Sara Ziff, once a fixture at Fashion Week, is a force behind a new labor law in New York that aims to protect models and perhaps redefine what counts as work.
There was a time when those close to Sara Ziff found it baffling that, by age 20, she had out-earned her father, Ed, a neuroscience professor at New York University, simply, as her mother, Susan, once remarked, for being “pretty and on time.”
In “Picture Me,” the 2009 documentary Ms. Ziff made with camcorder footage from her days as a fashion model, she is seen receiving a paycheck for more than $111,000, which elicits little more than a shrug.
Ms. Ziff joined the modeling business in 1996 after a photographer scouted her on her way home from the Bronx High School of Science, when she was a freshman. Soon enough, instead of babysitting on the weekends, Ms. Ziff was attending casting calls and landing spots in Seventeen magazine. After graduation, instead of heading to an Ivy League university like most of her peers, she opted for the runway.
“I knew that models were often valued for their extreme youth and that if I wanted to have a shot at it, this was my chance,” Ms. Ziff said. “And that it could be an opportunity to put away some money.”
For Ms. Ziff, that was the first in a series of bold choices in which she built a career, helped expose some of the seedier sides of the business, and ultimately stepped away from the glamour and paychecks to stand up for the rights and protections of others. The culmination of much of that work comes on Thursday, when New York State will implement the Fashion Workers Act, a piece of legislation championed by the Model Alliance, a group founded by Ms. Ziff that aims to remake the modeling industry in the fashion epicenter of the United States.
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