There was a time when those close to Sara Ziff found it baffling that, by age 20, she had out-earned her father, Ed, a neuroscience professor at New York University, simply, as her mother, Susan, once remarked, for being “pretty and on time.”
In “Picture Me,” the 2009 documentary Ms. Ziff made with camcorder footage from her days as a fashion model, she is seen receiving a paycheck for more than $111,000, which elicits little more than a shrug.
Ms. Ziff joined the modeling business in 1996 after a photographer scouted her on her way home from the Bronx High School of Science, when she was a freshman. Soon enough, instead of babysitting on the weekends, Ms. Ziff was attending casting calls and landing spots in Seventeen magazine. After graduation, instead of heading to an Ivy League university like most of her peers, she opted for the runway.
“I knew that models were often valued for their extreme youth and that if I wanted to have a shot at it, this was my chance,” Ms. Ziff said. “And that it could be an opportunity to put away some money.”
For Ms. Ziff, that was the first in a series of bold choices in which she built a career, helped expose some of the seedier sides of the business, and ultimately stepped away from the glamour and paychecks to stand up for the rights and protections of others. The culmination of much of that work comes on Thursday, when New York State will implement the Fashion Workers Act, a piece of legislation championed by the Model Alliance, a group founded by Ms. Ziff that aims to remake the modeling industry in the fashion epicenter of the United States.
The problems of the modeling industry became clear to Ms. Ziff early in her career, and the documentary she created didn’t just show the glamour of being young and flush with cash. It also chronicled a more common experience: teenage models saddled with debt, struggling with eating disorders and navigating an industry where sexual abuse was often normalized.
“When my film came out, I went from, you know, working at the highest levels of the industry to pretty much overnight the big brands stopped calling,” Ms. Ziff said. “My earnings plummeted and I basically went into debt. Yeah, it was a really hard time.”
But one call Ms. Ziff did receive was from Susan Scafidi, the founder and academic director of the Fashion Law Institute. Ms. Scafidi had been moved not by the film’s direction but by the reaction of the audience, which she described as “filled with tears and great emotion and with expressions of fear.”
Ms. Ziff earned a degree in political science from Columbia University and, in 2012, with guidance from Ms. Scafidi, founded the Model Alliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing worker protections for models.
The implementation of the Fashion Workers Act could make large strides. It grants models basic workplace protections such as meal breaks, overtime pay and formal mechanisms to report harassment. It also includes protections against discrimination based on race, gender, age and sexual orientation, among other characteristics, and it has language about the ownership of digital replicas created by artificial intelligence.
“As a model, your job is to appear effortlessly glamorous — you’re supposed to appear not to be working at all,” Ms. Ziff said. “I know we’re not coal miners, but we’re workers, and we deserve to have basic rights and protections on the job.”
Those rights, which may seem unremarkable to many working Americans, have long eluded models, who often operate within a murky web of overlapping contracts with management companies and fashion brands. That fragmented structure has left models, many of whom are classified as independent contractors, without the leverage to negotiate fair terms, wages or protections.
The law has the potential to reverberate beyond fashion and to other spheres dominated by freelance or gig workers where labor activists are calling on lawmakers to tighten the definition of independent contractors. Last year, the Department of Labor issued a ruling that required workers who are “economically dependent” on a firm and whose work is “an integral part of the employer’s business” to be considered employees.
However, these efforts are also facing pushback from businesses, including modeling agencies, which claim the reclassification will increase costs. In 2024, California’s Supreme Court upheld Proposition 22, which classifies Uber and Lyft drivers as independent contractors, in a win for the ride-share apps.
The Fashion Workers Act goes beyond attempts to regulate how fashion houses interact with models, it will also deal with model agencies, which don’t have a fiduciary duty to act in models’ best interest. These organizations often hold power of attorney over talent, negotiating compensation and scope of work on behalf of the models.
With more clarity around contract terms, Ms. Ziff hopes, models will be better positioned to navigate late payments, which are a longstanding norm in the industry.
Ms. Ziff recounted her own experience with that. She said when clients failed to pay on time, her agency would give her a wage advance, and then charge her 5 percent interest for the delay, trapping her in a cycle of debt. That issue is more extreme for models on the lower end of the earning scale. The median pay for a model in the United States was a little over $47,000 annually in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
“The whole thing is just grotesque,” Ms. Ziff said. “People became really vulnerable. The financial exploitation begets sexual exploitation.”
It was through attempts to deal with that sexual exploitation where the profile of the Model Alliance was raised.
When Ms. Ziff founded the group, she didn’t know the form the organization would take. But she knew she had to have a support line where models could share their experiences. She found that a number of the messages she received were from models detailing experiences of sexual harassment and assault. Many were barred from pursuing legal action because the statute of limitations had elapsed.
So when a public affairs consultant approached the Model Alliance about helping to draft the Adult Survivors Act, which was being championed by State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal of New York, Ms. Ziff jumped at the opportunity.
The law, which passed in 2022, allowed for a one-year look-back period in which adult victims who were 18 or older at the time of the alleged abuse could bring their cases to court.
In 2023, Ms. Ziff was among the people to file a lawsuit under the act when she accused Fabrizio Lombardo, a former Miramax executive and a close associate of Harvey Weinstein, of rape.
The lawsuit, which also names Mr. Weinstein, Disney and its subsidiaries Buena Vista and Miramax, is still ongoing.
“That was a particularly challenging campaign because it’s really difficult to talk about sexual abuse,” Ms. Ziff said. “And you know, even when you’re talking about something that happened decades ago, you know, in my case over 20 years ago, it can instantly feel so fresh.”
Ms. Ziff, who began to cry when recounting her experience in a recent interview, said she knew the law would be impactful.
More than 3,000 civil lawsuits were filed under the Adult Survivors Act, including one by Casandra Ventura, an R&B singer, who sued Sean Combs, her former partner and the music producer also known as Diddy, for rape and repeated physical abuse. This suit paved the way for the government’s lawsuit against Mr. Combs, who is charged with racketeering, conspiracy and sex trafficking.
Ms. Scafidi, who is no longer associated with the Model Alliance, said that the success of the Fashion Workers Act, which has received support from the Council of Fashion Designers of America and SAG-AFTRA, rested on how it deals with the diminished importance of models in the larger fashion ecosystem today.
“It’s a little paradoxical,” she said. “Models on the covers of magazines are replaced by celebrities. In advertising, models have been replaced by influencers. There’s a concern right now, and it’s written right into the bill that models are being replaced by A.I.”
Mr. Hoylman-Sigal, who is the lead sponsor of the legislation, however, believes the success of the Model Alliance rests on Ms. Ziff’s ability to explain the issues to a broader audience.
“She shared the details of her own experience, which set the stage for me and for others to understand how deep this problem is in her industry,” he said. “If it happened to her, someone who is well-resourced, educated and in a position to articulate the abuses, what else is going on?”
Ms. Ziff says she is proud of what the Model Alliance has accomplished, even though there is “certainly a lot more work to be done.” Despite the changes, she doesn’t see herself ever going back to modeling.
“I’m in a new phase of life now,” she said. “It’s actually nice, because if I’m ever asked to do a photo shoot, it’s as an advocate, not as a model.”
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