Supermodel Carolina Parsons is one of Chile’s most successful models, and has appeared in Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Glamour magazines. She is currently scouting for talent in small towns in Chile as part of a televised competition that will be broadcast at the beginning of next year. In this interview, she talks about the competition, the industry’s problem with anorexia, and Chilean women.)
Here is what she said…
QUESTION: What are you doing at the moment?
CAROLINA PARSONS: I arrived from New York on Sunday after spending a day at my house in Punta del Este. I’ve come here to do the shoot for the París department store, and to launch the scouting campaign. The trip is timed so that Camilla, the first girl to be selected, could come from Iquique without missing classes. We’re going to send Camilla to Asia first of all, because it’s easiest to start there.
Q: And what about school? She’s only 13 years old.
CP: I started working at 14. Katarina Scola, my best friend, who is Brazilian and comes from a town with 2000 inhabitants, started at 13. Today she’s 24 and she has an apartment on Fifth Avenue in New York, and an enormous house in Brazil. If she had stayed behind in her little town, she wouldn’t have made it through school.
Q: And now you’re doing the same thing for Camilla. You’re her fairy godmother.
CP: I’m giving her an opportunity. She stays in my house, I teach her stuff, I tell her all about show business, so she can have a concept of what this job is like.
Q: Shakira talked to Bachelet about fighting against child labor, and you’re encouraging girls of 13 to get into the fashion industry…
CP: It’s a very positive initiative. Models can finish school by correspondence, or can be accompanied by a private tutor – it’s not something that has any influence on child labor. School gives people the chance of a future, which is also what I’m offering these girls. We never thought Camilla would leave school and go to work in Asia in the middle of her classes.
Q: When we were coming here in the taxi, the driver told us that Pamela Díaz is the best model…
CP: You can’t underestimate the work that girls like Pamela do. But there’s an image problem. They’re show women, or TV stars. They have a lot of talent and they deserve their success. But I didn’t like it when one of their moms says that her daughter was an international model; it’s not the same thing.
Q: It seems like a social problem, that these girls want to rise up in the world through television.
CP: Class has nothing to do with it. It’s to do with your appearance and your personality. If you have the talent and the strength to work the catwalk in Paris and deal with all the bullshit of modeling, it doesn’t matter whether you come from a castle or a mud hut. Locally speaking, maybe there’s some social climbing. It’s true that you get to meet a lot of people; you go to a show and you meet Bono. I met Giuseppe (Cipriani, Italian businessman and Parsons’ boyfriend) on the plane from Milan to New York.
Q: And you’re finding diamonds in small Chilean towns.
CP: It’s because the talent scouts don’t look properly. The people at (New York model agency) Next have the best models in the world, and Ming Liao (the well-known agent who discovered Parsons) has found girls all over the world, but the last girl they got from Chile was me, and it was because he saw photos of me in Paula magazine when he was passing through an office here. I was 14. It was lucky because otherwise I would have been a local model and probably not very successful, because I’m quite stylized and skinny – I don’t have the curves that they like here.
Q: You’re on the border of the anorexia controversy, of models who die to be thin.
CP: I was just reading about that in the paper on the way here. It’s such a shame. I knew a lot of girls who had eating disorders, but when I was a lot younger. Girls today have eating disorders, but it’s part of growing up – it’s not the fashion industry’s fault, even though it’s true that models set a standard of beauty for young girls. The fashion for thinness was started by Twiggy more than 40 years ago; it’s nothing new. And imposing rules on beauty, where a model that’s 1.75 meters tall can’t weigh less than 55 kilos, is not the solution. The right thing to do would be to teach about nutrition in schools and universities. On the page opposite the news that the Brazilian model had died of anorexia, I read that 3,500 people die every year from obesity. So what we’re talking about is really a social problem.
Q: The first time this was brought up as a public health problem was a few months ago, when the Spanish government said that size 0 models wouldn’t be allowed on the catwalk.
CP: They imposed a minimum weight, where if you’re 1.75m tall, you can’t weigh less than 55 kilos. Giselle Bundchen, who’s a great friend of mine, is 1.78m tall, weighs 51 kilos, and is famous for her curves. She wouldn’t have been allowed into that fashion show because of being too skinny. That’s ridiculous.
Q: Have you had friends who have been anorexic?
CP: When I was young, during puberty, yes, but not as an adult. When we were scouting, we picked out Camilla and Constanza, another girl aged 17, who would have had to lose a lot of weight to make the catwalks abroad. And we talked to her and her family and we told her we’d wait as long as we had to wait. We waited two months and she didn’t get any slimmer, we waited four months and still no slimmer. Six months, and she’s still not any slimmer.
Q: What is it you like most about Chile when you come back here?
CP: It always makes me really proud when I return to Santiago. It’s such a safe, clean, pretty city. And you only hear good things about it from people who visit the country. The only thing that really disgusts me is when they tear down neighborhoods with beautiful houses, it’s so stupid. It really upsets me when they destroy houses to put up such ugly buildings.
Q: Are you interested at all in the discussions about corruption?
CP: I’m about as apolitical as you can get. But discussions about corruption are all over the world, and you read about it everywhere you go. It’s not just a Chilean problem, and it seems a good thing that everything’s being brought to light and being dealt with. Justice is being done, and you can tell this is a modern, well-run country.
Q: You think it’s well run?
CP: When you arrive in Chile, especially if you’ve stopped over in another Latin American country, you realize that you’re arriving in a great country, that’s really well run. I’m always boasting about Chile. Everything works, and works well.
Q: How would you describe the modern Chilean woman?
CP: Really feminine, maternal, and really strong. Women today are wearing the trousers, but still being feminine. Look at the percentage of single mothers. We have a single mother for our President. I met her at my boyfriend’s restaurant in New York, and she thanked me and my sister for what we’ve been able to do for women in Chile. Special thanks to LA NACIÓN
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