Swing, September 97

Ned Ambler doesn't look like a style maven, but this visionary helped create the hottest trend in advertising.

Ned Ambler has a style all his own, and Ambler's street finds are snatched up by Calvin Klein.

By Eve Therond

Call it revenge of the nerd. Three years ago Ned Ambler, a skinny, feral-looking young man with a "double mohawk" haircut, was searching for work in New York, but no one would hire this odd-looking creature. Not even to serve coffee in an East Village diner. Now the 28-year-old former misfit from Washington, D.C., is the preeminent casting director for the hip, young advertising campaigns being shot by such famous photographers as Richard Avedon (CKbe), Mario Testino (the Gap), and Steven Meisel (Calvin Klein jeans, Ckone, and Valentino).
 Ambler's fortunes began to change in 1994 when an acquaintance at L'Uomo Vogue, the bible of European men's fashion published in Milan, recommended him for a freelance stint as a New York-based stylist's assistant for the magazine. "One day I was sitting on the curb, couldn't get a job anywhere," he says, "and the next I was riding in a limousine to collect a $12,000 diamond tiara for fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi."
 Ambler's duties consisted mostly of steaming shirts and unpacking clothes, but he got to know photographer Steven Klein, who was toying with the idea of using real kids instead of professional models in his pictures. Klein sent Ambler back to his old East Village stomping ground in search of five interesting-looking street types. Ambler combed the clubs, squatter dorms, alleys, and streets and returned with 30 examples of the eccentric, the tattooed, and the pieced. The "new realism" was born.
 Ambler spent a few more months working for L'Uomo Vogue. During that time, he met a number of other high-profile photographers, including Meisel, who observed his talent as a heat-seeker for the unconventional looking, and they began hiring him directly to recruit for their ad campaigns. Word spread. Soon Ambler was generating that most crucial of auras in the fashion world: a buzz. Suddenly everyone looking for a fresh face had to work with Ned. He scouted Annie Ok, the young Japanese woman who wears a crown in the Gap as, at a rock concert. "Last Spring she opened the Chanel show in Paris," he says. She also landed a small part in the new film version of Great Expectations, starring Robert de Niro, which TriBeCa Productions just finished shooting.
 "I discovered So Fine [the young black woman featured in the Ckone fragrance ads] hanging around a McDonalds in Harlem. " Ambler found one of his ragtag crew at a Brooklyn boxing ring; one selling books in SoHo; and another while riding in the back of his cab. He's always on the lookout for the next fresh face. "I tell them I'm casting for whatever it is," Ambler says, "and ask them if I can take a Polaroid [right there]. They always say yes. People just seem to feel comfortable with me."
 In Ambler's world, flawlessness and symmetry are not the gold standards, and Cindy, Christy, and Naomi do not define beauty. He thinks the "new realism" in photography reflects "a change in the whole country. People talk about things we never talked about before. And they don't identify with perfection," he says. "Designers are looking for new models to represent their lines who [regular] people can identify with.
 "The CKbe ads are about a generation of kids, how articulate and smart and amazing they are. We chose them because of their huge personalities, not because they were skinny or had strange eyes. They're playwrights, poets, illustrators. They're incredible - and they never thought about doing fashion. It's refreshing. I don't want to see sulky models anymore."
 Ambler is one of the few in the business who disapproved of the drugged-out look in photography that had been so popular until a few months ago. Asked about the fashion industry's long overdue acknowledgment of it's complicity in promoting the sunken cheeks and hollowed-out eyes of "heroin chic," Ambler shrugs. "I'm bored with all this," he says. "We're totally over it."
 In addition to his casting work - for magazines and music videos, as well as fashion shows and advertising campaigns - Ambler is also trying his hand at film directing. His first feature, Rock Star, made after he graduated from New York University with a degree in film and television, has been screened at several film festivals this year. When he's not running his own casting and production company, Ned Ambler Pictures & Casting, the young entrepreneur unwinds by playing at clubs around New York in a punk-rock band called New Hope For The Plasmatics.
 Ambler is enjoying the public perks of his success - hanging out with celebrities, attending club openings, fashion shows, and movie screenings almost every night of the week. But he takes just as much satisfaction in his personal triumphs, saying: "It's only now that I'm doing so well that my mother has finally stopped saying to me, "Ned your hair is really horrible. Cut it!"

Editorial assistant Eve Therond researches International trends for Swing.