The casting director, a Dutch man in his 50s with a large paunch, looked at me, his eyes darting around my body. “Take off your top and show me your torso,” he said. I was exhausted after 14 hours of castings, and so I did what I was told and removed my undershirt to reveal my rather pallid chest. After a quick glance, the casting director returned to his seat in the adjacent room and muttered to his stylist, “He’s beautiful, but he’s fat.” Sound travels easily in a hard-floored warehouse; I had moved to the changing room, but I heard his words clearly. I felt humiliated.

I had walked the catwalk twice at Paris Fashion Week, worked with a range of talented photographers and stylists, and was part of a world filled with staggeringly beautiful people. But this wasn’t the first time I had been called overweight, despite my …

“To let anyone who is not a heterosexual woman, gay man or eunuch have a position of power in modelling is totally irresponsible”

Heard the one about the sexist, racist, middle-aged French model agent? You’re right, it’s a trick question. Because perhaps the strangest thing about the Gerald Marie affair – unspeakable boss of Elite Models, exposed by MacIntyre Undercover as a lecher and a cad – is not that Elite attempted to reinstate him so quickly last week (two days after his agency accepted his resignation for his “shocking, unacceptable and highly inappropriate” behaviour) but that he was ever suspended in the first place. (Only the last-minute intervention of Elite’s American chairman, grand old John Casablancas, scuppered French Elite’s sneaky plan.)

As with the reviled It Girls and Fat Cats, and now poor Posh Spice, Marie has done nothing at all unusual or bad by the standards of his …

Is it time to hand in your P45?

“I’m a model, you know what I mean, and I do my little turn on the catwalk,” Right Said Fred sang, nipples front-and-centre in a black mesh T-shirt, in 1991.

The singer’s mockery, at the time (and as recently as 2001 with the release of films such as Zoolander), was justified. The idea of men earning a living for simply wearing clothes smacked of unappealing traits – narcissism, unintelligence and a lack of seriousness. But in more recent years there’s been a seismic shift in attitudes.

Not only has male modelling begun to match the status and acclaim female modelling has held since the 1980s, thanks to names like David Gandy, Tyson Beckford and Sean O’Pry becoming celebrities, it is also increasingly seen as desirable work. And the emphasis is on “work”: as well as now being considered a legit career, there …