—
The industry treated male models as disposable for a long time. The shift toward treating them as professionals has changed more than just business outcomes — it has changed who shows up.
When I opened my modelling agency in Zurich in 2010, the conventional wisdom about the male side of the business was simple: men were the secondary act. Women’s modelling was the main commercial engine. Men were a smaller revenue line, lower day rates on average, fewer campaigns, less editorial attention. The industry’s casual assumption was that men in modelling needed less of everything — less development time, less mental health awareness, less career planning — because they would either make it quickly on raw looks or wash out and go back to whatever they did before.
Fifteen years on, that assumption has aged badly. Some of the most thoughtful, durable, professionally-developed talent I have worked with has been male. The shift in how the industry treats men has been quiet, uneven across geographies, but real. And it has taught me something I did not expect to learn from running a fashion business: a great deal about how men respond when they are taken seriously as whole people rather than as physical assets.
The Old Pattern
The default treatment of male models in the early 2010s was dismissive in ways that would now be widely criticized. Boys signed at sixteen would be handed a contract, sent to fashion week with minimal preparation, expected to figure out the city, the casting circuit, the language barrier, and the loneliness on their own. The ones who couldn’t, didn’t. The industry called this filtering. It was, more accurately, abandonment.
There was a parallel cultural assumption embedded in the dismissiveness: that boys did not need emotional support, that they would not ask for it, and that asking would itself be a sign they should not be in the business. The result was a high attrition rate, a lot of men quietly damaged by experiences they had no framework for processing, and a steady through-line of stories — usually emerging years later — about everything from financial exploitation to physical and sexual abuse that was tolerated because the men did not feel permitted to speak about it.
This was not unique to modelling. It was a version of how a lot of male-dominated and male-adjacent industries treated young men in the late twentieth century. Sport, music, finance — the pattern was recognizable across all of them. But modelling concentrated the dynamics in a way that made the damage easier to see, once anyone started looking.
What Changed
Several things shifted, mostly in the past decade, and not all of them for noble reasons. First, the industry became publicly accountable in ways it had not been before. Models — male and female — began telling their stories on social platforms that bypassed the industry’s traditional gatekeepers. Brands faced reputation risk for working with agencies that handled talent badly. Major casting directors began asking explicitly about wellness protocols before booking talent.
Second, the economics changed. As editorial budgets tightened and brand campaigns became more carefully managed, clients began to value reliability over raw discovery. A model who could be counted on to show up prepared, present, professional, and in good shape over years of work became more valuable than a striking new face who flamed out at twenty-two. Reliability requires support. Support requires investment. Agencies that invested earlier in the wellbeing of their male talent began to outperform agencies that did not.
Third — and this is the part I find most interesting — the men themselves began arriving differently. The generation of male models I work with now, in their late teens and early twenties, are noticeably more articulate about what they need than the generation I worked with at the start of my career. They ask about therapy access. They ask about contract terms. They ask about long-term career planning. They are less willing to sign with agencies that cannot answer these questions clearly.
What Men Actually Need
Here is what I have learned, mostly through getting things wrong before getting them less wrong, about supporting men working in this industry. Most of it generalizes beyond modelling.
- Men ask for help when they have a clear, low-stakes channel for asking. The model who will not call his booker about a personal struggle will text the booker’s assistant about a logistical question and let the real issue surface in the conversation. The infrastructure has to exist for the indirect approach.
- Specificity matters more than gestures. “How are you doing?” produces nothing. “How is your sleep?” or “How are the new flatmates working out?” produces real information. Men respond to specific care, not general care.
- Money is often the cover story for other issues. A model who is anxious about a contract is rarely just anxious about the contract. The contract is the legible problem behind the illegible one.
- Peer support outperforms top-down support. The most useful conversations for our male talent happen between models who have been at the agency for three or four years and models who are six months in. We facilitate this. We do not try to replace it.
- Men who are taken seriously as professionals show up as professionals. The reverse is also true.
The Quieter Cultural Shift
There is a broader change underneath all of this that is worth naming. The cultural conversation about what men are and what men do has been loud, contested, and frequently unproductive over the past decade. Inside the small industry I work in, I have watched a quieter version of that conversation play out among men who do work that is unusually exposed — work in which their bodies, faces, and emotional presence are the entire product.
The men I work with do not have the option of treating their interior lives as private and unrelated to their professional lives. The job demands emotional availability. It demands that they show up fully, often in vulnerable physical states, often in front of strangers, and produce something that reads as truthful. The men who succeed at this over years are not, in my experience, the men who are best at suppressing what they feel. They are the men who have done some genuine work on understanding what they feel, and who have learned to use that understanding as a professional resource.
This is, I think, a useful corrective to a broader cultural narrative that frames male emotional development as either a weakness or a private matter. In the work I see most closely, it is neither. It is a professional asset, developed over time, and the men who develop it tend to have longer, healthier, more interesting careers than the men who do not.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Running a Swiss model agency in Zurich gives me a particular vantage point on these questions. Switzerland’s working culture is undramatic, direct, and oriented toward long-term professional relationships rather than short-term transactional ones. This shapes how the agency operates. We sign fewer male models than larger agencies in Paris or Milan, and we develop them over longer arcs. We expect the relationship between the agency and the model to last years, not seasons. We treat the early career investment as the foundation of a working partnership, not as speculative spending on a face that may or may not pay off.
Practically, what this means for the men on our board is that the agency commits to specific things and follows through on them. Mental health resources are available. Financial planning support is offered. Career conversations happen on a regular cadence rather than only when something is going wrong. Difficult feedback is given clearly and early, when it is still useful. None of this is revolutionary. Most of it is what any responsible employer should provide. The fact that it is sometimes treated as exceptional in the modelling industry tells you something about how low the baseline used to be.
What I Want Other Industries to Take from This
If there is anything in the modelling industry’s slow, partial, still-incomplete shift in how it treats men that translates outward, it is this: the difference between treating young men as developmentally complete adults and treating them as developmentally serious adults is enormous. The first assumes the work of becoming who they are is finished, or never started, or none of your business. The second assumes the work is ongoing, that you will encounter it whether you plan for it or not, and that supporting it well is part of what you owe them as employer, mentor, agent, or colleague.
The first approach produces high attrition, hidden damage, and the kind of culture that eventually generates a public reckoning. The second approach produces durable careers, healthier people, and — incidentally — better business outcomes. The industries still operating on the first model will eventually have to switch. The ones that switch earlier will have an advantage that is increasingly difficult to compete with.
Closing
I did not expect, when I started this agency, that running a fashion business would teach me as much as it has about men, masculinity, and the kinds of support that allow young men to do hard, exposed work over long periods without breaking. I am still learning. The mistakes I made in the first five years of running the agency were not the mistakes I expected to make, and I assume the mistakes I am making now are not the ones I will eventually identify.
What I am more confident about is the direction. Treat men in your work as serious, complete, developing people. Build the infrastructure that lets them ask for what they need without it costing them their place. Take the long view. The men who emerge from that kind of working environment are different — better — than the men who emerge from the alternative. And the industries that figure this out will, slowly, replace the industries that don’t.
About the author: David Ratmoko is the Director and Owner of Metro Models GmbH, a Zurich-based modelling agency representing male and female talent across editorial, commercial, and bridal categories. He has worked in the European modelling industry for over fifteen years.
—
