidates willing to be featured as the brilliant women at Betabrand, contradicting the standard model mold and breaking free from the idea that models have to be perfect and coiffed.
After 60 responses, the company began selecting their models and quickly got to shooting. Lindland says that restricting models to only the highest levels of education is a first, and is directly in line with the company motto of, “New Ideas, Non-Stop.”
“It’s a privilege to work with models with far more ideas in their heads than I [have],” Lindland opined.
This isn’t Lindland’s first foray into the creative
They’ve also created an app called Model Citizen which Lindland calls an “open casting call,” as the app crowdsources potential models. Within the app, users can see what others are wearing, which helps the brand to market simultaneously. Genius.
Lindland asserts that the concept of using brilliant women in their clothing line is indicative of the fact that women are more than what they wear. In every photo, each model’s expertise is celebrated in the form of her specialization being listed. On every photo.
Watch for other brands to follow suit. This is an interesting change in the tide.
