CAST OFF Vanity Teen

Vanity Teen September Digital Cover – Paris Fashion Week Edition

There is a particular kind of silence in Paris before Fashion Week begins.

For days, girls arrive with their books under their arms, their phones full of castings, their names written on lists, their faces becoming familiar to people they have never met.
They wait.
They walk.
They turn. They are measured, looked at, remembered, forgotten, called back.
Then they do it all again.

Because before the lights, before the music, before the first step onto a runway, there is the casting.

And sometimes, everything happens in a few seconds.

A door opens. A girl walks in. Someone looks up. A name is written down. A possibility begins.

For the second September digital cover of Vanity Teen, marking the the Spring/Summer 2027 fashion season, we wanted to return to something that has always been part of our DNA: model scouting.

Vanity Teen was born with a direct connection to new faces, to discovery, to that extraordinary moment when someone who is still unknown suddenly becomes impossible to ignore. So we imagined the perfect casting. Not a real one, but perhaps something even more interesting: an imaginary day in Paris in which the endless ritual of Fashion Week casting becomes a story in itself.

For days, models compete for the possibility of a few minutes on a runway. Only a handful will get there. The rest wake up the following morning and start again.

There is something brutal about it, but there is also something beautiful.

The uncertainty.
The rejection.
The adrenaline.
The ambition.
The strange intimacy of being seen by a stranger and hoping that, for one brief moment, they see something you already know is there.

And then there are the small rituals that make up the mythology of a casting day. The bags dropped by the door. The books under an arm. The endless changing of shoes at the entrance, from sneakers to ballet flats, from one pair to another, sometimes slipping into tiny ballerinas on girls impossibly tall, as if changing shoes could somehow change the odds.

For CAST OFF, we chose six girls we believe have a bright and luminous future ahead of them.
Six different faces, six different energies, six completely individual ways of inhabiting the idea of a model.

The road ahead will not necessarily be easy. It rarely is.

Fashion can be generous, but it can also be unpredictable, accidental and unforgiving. A career can turn on a casting, a photograph, a meeting, a yes, a no, or simply being in the right room at the right time.

But we believe in these girls.

And perhaps that is the most important thing a magazine can do when it discovers someone: not predict where they will go, but give them a place from which to begin.

For this first chapter of CAST OFF photographer Boyan Li and videographers Adone Giuntini and Gaspard Gevin-Hié imagined and captured an idealized, almost cinematic behind-the-scenes report of a casting day in Paris. A casting that never happened, and yet feels completely real. Streets, waiting moments, movement, anticipation, faces, bodies, boredom, excitement and that peculiar suspended time that exists only between one possibility and the next.

This time, Vanity Teen is also teaming up with Maison Ernest, the historic Parisian footwear house, bringing its signature high, impossibly high heels into our imaginary casting day.
On the streets of Paris, sneakers give way to vertiginous heels, and suddenly the walk changes, the posture changes, the entire body changes.
A few steps on the pavement become a rehearsal for the runway, a tiny ritual of transformation before the next door, the next casting, the next possibility.

This time, there are no interviews.

No biographies to explain who these girls are. No words to tell you what they should become.

Just photographs and moving images.

The girls speak for themselves.

Published on the second day of Paris Fashion Week, CAST OFF is intended as the beginning of a new Vanity Teen series, one that we hope will return every Fashion Week and continue to follow the faces, dreams and unpredictable trajectories of a new generation of models.

Six girls today.

Who knows how many tomorrow.

Welcome to CAST OFF.

And enjoy the show.