dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Midland are Rachel Chandler and Walter Pearce, casting young upstarts who have risen with NYC fashion’s new generation.

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Midland Agency’s founders RACHEL CHANDLER and WALTER PEARCE have distinguished themselves by casting models who look like the exceptional and idiosyncratic people we know and love in real life–individuals who evoke a sense of connection and affinity to the brand they’re wearing, rather than the intimidating qualities of unattain ability and hauteur that the fashion industry’s rarefied conventions of beauty have traditionally promoted. A defining moment for Midland came in the spring 2019 show for VAQUERA, which they cast and in which Walter himself took to the catwalk. His general demeanour, and most specifically his walk, serves as a neat symbol for the way Midland has marched through New York fashion to their own beat. It wasn’t a runway walk in any conventional sense, more a stooped and stompy lurch, executed with the adolescent urgency of an angry goth ploughing through a crowd to reach the bus before it pulls away. It exemplified the eccentricity of movement that Walter has always encouraged in his models and looked like a defiant two-fingered salute to the uptightly elegant gait that is customary on the catwalk. The press christened it the ‘zombie walk’ and noted that some of the Fashion Week shows that followed in Vaquera’s wake loosened up their choreography too. In short, Midland have a talent for making the rule-bookway of doing things look very old.

LOVE ISSUE 22

CREDIT: NICK DELIETO

The Midland offices are serving as a shoot location today, so Walter and Rachel are phoning in from their respectivehomes in New York. They have known each other for five years–long enough for the specifics of theirfirst meeting tobe a bit foggy: Rachel recalls an address in Queens but Walter says he’s not sure if he was ever actually there. It was definitely in the run-up to a HOOD BY AIR show – SHAYNE OLIVER had invited them to do the casting. Rachel was already working for them in her capacity as a photographer, brought in by her friend and HBA stylist AKEEM SMITH to shoot their look books. ‘I was doing my own casting for them,’ she remembers, ‘and they liked the casting.’ Walter, meanwhile, had been interning at Hood By Air. ‘I guess you could say I was a casting assistant, mostly street casting,’ he says vaguely, ‘but I didn’t really know what I was doing.’ ‘I think Walter and I figured out we were casting directors,’ says Rachel, ‘by Shayne asking us to do casting.’ ‘Yeah,’ agrees Walter. ‘I didn’t even know that was a job.’

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Rachel knew it was a proper job because she’d seen professional casting directors at work on shoots when she was assisting the likes of PATRICK DEMARCHELIER. ‘But I thought it was an administrative role. I didn’t know what a creative job it had the potential to be.’ Rachel, 32, moved to New York from LA to study the history of art at the Gallatin School, and her photographic work has featured in Purple, Marfa Journal and Dazed. From the positive response that greeted their HBA casting, it was clear that she had a real talent for spotting a new face. ‘I could see there was a demand for what I was doing. So I became increasingly interested in casting to make money and to give myself a break from worrying about my own pictures.

https://www.thelovemagazine.co.uk/article/ever-wondered-whos-responsible-for-casting-the-marni-shows-meet-the-duo-behind-midland-agency