A rehab center for eating disorders should be a private place where patients get the much-needed care and skills to lead a normal life. The largest Swiss rehab center accepts some of the sickest patients, those who need to be hospitalized because they are so thin. Unfortunately, they’ve had to deal with an usual issue when it comes to patient aftercare. Agents from top model companies have been lurking outside of the Swiss rehab in order to gain new clients. The agents approach the young girls and hand them a business card, while filling their minds with the idea of fame and riches. The mother of a young 14 year old girl and the girl’s care coordinator confronted an agent after he approached the young girl, to which the agent defend himself by saying, “They approach healthy, normally slim young people and that they never urge anyone to lose weight.” You would think there could be nothing worse than agents looking for new clients outside of a rehab center, but there is something just as awful. Agents get paid a large finder’s fee for finding young, beautiful, new talent. Scouts in South America and Brazil look for white models, using their knowledge of European settlement history. In Russia, agents find poor young girls and lure them with the idea of riches and fame. This has to be a whole new low for the modeling world. I know they’ve been doing some extremely questionable things lately, with the majority of the runway being white during Fashion Week, male models looking extremely gaunt, and telling ethnic models that they lost out on a job because there was “already one of their kind” working a runway. To hear that big-name companies pay agents large amounts of money for finding naturally “thin” models outside of rehab centers and white models in Brazil and South America is just disgusting. I hope that the more these stories come to light that things will change in both the modeling industry and the way agencies handle and obtain their clients. Jezebel

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