I keep thinking about Melania's zed card.

If you aren't near the modeling business, a zed card or a comp card is the modeling equivalent of a headshot. It's slightly different, because their stats will be on it and headshots are mostly of the actor's, well, head.

A zed card will have at least one full-body shot. Back before the Internet, this was the only way models could be submitted for work. As the assistant to a casting director back then, I saw thousands of these. It was both my work and a fun way to assure I always felt fat.

Here are some examples. Joan's is recent, Behati's is probably from an earlier time, before the rock star husband and the kids.

Which is why her zed cards keep bugging me.

We have never seen one.

Models are constantly refreshing and updating their book as they get work. The better pictures become a new zed card. You are being hired because of your looks.

The visuals which sell you have to be their best, so you and your booker are always trying to improve it. There are always previous cards left over. We have never seen a single zed card for any of the years she was supposed to be working surface.

Also, no professional shoots of any kind. We have tons of early pictures of any model of her generation, even if you were only a second-tier catalogue model.

(No insult meant to catalogue. That stuff is BANK)

Again, if your life is your image, you keep careful track of it.

This is what you find of Melania. There are more, but you get the point. These are the pictures your local photographer takes in your podunk Communist town which you send to a modeling agency, who never writes back.

Okay, just one more.

The next time she's working, it's because she's dating some old guy in New York and she's sort of famous. There are literally no pictures of her work.

"But what about the nude ones with the girl?"

Yeah, that's not modeling the way she tries to present herself.

Which brings me to my point, which I am going to present very, very delicately.

There's a decade she can't account for.

There's are nude pictures featuring implants which, besides being shoddy work, make her too big for top-level fashion modeling.

There are points of contact to people who, on the surface, were involved with the modeling industry but, in fact, appear to have been in another industry which requires a steady supply of pretty, poor, young women.

If you like this, perhaps I can coax you into helping to support my Small Stories, a (usually) funny daily story of my real-life disasters and grudges?

I promise never to pull your hair into a high side ponytail. https://www.patreon.com/user/posts?u=4846197

"WHY DOES THIS MATTER YOUR A JEALOUS #HATER."

You caught me.

I always wanted to help a man older than my father find his junk under his cheese-encrusted folds and then wait for the pills to kick in.