How To Do Anything Better: Supermodel Survival Edition

Part 1: Enemies with Long, Stabby Fingernails

The big, wide, fashionable world outside the Vaseline-lensed pages of the Sears catalogue is a dangerous place. Miss Tyra is not your friend and Naomi Campbell will cut you, bitch. Well, actually, she’ll probably bludgeon you to death with her cell-phone first. But those are just other models, sweetheart. Anna Wintour wears bangs to hide the Mark of the Beast etched into her forehead like a designer label on a $40,000 leather handbag. You have just entered the dark realm of Hecate and you need to tread with care lest you rouse the wrath of the reanimated corpse of Karl Lagerfield. He is wearing a smoking jacket and stovepipe pants, with a profusion of lace ruffles gathered about his neck, and his veins are pumped full of the finest embalming fluid in the land. Oh la la, c’est chic!

Never forget that the pretty starlet is your natural enemy. Although she is probably a foot shorter than you, she stars in romantic comedies and still retains some secondary sex characteristics, which means she will steal some of those coveted magazine covers whenever a new movie comes out. Being an actress, she is also better at pretending to be human and/or humane. You can take comfort in the knowledge that clothes hang better on you and that you will never have to stoop down and pretend that you’re in love with Tom Cruise unless you’re hypnotized into marrying him.

Part 2: The Look

Being gorgeous is good but it’s super-double-plus good to be gorgeous in a way that is vaguely reminiscent of a space alien and/or a praying mantis. Do your lovers ever wonder if you are laying eggs inside their stomachs? After sex, do they seem particularly nervous, as though they feared having their heads chomped off? Are you nevertheless devastatingly angular? These are all signs that you were born to be fabulous.

To succeed in fashion, you will require three expressions – the Blank Stare of Fashionable Ennui, the Smouldering Stare of Sexy Loathing, and the Almost Friendly Stare of Cosmetics-Induced Glee, otherwise known as, “I’m smiling with my eyes.” The toothy grin of the supermodel is a phenomenon on par with a sighting of Hailey’s Comet. If you ever feel the temptation to smile, the Wicked Wintour will get a twitching in her thumb and send her hell-imps to poke you between the ribs with Choos and Blahniks. To avoid any undue exuberance, spend as much time as possible contemplating that glorious memento mori, Corpse of Lagerfield.

Part 3: The Winning Attitude

Repeat after me, “I am not a coke addict. I just have a perpetual cold. I am not a heroin addict. I’m a really skinny Type 2 Diabetic. I am not on speed. I’m just clinically insane. I am the picture of health, even on the days when my BMI dips under 10. It's just my meth-tabolism - I mean, metabolism. I am a totally functional human being and will continue to be this way at least until I’ve been on French Vogue twice.” This is to be your mantra until you marry a rock star. At this juncture, feel free to strut around sweatshops in stilettos, construct elaborate coats out of 101 dalmation puppies and just be too, too unspeakably "it", preferably to the dental drill sounds of German industrial music.