Jaime King on Modeling Reform: 'There Needs To Be Someone Taking Care of These Kids'

Wonderwall, Thursday, September 15, 2011, 9:39am (PDT)

By Rebecca Silverstein

• Jaime King may have retired from modeling to act full-time, but she hasn't left it behind altogether. In fact, the "Hart of Dixie" star wants to take what she's learned in Hollywood, apply it to the modeling world, and make it safer for young people.

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  "The modeling world is really unregulated," Jaime said at Bing Presents The CW Premiere Party. "I think that there needs to be some sort of guides there for young kids that are going into this industry, because there are no rules."

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  The difference, she says, is unions, which abound for actors but are non-existent for models. "With acting, there are boundaries. It is a union. You do have to go to school, you can only work for a certain number of hours, and you do have to have a chaperone. It's like they are looking after you."

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  Jaime's not the only one with the idea to reform the industry: "There is a great model, Sara Ziff, who is actually working with something right now called the Model Alliance. And she and I have been in contact recently, and she was like, 'How can we do this? How can we make this work?'"

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  Jaime already has some idea of what to do. "If I had the choice, I would bring the heads of SAG and put them with the proper people in the fashion industry so they could show them this is how it could be done."

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  Having some time away from modeling has given Jaime the right frame of mind for what needs to be done to transform the system.

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  "I haven't modeled since I was 19 years old. I am 32 now, so it has been a long time, but now that I look back upon it, I think it is really important," she said. "When I see young actors on the set and I see how well they are taken care of ... obviously you hear of kids going rogue in Hollywood because people like to focus on scandal, but the most of the time, a lot of these kids are really good kids, and they are well educated and really smart."

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  Still, Jaime isn't quick to the point the finger at who's at fault for the failing modeling world system that's currently in place.

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  "I don't think that it's anything malicious. I think that it is just uneducation [sic] and ignorance," she said. "I don't think that it's the designers. I don't think that it's the photographers. I think it has been this way for so long that people just don't know the difference that you can't just take a 14-year-old and not have her mother there or tell her mother that she is being chaperoned but the chaperone is not even of age.

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  "There's got to be rules -- there's got to be structure. There needs to be someone taking care of these kids."