T Magazine: At One Modeling Agency, Nonconformity Is Key
For Eva Gödel, the owner and founder of Düsseldorf-based model agency Tomorrow Is Another Day, model-scouting is more than just a job. “The thing is, I’m always looking everywhere,” she says. “In the middle of the shopping street, I can stand there for eight hours and just look. The more people, the better for me. Some of my best boys I found when I was driving in my car!”
In the 15 years she has been running the agency, Gödel has launched the careers of dozens of young men from all over Europe and cast hundreds of runway shows for fashion houses including Alexander McQueen, Lanvin, Rick Owens and Raf Simons. She works frequently with photographers like Willy Vanderperre and the stylists Robbie Spencer and Alister Mackie; her models appear in some of the most highly sought-after editorials and campaigns of the season. In the process, she has been fundamental in a seismic shift in the field of male modeling — an industry that has, in the last few years, seen muscled Adonises replaced by a more individual — and less than conventional — aesthetic.
“Eva really was the first to legitimize the idea of running an agency that focuses on street-cast models,” says Spencer, who is also the creative director of Dazed magazine. “Eva’s focus is always on real people, not fantasy, and I think that approach is really special.” A self-confessed Luddite, Gödel eschews social media for casting. “I never do it,” she says, acknowledging that it’s become an industry-wide norm to cast models from Instagram (this season, Gosha Rubchinskiy sourced diverse models from around the globe — on Instagram). “Honestly, what I like about my job is when I have the time to go outside and watch people and see them, or go to a concert and watch what the people are doing. I think I need to see how someone lives. I don’t think I can see it from a photo. I must see how they move and how they talk and how they are. It’s more of a spirit around them for me.”
Growing up in Cologne, Gödel, 39, would tear pages from i-D and Dazed and paste them on her walls, citing the controversial CK One ads by Steven Meisel, old Helmut Lang campaigns and a 1992 exhibition by Larry Clark as strong influences in her work. At the age of 17, she started working in a shop, Made In, where she decorated the walls of the store with Polaroids of the customers. It was there that she discovered her knack for casting. Her first model agency, Nine Daughters and a Stereo — which she co-founded with Kira Bunse in 2001— grew out of a final thesis for a graphic design course she was taking at the time. “It was not meant to be a business. I just did it in a way that I could photograph the people that I saw as interesting and that I thought could be cool,” she says.
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Courtesy of Tomorrow is Another Day
In the early 2000s, “cool” came to be defined by the work of Hedi Slimane, then the creative director at Dior Homme, and Raf Simons — both of whom were deeply embedded in youth culture and experimenting with men’s fashion and a skinnier silhouette. “It felt more relevant to us,” says Gödel of the influence of these two lodestars, both of whom fittingly choose to collaborate with her agency. After she formed Tomorrow Is Another Day in 2010, Gödel’s cast of skater kids and beautiful nonconformists — pale, skinny, sometimes tattooed — came to personify this new attitude in men’s wear. “When I started, those kind of boys didn’t exist,” she recalls. “In the first year, I only booked them for Raf — he would come to Cologne and he always found all of the boys I found on the street interesting. Then other people started picking up this look and liking it, and so it went on.”
A potent antidote to the bland mainstream then, the men (and, now, a few women) on the roster of Tomorrow Is Another Day include some of the buzziest names of the moment: Artur Chruszcz, who was featured in the fall campaigns for Prada and Raf Simons, the elegant, Indian-born model Yusuf Siddiqui — a favorite of the emerging designer Grace Wales Bonner — and the more classically chiseled Andrew Westermann, who appeared in campaigns for Louis Vuitton and Hugo Boss. The 19-year-old mop-topped Paul Hameline, a Parisian punk kid who Gödel discovered in 2014 on his way to exams, is also on the roster. “I got scouted five times before, but it never appealed to me,” says Hameline, who also assists the stylist Lotta Volkova. “But when Eva asked me, there’s something that made me wanna give it a shot, and I’m pretty certain that if it hadn’t been with her, that I would have tired of it,” he said, echoing a common thread among the models who see Gödel as much as a maternal figure as well as friend, confidante and mentor. “Most of us are in it for the experience rather than seeing it as a career,” says Jonas Glöer, who walked exclusively for Prada in its recent men’s fall/winter 2016 show in Milan. “That’s why we’re the most fun and definitely the most diverse agency. Everybody seems to bring something completely different to the table, and just being around each other encourages us to express ourselves freely.” Spencer agrees: “I think her honesty and concern for the boys she meets and represents is what really makes her stand out and makes Tomorrow Is Another Day seem like no other agency. For Eva I think it is more about a family of people.”
Family can, of course, bring its own dysfunctions. Last season the agency was in the headlines when the German model Jera (previously a muse to Owens) displayed a banner while walking at his spring/summer 2016 show declaring “Please Kill Angela Merkel — Not” — a move that prompted Owens to punch him in the face after the show. Gödel immediately dropped Jera from the agency. Now, she grimaces at the memory of it. “In the end, I’m very sad at what Jera did,” she says. “I’ve had him in the agency since my diploma, but he was always only working for Rick because he was really the face of the collection. I never booked him for anything else. I always told Rick, ‘If you book him, it’s on your risk.’ Still, it was really sad that he took it too far. I never thought that he would ruin it that way.”
While she has no plans to expand her operations beyond its base in Düsseldorf, she extols the virtues of looking farther afield. “What I would like to do is take more time to travel to more cities and find people there.” While her search for beauty is constant, she acknowledges the ephemeral nature of her job. “I think sometimes there is a temporary thing about beauty. There are some boys who have been with me since the beginning, and then there are boys where it’s only about a short time. They are just right at that moment. It doesn’t last, and that makes it so beautiful.”
