Cool,
According
to Whom?

Twenty years ago, these were practical words in a casting room.

I had been working in casting long enough to recognise the type almost instinctively. You looked at Polaroids, books, faces, bodies. Before the photograph, there was already a process deciding who could enter the image.

That process did not always feel ideological. Most of the time it felt like work. A brief arrived. A face was right or wrong for it. A body belonged to the world being constructed, or it didn’t. The vocabulary could be brutal because it was ordinary: too short, too fat, too gay, not masculine enough. The words described the limits of an image before the image existed.

Looking back at casting material from the 2000s, what interests me now is not simply who was excluded. It is how visible the repetition becomes. Douglas Perrett’s Wild Things, an archive of casting Polaroids taken between 2000 and 2010, records hundreds of faces before the finished fashion photograph. A 2010 Alexander Wang line-up board does something similar in another form: face after face, numbered and organised, a visual system before the runway.

The individual faces are different. The frame around them is remarkably consistent.

In 2022, I worked on the casting of a worldwide Armani campaign.

At the time, I didn’t notice that everyone who was selected was white.

Looking at the films now, I notice much more. I notice the way the camera looks at the women. How it moves across the body. The relationship between watching and being watched. In the Emporio Armani film, there are moments that I once read simply as seduction and that now feel strangely close to a woman being followed.

I don’t remember questioning any of this at the time. Not because I consciously agreed with it, but because it was familiar. This was part of the visual language of fashion and advertising around me. It didn’t present itself as a point of view. It simply looked like the way things looked.

That includes the men. “Not masculine enough” made sense because there was an “enough”: a recognisable code of male desirability that casting, styling and the camera could reproduce without having to name it.

Ten years later, I was casting for Dior. This time, diversity was explicit from the beginning. I was working directly with Baron & Baron and Maria Grazia Chiuri on the casting. The question of who was in the image was not something to notice afterwards. It was part of the conversation before the image existed.

But the more interesting shift was not only happening in front of the camera.

The final Dior Magazine project invited ten Greek women photographers to interpret the Cruise 2022 collection across Greece. The same clothes moved through different landscapes, bodies, interiors and ways of looking. A woman beside the sea. A woman reflected in a mirror. Women in the dry brightness of Greek architecture. A face almost disappearing behind a shell.

The change wasn’t only who could enter the image. It was also who was making it.

For me, that matters because Greece changes position too. It is no longer simply a location in which an international fashion image is produced. Greek women are constructing the image of women in Greece. The country becomes a point of view.

By 2025, I was casting for Nike in Athens. The question in the brief was simple: Who are the new Athenian muses?

There was no single answer. We were looking through agencies and Instagram, for models and dancers, for people who could move, but also for people whose presence already carried something of contemporary Athens. Different ethnicities, different bodies, different expressions of femininity. Not the absence of criteria. A different set of criteria.

The difference wasn’t only the screen. The old casting Polaroid tried to reduce information: everyday clothes, little or no makeup, a face and a body made legible for selection. Instagram does almost the opposite. Style, friends, music, nightlife, work, places, gestures, opinions. The things that might once have been removed from the casting image can now be part of what makes someone interesting.

By then, casting had changed in another, quieter way. I wasn’t only looking at people; I was looking at how they had already chosen to show themselves. Instagram had become part of the casting archive. The subject arrived with an image already in progress. Casting was no longer only looking at what someone could become inside an image; increasingly, it was also looking at an image they had already begun to make of themselves.

Nassia Matsa makes that shift visible in a particularly sharp way. In Nike, she appears inside the finished brand image: styled, composed, moving through Athens. But in Model Check-In, the project she later brought to Dazed, the direction reverses.

She has spent years being photographed. Here, she turns attention towards everything around the photograph — and sometimes back towards herself.

The taped feet. The strange angle. The face that does not have to flatter. Jewellery in the mouth. A makeup palette becoming a mirror.

These are not simply “real” pictures opposed to artificial fashion pictures. That would be too easy. They are interesting because of who chooses what deserves to be seen.

Twenty years ago, the unpolished image in my working life largely belonged to the machinery of casting. It helped someone else decide. Here, the model participates in producing and circulating the unfinished image herself. The raw photograph has not disappeared. Its authorship has shifted.

None of this means fashion has stopped constructing ideals. It hasn’t. Casting still selects. Brands still choose. Magazines still decide what gets published. Platforms have algorithms. Difference itself can become a category, a look, even another thing to sell.

And the old codes have not vanished. Thinness, whiteness, conventional beauty and conventional masculinity continue to occupy enormous space. The story is not that fashion became inclusive.

What has changed is that the image is being constructed from more directions.

The person in front of the camera can arrive with an image already in circulation. The photographer can bring a different history of looking. A model can document the system photographing her. Someone selected for a campaign can become the person imagining the next one. The audience can answer back, copy, reject, circulate, remix.

Twenty years ago, “too short, too fat, too gay, not masculine enough” could operate as ordinary practical language because the boundaries around the desirable image felt clearer.

They are less clear now.

And that changes what can feel culturally current. Representation is no longer only about who appears in the frame, but about an awareness of what the image is saying: who is visible, who is looking, whose point of view shapes the story, and what assumptions are being repeated.

Perhaps this is where consciousness enters the idea of cool — not as a moral badge, and not as a new set of rules, but as cultural awareness. To make an image now is also to be conscious of the culture that image enters.

So the question is no longer only: who gets to be the face?

Who gets to decide what the face means?