As the owner of Company Management, a small New York modeling agency, Michael Flutie is a mere David in a world of high-gloss Goliaths. But he’s slinging stones at conventional wisdom, hoping to topple some long-held beliefs, if only he can hit enough of the right noggins on Madison Avenue.
You see, Flutie doesn’t believe the beauty myth. He doesn’t believe a woman has to have a perfect nose, perfect lips, a perfectly shaped face and be the perfect 5-foot-9-inch height to be beautiful or to be a model. Nor does he believe she has to be white, blond and blue-eyed. In fact, he doesn’t even believe a beautiful woman has to be female.
Flutie wants to build the biggest and best little modeling agency in the world by using this philosophy: Flaws give a woman character, ethnicity is beautiful, gender confusion is provocative. In other words, non-standard beauty is the new beauty standard.
“I like to provoke your sensibility. I like to provoke and create a situation in which someone is saying, `Oh my God, her lips are so large,’ or `She’s only 5-foot-6,’ or `She looks ethnic,’ ” says Flutie, 34, who fashions himself as more of a personal manager to his models than simply a booking agent.
“For me, the deviation away from the normal lip or the perfect-shaped faced or the straight button nose is what makes a girl interesting.”
The big question is will anybody of any significance think the same way?
The answer seems to be “yes.”
Last year, Cover Girl, a Procter & Gamble company, was looking to sign an ethnic model. Flutie sent over Lana Ogilvie. Cover Girl liked her. Ogilvie goes down in history as the first black model to land a major cosmetics contract; Company goes down in history as the first agency to swing it.
Then there’s the case of 17-year-old Jaime Rishar, who at 5-foot-6 is freakishly short for a model, even shorter than Kate Moss, who everyone knows as the bare-chested waif opposite Marky Mark in those Calvin Klein underwear ads. Says Rishar: “Michael was the only one who would take a chance with me.”
It’s paid off. Rishar has been successful in the eight months since she joined Company. She’s featured in five ad campaigns this fall-the Gap, Replay Jeans, Dolce & Gabbana, Byblos and Complice-and she’s on the cover of this month’s Italian Vogue.
“It’s proportions that count,” says Elizabeth Watson, agent, casting director and wife of New York photographer Albert Watson, who shot the Byblos campaign. “And Jaime’s proportions are perfect.”
Carina Wretman has a crooked nose, but she’s one of Company’s most booked models.
And Connie Fleming travels the world over for French designer Thierry Mugler and does all of Mugler’s shows. She’s posed for hotshot photographer Steven Meisel for Allure and Interview magazines. And she’s really a man in drag.
Working out of a SoHo office building with 19 staffers (including his mother, who is the comptroller, and two brothers, who head up finance and operations) and 40 models to his name, Flutie has managed to establish a thriving “boutique” agency in a matter of just five years. Boutique (Flutie’s own term) refers both to the smaller size of the agency in comparison to Elite Model Management or Ford Models, which handle hundreds of models, and to the nature of the business performed, says Flutie. He describes the difference this way: “They are in the business of providing models to clients. I am in the business of managing models.”
Reported growth
Although Robert Flutie, his brother and chief financial officer, would not reveal Company’s billing volume, he did say the agency has reported 200 percent growth in revenue over the past five financial years.
“It sounds like it’s possible,” says Geri Richter, bookings editor at Allure magazine, who has worked with Flutie for more than six years and who believes his strategy of cultivating quirky beauty is “right on.”
“The (fashion) industry has opened up to allow him to do that. Now the industry is accepting of girls who are different,” says Richter. “Company has always seen that. They’ve always gone for the little bit more offbeat, unusual girl. Now is his time.”
Michael Flutie credits his success to good marketing.
“Every industry is very much like a Coca-Cola bottle,” says Flutie, who got his training at Elite, where he worked as an agent for five years before starting Company in 1989. “It’s got to be marketed. There’s got to be a reason why somebody walking down the street would decide to buy Coca-Cola versus Pepsi.”
Or in this case, why the Gap or Byblos would choose Jaime Rishar over a taller model. Or why American Vogue would want to shoot Carina Wretman over a model with a straighter nose. Or why Cover Girl would sign Lana Ogilvie over the more “standard” white model.
To all of the questions, Flutie has a singular answer: The time is ripe for models who look like real people in the real world.
“As we approach the year 2000 and go into the next century, we’re dealing with so many different diversities of cultures and values that we have to create an image that’s more than just the traditional white, blond, blue-eyed image, especially in America and especially as Westerners for Asia and Europe to perceive what that image is,” says Flutie. “The traditional blond-haired girl on the Kelloggs box had to eventually be replaced.”
Having spent his boyhood in the Middle East (his father was the official photographer to the King of Jordan), Flutie says he observed a culture of dark-skinned people who revered that blond, blue-eyed image as the symbol of perfection. After his family moved to New York, he found that image not reflective of what America is all about.
A different image
Flutie isn’t the only one in the business who thinks America needs to see a different image. Calvin Klein caused quite a stir in New York in March when his fall show featured models of all ages, from 19-year-old Kate Moss to Lauren Hutton, who turns 50 in November.
And then there’s FunnyFace. For 28 years, banks, illustrators, corporations and even glossy magazines like Esquire, Newsweek and Details have been calling this N.Y. agency for strong-featured character and “real people” models. Which means: short people, fat people, short and fat people, tall people, skinny people, bald and balding people, etc.
Let’s not not be mistaken here, though. Company’s models aren’t that real. Nor, for that matter, are they average, everyday, ordinary women. They’re gorgeous. And many of them would fit in quite naturally in any modeling agency in the world.
But some of them wouldn’t.
Like Connie Fleming and the twosome of Mathu & Zaldy. They’re transvestites-and other things.
Fleming is a nightclub performer in New York and always appears as a woman. Mathu is a makeup artist; Zaldy is a clothes designer. In their free time, Mathu & Zaldy model and assume various personas-often female or gender questionable. Flutie says he was asked by several “very, very important photographers” to manage the three’s careers, and it made sense.
Somewhere in between Flutie’s more traditional looking models and the transvestites are a number of models who are noticeably different from most cover girls-not over-the-edge different, but just out-of-the-ordinary looking.
Not the girl-next-door
Like Shoshana Fitzgerald and Julie Chaikosky. They don’t have the traditional perky model’s nose and they don’t look like the girl-next-door. They have strong noses, influential noses, big noses.
Fellow model Carina Wretman says throughout her career she has been advised to have her askew nose surgically corrected.
Nonsense, says Flutie. “Clients call up and say, `But her nose is crooked.’ (And I say,) `Yes, but it’s so beautiful. Do you know how many women out there have crooked noses?’ People want to relate to someone that, yes, is glamorous and beautiful but someone they can identify with. And it’s an identifying factor, and that’s what I look for in my models.”
If a model looks all too flawless, Flutie works against the perfection.
Such is the case with model Beri Smither. Before joining Company in 1992, she was represented by Eva Models in Paris, and she had one look, which is the standard for a tall, blond, blue/green-eyed beauty: Aloof.
Flutie changed that. He turned her into a woman that women could like-earthy, healthy and natural looking-by suggesting a few revisions in her looks and in her on-camera performance and by taking her from the youngish Elle magazine and into the more mature books like Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
“It was an image statement that really needed to happen,” says Smither, 22. “I’ve become more of a woman. Sophisticated. I think woman can relate to that better than a 14-year-old in an Yves Saint Laurent dress.”
The June issue of Harper’s Bazaar was a showcase of the new and revised Smither. She was featured in a 12-page lingerie photo story along with actor Fred Ward. Instead of posing seductively for the camera (or for Ward), she played to the readers of the magazine, looking very much like a contemporary Lauren Hutton.
Smither’s hair was cut shorter. Her face was expressive and friendly. And her body, although baring a lot of skin because of the nature of the shoot, looked sexy but in a toned and healthy way.
“It’s about simplicity, and that simplicity is what makes her interesting,” says Flutie. “She’s animated now, and she’s developed and grown into a character.”
And that’s what it’s all about, says Flutie. “Modeling, very much like acting, is an interpretation of a character, photographed during a moment, that gives you an image of a person’s personality and inner strength,” he says. “And usually that beauty is brought out from within.”
