James is a girl (Published 1996) (2024)

AN OCTOBER MORNING IN PARIS. JAMES KING, HER HAIR PULLED back into a ponytail, bounds from an elevator into the lobby of the Hotel de la Tremoille, not far from the Arc de Triomphe, where she has been staying for the past week. "How do I look -- what do you think?" she asks the 20-year-old Julia Samersova, who used to work at Company Management, the modeling agency that began representing James nearly two years ago, when she was still known as Jaime. (Company Management already represented Jaime Rishar, a top model. "James" was already Jaime King's nickname.) Samersova is now James's best friend and occasional chaperone. Seated at a breakfast table squeezing lemons into a bottle of Evian, she looks up at James, who gestures nervously at her black pants and long-sleeved black shirt. "Do you think this is proper? Do you think it's fierce yet subtle?" ("Fierce" is the superlative du jour this fall among the fashion crowd.)

"Yes," Samersova says, nodding. "Yes."

She has enormous dark eyes and braces on her teeth, and will tell anyone who asks that her father is a Russian mobster. Motherly beyond her years, she has taken a break from her studies in fashion-business merchandising at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York to accompany James to this fall's ready-to-wear shows in Europe, which began the first week in October in Milan.

"Banana Republic rocks, I'm sorry," James says.

It is the morning of the John Galliano show, one of the most anticipated of the collections being shown in Paris, and James has been cast in it -- a triumph for any model, not to speak of one having her first season in Paris. James has just finished her third season in Milan (fall, spring, fall), but because of French law, any model under 16 is prohibited from appearing in the Paris collections. James turned 16 in April.

When James has finished her breakfast -- tea, a small pain au chocolat and a chain of Marlboros -- I walk with her and Samersova to the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, where the Galliano show is to take place. Despite the balmy weather, Paris has been a mess -- a general strike and the resulting gridlock have filled the air with a throat-scorching smog; the proliferation of terrorist bombs in subways and garbage cans has led to a heavy police presence on the streets. Yet the fashion world feels eerily removed from all this. At the backstage entrance to the Galliano show, the most pressing question is who will get in and who won't. Fashion shows used to be sedate affairs catering mostly to magazine editors and department-store buyers. Now that models have become icons, the shows have about them an air of exquisite urgency: they're cultural high-low events, like a Stones concert in the 1970's.

Though the show isn't scheduled to start until 6:30 P.M., models like James who aren't yet stars are summoned hours ahead to have their hair and makeup done, so that the top models can arrive last and enjoy the full attention of the staff members. In a windowless backstage area, time drifts by on a languorous haze of smoke and hair spray and blow-dryer heat. A dance beat throbs unnoticed, like a pulse. James sips a can of Heineken and smokes. She picked up a horrible cough in Milan and developed shingles on her back from stress -- a wide brush stroke of tiny purple blisters that she takes obvious glee in showing people. Samersova nags at her to take her medicine.

James likes to tell people that she and Samersova are Tauruses. "I mean she is the second me," James says. "That's why I bring her here, because I know that when I'm too frazzled to make a rational decision I can trust her because we think exactly the same. I mean she's like a boyfriend but not."