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Fashion Jungle by Rachel Van Dyken, Kathy Ireland

A terrain where snakes and jaguars are disguised as amicable faces with hidden agendas. This geographical location is known as the concrete jungle, or as author Rachel Van Dyken calls it, “Fashion Jungle.” In the midst of the predator vs. prey environment are four girls with the ultimate career: modeling. Modeling is filled with photoshoots, high-class cocktail parties, and opportunities to be on the most elite magazines or the face of designer brands. It’s the ultimate glamorous life with daunting costs. 

Author Rachel Van Dyken reveals the hidden stories that the modeling world covers up in her book Fashion Jungle (Trident Media Group). She collaborated with the successful American supermodel, Kathy Ireland. With the help of Kathy, Rachel was able to tell the fictional story based on real-life experiences. It serves as a message that even the most glamorous lifestyle on the surface has disheartening consequences of sex trafficking, suicide and addiction. 

BookTrib: First of all, how did this project come to fruition? Who approached who?

Rachel: We (Rachel and Kathy) were actually introduced by a mutual friend and we just started talking. The book was something that was brought to my attention by this person and they were like, “hey, would you be interested?” So then I was like, we need to talk, obviously, and Kathy called me that week and we just started talking about all her stories and all the things she wanted to do.

It was pretty emotional, honestly, because in the book there’s a lot of stuff that deals with the #metoo movement, human trafficking and a lot of stuff that we fictionalized in order to protect people in her real life, so it was a very interesting experience because it’s hard when you have real life things that have happened to someone. Trying to fictionalize that is definitely a challenge. So we just started talking and it kind of took off from there. We started writing right away. 

BookTrib: Can you tell us a little bit about the collaborative process between you and Kathy?

Rachel: It’s different with each partner you write with. I’ve done two other projects like that where it just depends on your writing process. Like we all have our things, for example I can’t write in Word, I have to use a special program called Ulysses so when I would send stuff over it would just format horribly. I would write stuff down, send it to her, she would send it back, and there would be a back and forth like that.

Kathy’s a very busy woman, she runs a billion dollar industry, so there was a lot of talking to her manager and talking to her. She didn’t think I was a stalker, so luckily she gave me her cell phone number so I was able to text her, or she would text me like “can we take this out, can we add this in?” It was really helpful for me that they were so open with communication. If I couldn’t get a hold of her I could get a hold of her or her manager and say “hey, I have a question, could you send this on?”

They were very, very collaborative with me which was great. It was a great experience. There were a couple times where I’d add stuff in and Kathy would take it out, or she would decide to change certain things. People keep asking, you know, did you write this and it’s Kathy’s story, but it’s definitely a co-authorship and a really fun experience for the both of us. 

BookTrib: Would you consider in the future collaborating with other notable people with stories to tell?

Rachel: Yeah, in fact I was talking to somebody about this just last week. I don’t know if I would make a career out of it because it’s a lot of pressure and I like to do my own thing and have a little bit of freedom in what I write, obviously with romance and stuff. But it’s a good challenge for an author. I would say it’s definitely one of the hardest things I’ve ever done as a writer because there’s just so much pressure to do justice to her story. And you also have to make sure to keep your readers entertained, because they have an expectation of you, so it was definitely a lot of pressure. 

BookTrib: With so many of these stories being drawn from real life, what sort of creative liberties did you take?

Rachel: You know, the biggest thing is trying to protect the people in it. Like, we based a character off Anna Wintour, but she and Kathy are very very close so she knew it would be okay to have this character Grace based on her in it. We based a character off Vanessa Williams because Kathy and her are very good friends, and we didn’t use her life as an example, but used her career. Actually, a lot of the things in there that seem outlandish, that people are like “there’s no way that’s real, that’s totally fictionalized,” no, that’s the real part.

So for me as an author, I write contemporary mafia romance, there’ll be things that we added into the book and I had no idea they were really in the fashion industry. The characters are very much fictionalized. One of the characters (Brittany) is based off Kathy, and obviously she did not have an affair at sixteen and get pregnant, but that’s something she wanted to put in there because she’d seen so many of her friends go through things like that.

Like they were here in New York, and they were modeling, and they slept with a photographer in order to get on the cover of Vogue and they got pregnant and got sent home. And when they get sent home, they get sent home with a bill, because the agencies here give you an advance much like they do in the book world, and if you don’t earn that out, if you don’t actually make it, they send you an invoice when you go home. So it’s a very harsh reality and we wanted to make sure that when people read it, they understood that that’s very much how the modeling industry was at the time. 

BookTrib: Were you aiming to tell a story about the modern modeling and fashion industries?

Rachel: When we first started writing, that’s when all of that stuff came out, like the whole Harvey Weinstein thing, so it was strange because as we’re writing it we’re going “oh my goodness, this is literally what we’re writing about right now.” The owner of this huge agency, and that’s part of the prequel novella we have with Apple Books. In it we talk about this very real person, and we don’t change his first name at all, that had owned an agency and was a predator. He groomed a lot of the models that would come to him. There were situations where he came on to Kathy, situations where he came on to other girls, and it was just totally swept under the rug. It was something where people said “oh, that’s just him. That’s just how this industry is.”

So when you’re telling kids who are fourteen, fifteen, sixteen that that’s just how life is, they convince themselves that this is normal. And that’s just such a wrong narrative to give to a child, and even though there’s some awareness of it now, you know it still goes on. You know there are people who are too afraid to speak, too afraid to say something. And a lot of the models at the time were scared to say something because they didn’t have any power, or they felt like they didn’t have any power. So we really wanted to tell a modern version of that, because it’s something that was so prevalent back in the day.

I mean, when we had our conversations we had like twenty pages of notes just from one conversation. We had so much content for this story that it was super difficult trying to keep it down to just one book because there was just so much. And on one hand, as an author it’s great having that much content, but it’s also difficult because Kathy has so many stories about friends who died, friends she never saw again who were sent overseas.

It’s just a very, very sad story, but I think that since we delivered it in a way that’s fiction we have a better chance of young people, especially young girls, picking it up and reading it, because it’s not a tell-all, it’s not a memoir, it’s not a nonfiction book. They’re not gonna be like “oh I’m bored,” we told it in a way that will hopefully get people’s attention. 

BookTrib: Say a young model arriving in New York City picks up this book, what would you hope they would get out of it?

Rachel: I would hope that the biggest thing is that they would understand that they have worth and that they have power. I think that so often when we’re put in a situation where we don’t know a lot or we feel insecure we default to “okay, whatever you say is totally fine” or we justify things because it’s something that we want.

So you’re thinking you want to be a model, you want to make it, so you’ll justify XYZ, but the more you justify, the more you give. You tell yourself “I gave in yesterday to this,” and soon you’re numb to it all. I think that the biggest thing would be a young person reading it and knowing they don’t have to justify, they don’t have to sacrifice.

They can always talk to someone and make sure that they’re safe in these environments and have safety protocols put into place. In my opinion, no career is worth sacrificing your self-worth and who you are as a person. 

BookTrib: You’re a prolific romance writer. There’s been a little bit of turmoil in Romancelandia recently. How do you see, moving forward, the romance publishing industry changing now that it’s all out on the table?

Rachel: So that was a mess. Huge mess. It was horrible to even watch. I think at this point they just need a fresh start, you know? I think that’s what everyone thought. I was actually in New York in June for the RWA (Romance Writers of America) Conference when Kennedy Ryan won her award, which was so amazing, and we had so many other authors of diversity who won, and it felt so good to be in that room and be like, oh my gosh, people are recognizing talent, and they’re recognizing that we want diversity and then over Christmas a bomb went off and we took a million steps backward.

And I think that’s not my heart, that’s not the majority of my author friends, that’s not their hearts. We want so desperately for there to be diversity in the industry and I think the only way to move forward is to have that and to have transparency with the board and the people in charge. As of late, we haven’t had that, so the only way to move forward is to create change in an environment that desperately needs change. 

Fashion Jungle is now available for purchase.

 

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Fashion Jungle by Rachel Van Dyken, Kathy Ireland
Publish Date: 1/28/2020
Genre: Fiction, Suspense
Author: Rachel Van Dyken, Kathy Ireland
ISBN: 9781733668070
Maria Konstas

Maria Konstas is the social media coordinator for BookTrib and sister company Meryl Moss Media. She graduated from Sacred Heart University with a marketing degree. She loves fashion and writing witty copy.

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