Content area
Full Text
Looking for a beautiful, bilingual Japanese woman to stand next to a car and talk about its engine? How about eight men, each with a 34-inch waist, 31 1/2 inseam, who can dance? Perhaps a cow that can act like a bull?
Affiliated Models Inc., a Southfield-based talent agency, has filled those requests and thousands more -- many just as offbeat -- since its inception 17 years ago in the living rooms of two former models, Linda Hack and Barbara McIntosh.
The agency subcontracts with models and actors for live fashion, film, print, voice-over, convention and trade-show work. It has about 9,000 men, women and children under contract, two-thirds of them Michigan residents.
An in-house staff of 20 operates from cramped, no-frills quarters. But that will change when the agency moves to 1680 Crooks Road in Troy on Dec. 17, doubling its office size from about 3,000 to 6,000 square feet.
Last year, Affiliated sent out about 6,000 people --and, yes, a few animals -- on jobs ranging from the Detroit Auto Show to commercials for General Motors, Cadillac, J.C. Penney and K mart.
Its models and and actors often wind up in the glamour spotlight, but behind-the-scenes fashion work involves more sweat than sequins, said Hack, president of the company. "There's a lot of physical labor involved," she said.
In a live fashion show -- and the company orchestrates hundreds every year in regional malls nationwide one must pull the clothes from the...