How the advertising boom for iPods, Kindles, and other gadgets is creating a new kind of supermodel.
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It had all the elements of a typical New York City photo shoot: bright lights, a gushing director ("Excellent, that's it, hold it right there"), even some sad-looking scrambled eggs that lay bereft on the craft-services table. But the subject of the shoot wasn't some leggy model striking a fierce pose. Instead, the focus of everyone's attention was on a pair of manicured hands, gently shaped to resemble a teapot.
The hands belong to 25-year-old Ryan Serhant, whose appendages are the centerpiece of AT&T's popular "Hands" advertising campaign, in which art-directed digits and palms form images associated with different countries (in this case, England). For more than 10 hours, Serhant's paws were painted, positioned, and repeatedly retouched by an artist, while a black T shirt covered his (actually quite handsome) face. The teapot configuration is just the latest hand job for Serhant, who over the past two years has contorted his extremities into the shapes of the Great Wall of China, a pair of Japanese geishas, and Egyptian hieroglyphics, among other finger fare, appearing in magazines, airport terminals, and on billboards across the world.
"When I told my parents that I was a hand model, they were like, 'What?' Which is pretty much how everyone responds," says Serhant, in between hands-free sips of water through a straw that an assistant unwrapped for him.
In the world of commercial modeling, there's always been a niche for the handsome-handed: pizzas that needed pulling, beers that needed pouring, and cheeks that needed stroking, by mitts that could endure a sharp-focus close-up. But the recent boom in high-tech gadgetry, from iPhones to Kindles, has meant big paydays and endless gigs for people with the right mix of hairless hands, dry palms, and small-pored skin. While Serhant declines to say how much he earned for his day-long shoot, an AT&T rep on-set jokes, "He'll be able to retire after today." In general, top hand models can command anything from a few hundred dollars an hour to $10,000 per day.
"The heyday is now for hand models," says Danielle Korwin, founder of Parts Models, an agency that exclusively represents body parts. When she opened for business in 1986, Parts was the only all-appendages outfit in town, and there were no more than 10 full-time hand models working nationally. Today, after three decades of tech growth, Korwin has more than 300 models on her roster, and estimates that some 50 people industrywide are making a living with their hands. "In the wild, wacky, [and] wonderful world of hand models," she says, "there's definitely been an uptick."
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