New York Magazine, November 96

New York Magazine - November 18 1996

Sayonara, Cindy. As cutting-edge advertisers race to get real, casting impresario Ned Ambler is single-handedly turning oddballs into objects of desire.

'When I say 'star', I mean it for real," Ambler is saying, a bit petulantly. Seated at a café on St. Marks Place, the budding model impresario is fuming over a recent article in Women's Wear Daily that found a touch of irony in Ambler's constant use of the word star to describe the dozens of amateur non-models - grungy young cab drivers, East Village bass players - that Ambler has cast in recent ad campaigns. Selling fashion from Levi's to Gianfranco Ferre to Dolce & Gabbana, Ambler's downtown nobodies are also showing up on MTV, in Details fashion spreads, and on Comme des Garcons runways in Paris.
 "I always call them my stars, because I think they would be able to star in a film. You see people walking down the street, and they have such a presence. Those are the kind of people who are interesting to photograph," Ambler says. "You get more of a sense of character rather than the model just being a mannequin. Sort of an inner life. Some soul. Some models are just so soulless," he sighs.
 Nobody would accuse Ambler's models of being standard-issue beauties, with their dramatic noses, sunken eyes, radical hairstyles, headed-to-rehab expressions.
 There's Gabriel Zapata - the gaunt faced slacker who appears alongside Kate Moss in ads for Calvin Klein's cK be. "He's got a really unique, interesting face," gushes Ambler. "It's, like, Rasputin-esque. I found him in Washington Square Park. He was sitting in the fountain one summer day.
 There is also Jakob Prüfer, the teenaged Dane with the pierced lip and long platinum hair who appears in Mario Testino's Calvin Klein-knockoff campaign for the Gap. Ambler found Prüfer, 19, "hanging out" in Tompkins Square Park this past spring. This summer he was snapped up by Ford Models.
 At the tender age of 27, Ambler talks of his young discoveries like a proud father. "This playwright friend of mine, Sander Hicks - he's amazing, and he's only 22, so he's going to be huge," he says. "Theo [the lead singer of Lunachicks] - she's totally amazing, one of the most beautiful women on the planet; she's hilarious·she's going to be huge!" Perhaps, but the first one getting huge is Ambler himself. The skinny entrepreneur is the man - the only person, in fact - behind Ned Ambler Pictures and Casting, a casting agency not for actors but for models, who, in fact, are not models at all until Ambler tells them they are. Supplying top fashion photographers like Richard Avedon and Steven Meisel with an unending stream of achingly groovy unknowns, Ambler is helping to take a wide constellation of his stars mainstream and, in the process, changing the way our society defines beauty.
 Unlike traditional modeling agencies, Ambler does not sign his finds to contracts or take a cut of their fees. Instead, he hires himself out to photographers, and working per diem, combs the city's nightclubs, coffee shops, and sidewalks as a finder of faces, of talent too unproven or uncommercial for traditional modeling agencies. While production people will often dig up "real" models for shoots as part of their general duties, Ambler has turned this obscure chore into a burgeoning business. For as long as the fad lasts, he's the "real people" guy.
 "Steven Meisel was recently doing a job and looking for a skinhead," says Mark Stratton, the production coordinator who first called on Ambler for Meisel's grunge-landmark cK one campaign two years ago. "I called Wilhelmina, Ford, Boss, everyone. There weren't any skinheads. So I called Ned. He found several, and a lot of people who would be willing to be skinheads for the right price." For cK one, reality paid off big. The fragrance went on to be a best seller in 1995. Only six weeks into its run, the reluctantly hyped cK be campaign - which features two Ambler models and the peripatetic Kate Moss - is making a similar splash. "We think there's a mood that our customers like, the non-glamorized approach," says Calvin Klein spokesman Robert Triefus. "I think the cK be campaign is looking at beauty in a number of ways. Visually, for one, but if you've seen the commericals, it's also finding an inner beauty as well. That campaign, where the individuals speak to the camera, is based on real interviews conducted and emotions and feelings that are personal to them. It's a beauty in a holistic sense."

**Photographs by Ned Ambler

 CALL IT ANTI-CHIC. IN CONTRAST TO THE polished glamour that has long dominated fashion - and fashion advertising - the new wave of fashion advertising stresses gritty, unvarnished realism and a wider range of ages, races, and body shapes. In cK one ads this summer, Calvin Klein felt compelled to balance out the Twigginess of Kate Moss with a defiantly fat woman as well as a host of "flawed" regular folks (many of whom were discovered in New York by, of course, Ned Ambler). Last spring, the watchmaker Omega briefly and, and quite publicly threatened an advertising boycott of British Vogue, protesting its propagation of anorectic models. All the while, Dr. Mary Pipher's Revising Ophelia was hovering on the best-seller list, recycling the argument that beauty standards are cruelly unrealistic for girls. Apparently, marketers were sensing a growing revolt among fashion consumers tired of torturing themselves to look like models. Instead they wanted models who looked (more) like themselves.
 Into this vacuum wandered a young fashion assistant with a thick black book of friends, a Polaroid camera, and some second-generation-p.c. ideas about expanding definitions of beauty. Soon, the fashionably sunken chests, hollow eyes, and stringy hair familiar to late-night diners at Ukranian coffee shops in the East Village were popping up in ads for Levi's and Members Only. Even people who had never been to the Limelight were taking notice. Thus, inevitably, a marketing movement was born, one that boldly appropriated the name - if little of the anti-commercial iconoclasm - of the "New Realism" photography movement. Photographer Josh Jordon, who regularly uses Ambler models for fashion spreads in magazines like Interview and Out, believes that Ambler has been able to successfully rebalance skewed, and unfairly narrow, definitions of beauty. "[The New Realism is about] changing your idea of what is a classic look. Like the guy with the big nose in cK be. He is really classic-looking, but you need to make people remember that."
Stratton believes the "real" models are more encouragingly familiar, more spontaneous and fresh, than the classically jock-Aryan variety. "I think college kids want to see people who look like themselves, or they at least want to see a fantasy of themselves." He says. "If they see themselves as rebels, they relate to the people with the pierces and tattoos, even though in seven years they're going to be stockbrokers."
 So the hunt grows even more tireless. Ambler is always looking for a new face to Polaroid. Often, he will take in five clubs a night. He'll run home to slip on some black chaps to check out a leather bar, or a blazer to find gospel singers uptown. One waitress who served him lemonade ended up in the Gap Testino ad. It's capitalism as scavenger hunt. "I'm kind of tired of casting people who know they're hip," he says wearily. "So I've been going to bowling alleys and frat bars around NYU. The people who don't expect it are more interesting, in a way."
 "He's just got a really good eye for finding somebody who is a young, groovy, edgy-looking kid who is not a freak," says Stratton. "That's a really fine line. You want them to be appealing, even though they have a pierced lip and black roots and dyed hair." In person, Ambler shares with many of his models, a pronounced clubland exotica. He wraps his skinny frame in obscure thrift-store tunics and reinvents himself "bi-seasonally" (today it's a moussed-up concoction suggesting at once Batman and Flock of Seagulls). Leaning over a corner table, he proudly pores over a fat pile of magazine clippings, flipping to an ad for Calvin Klein jeans that features a girl in a black denim dress. "Her name is So Fine. I found her outside a McDonalds in Harlem." Another page features George Castro, 21, a cab driver who bears an eerie resemblance to Willem Dafoe. "He's totally amazing," Ambler says of his modeling hack. "It just makes me feel good that I can help him get out of that."
 Ambler's origins, like those of many of his flamboyant East Village compatriots, are actually far from exotic. He was raised an only child in Richmond, Virginia. In his teens, he was a boarding school student at the Salisbury School in Connecticut, where he "had to wear a coat and tie to class, even on Saturdays." By 1988, he was studying film as an undergraduate at NYU. After graduation, he occupied a succession of apartments in Alphabet City. He planned to make films (he has since finished one, called Rock Star) and tried to make ends meet selling collage illustrations to magazines.
 But Ambler's big break came three years ago, when he landed a job as a gofer at L'Uomo Vogue. One day, the editors needed somebody to go out and dig up a dozen local kids for a fashion spread. Ambler was uncannily well prepped for the task. "Since I was in my teens, I followed like twenty different magazines: Details, Interview, Detour, ID, The Face. Read every page, every inch," Ambler says. "So I've been able to follow Dolce & Gabbana ads and Calvin Klein ads, and I know what Steven Meisel's ttype is. I know what Ellen Von Unwerth's type is. Now when I'm out, I'll say, 'He is so right for this Ferre ad I'm doing. Michelle Compte is going to love this blond-haired boy." So I Polaroid him.
 "There are some people who are so sexy and gorgeous and amazing, but they don't photograph that well. You really don't know until you Polaroid somebody," Ambler says. "I'll go into a huge club like Twilo and maybe see three people I like out of a thousend." For the most part, Ambler's kids have stepped through this window of opportunity to find a one-shot chance to make $1,500. Some will do a shoot every month. There are a few, however, who are actually starting to become "huge". Ambler cast some two dozen amateurs in Testino's faux-spontaneous Gap campaign. Four have since signed with major agencies. "I'm not afraid of my job ending, because there's always going to be a need to find models," says Ambler, stopping to ponder a future beyond Ugly Chic. Fashion being fashion, it will change, after all. So Ambler will, too.
 "As we move away from the new realism thing, a lot of the models are still going to be, like, downtown people, but you're never going to know it, because they just have classic good looks," he says. "They're going to be East Village rockers, but they're going to be doing Gucci ads."

Photograph by Joshua Jordon