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A model is supposed to personify abstract ideals for countless people. In reality, models are tall, lovely young women or teenage girls. But whether she is impersonating a mobile clothes-hanger or is directed to silently emanate grace, charm and sophistication beyond her years, a model's task is closer to dance than any other profession, art or occupation. But dance of a special nature, using only their bodies and a range of movement so sparse that even minimalist choreographers would be daunted by their stiflingly repetitive and restrictive repertoire. By definition objectified by the fashion industry, models have long been objects of media concern, comic scorn, male predatory sexual attention and little girls' unrealistic idealization.

Tutus and point-shoes are fetish objects for today's pampered little girls before they begin obsessing about runway models. When girls realize that ballet is strenuous, extremely challenging and requires
rare skill, making "ballet dancer" as much of a dream occupation as becoming a pretty, pretty princess, they turn to striving and struggling to look like 'fashion models.' Yet later in life, many models party their opportunity away, or float through fashion's ranks before being replaced within a few fleeting seasons. Only a handful gain recognition within the fashion industry and fewer still become known or celebrated outside the fashion community.

Nevertheless, models, like dancers, are frequent subjects of art. While some top models like Kate Moss are known as muses to top artists, few artists have devoted themselves to depicting the stream of mostly interchangeable skinny girls who pass through the doors of modeling agencies. London-based Chantal Joffe is an exception. She began painting from fashion magazines as "a ready made, endless source for images of women." Admiring the lighting and the drama that fashion photography creates in a single, stylized image, Joffe cherry-picked source material from Vogue and other high-end magazines for her homages to fashion photographers' art.

Now for her show at London's Victoria Miro gallery, up through August 2nd, Joffe presents a body of work painted from life. Invited behind the scenes at Paris Fashion Week, Joffe has updated Degas, who painted ballerinas as they prepped backstage at the Royal Ballet. While Degas was interested in depicting the dancers' stretching and preparing, Joffe aimed to capture glimpses into the girls as they are made ready for the runway. The twenty-two oil on canvas, board or cardboard magazine-sized paintings that Joffe created from snapshots she took backstage demonstrate that the 'girls' behind the stage are lovely and lucky girls, largely unknowable to others, and only sometimes known to themselves.

Ana Finel Honigman: Why did you decide to represent models at the Chloe show? Are you particularly interested in that line? Do you see a specific connection between Chloe and the Paris in Degas's era?

Chantal Joffe: I chose the Chloe show because I thought of the idea after going to see one of their runway shows, which I attended because my friend Paolo Melim Andersson was then the head designer [before Hannah MacGibbon took over]. When I told Paolo that I was interested in going backstage, he got me a full-access press pass.

AFH: Did you befriend Andersson through your work?

CJ: He was an old friend.

AFH: Are you critical of how the fashion industry regards and treats young models?

CJ: More interested in observing it than criticizing it.

AFH: Are you interested in the clothes as well as the images and ideals produced by the fashion industry?

CJ: In as much as I like painting the different patterns and colors, I also like the way they place the paintings in the now. I hate it when paintings look self-consciously retro.

AFH: Had you been backstage at shows before? Did it run counter to your expectations?

CJ: It wasn't how I imagined at all. It was paradoxically more and less glamorous than I had expected. There was a manic energy. But then, all of a sudden it's all over, and we were all back in reality, in the Tuileries on a Saturday afternoon.

AFH: What areas of the backstage interested you most?

CJ: I liked all of it. I particularly liked when the models were having their hair and make-up done. Though, I wasn't comfortable taking pictures when they were naked. That felt invasive.

AFH: Were you asking the girls' permission? Would you have taken photos of them changing if they had allowed it?

CJ: No, I didn't ask them. I was more insignificant than a flea in the sea of photographers with my small snappy camera. It was a great thing to realize that I was invisible. I had such a freedom. Once I got over my initial terror, it felt fantastic. I was given permission to photograph them changing, when the rest of the photographers were shooed out, But they looked so very vulnerable and young that I couldn't bear to do it.

AFH: You rarely include nudity in your work. Why is that, when it is such a powerful and important part of high-end fashion magazines like French Vogue, W or Vogue Italian?

CJ: I have done a lot of paintings of myself and my daughter nude. I think I just prefer to really know the people whom I paint naked.

AFH: How different was the experience of painting the models from finished and printed editorial images, and photographing them yourself?

CJ: At first I thought the images I took were unusable. They were kind of dull. They were also lacking in color and focus, compared to magazine photos, I am not a very good photographer. And then I started painting from them and they began to interest me more and more.

AFH: What aspects of the images started interesting you?

CJ: That's hard to describe. I guess what you think you are going to find is usually very different from what you actually do.

AFH: What has happened to the snapshots you didn't paint? Are you saving them for some other project?

CJ: No, they are in a big box in my studio. I probably will never use them again.

AFH: There is a lot of documentation depicting the models and the process backstage in shows. Vogue and other publications frequently show the process in spreads and separate sections. Were you previously interested in these 'candid' images, or has your interest always been the final, polished, editorial product?

CJ: I guess so, if only in that I looked at them. But they seemed quite stagey.

AFH: Do your photographs look different to you than the "behind the scenes" shots over reproduced in magazines?

CJ: Yes, they are truly amateur looking.

AFH: How did you get the girls to not pose for your pictures?

CJ: They are so involved in what was happening that they weren't posing. They were having their hair and make-up done. They were smoking, eating whatever little things they ate or chatting on the telephone. They didn't notice me, except perhaps as someone mildly irritating. The doorman tried to throw me out at one point, because he must have thought I looked like an interloper.

AFH: Where the girls aware of whom you were and why you were photographing them?

CJ: No, one of the hairdressers asked me. They were having their hair washed in plastic basins with kettles of water, because the sinks had broken, and I was taking hundreds of photos because it looked like something out of Degas, The girls were arched backwards with the hairdresser's arms pouring these kettles over their hair. Anyway, the hairdresser was annoyed because I took a lot of her and the idea that I would paint from them seemed to piss her off further.

AFH: Did you discuss Degas with any of the girls?

CJ: I didn't. I said to one girl that her chequered shirt looked like something Bonnard would have painted but I don't think she spoke English. It is a funny hermetic little world. They are the queens of it, being waited upon by smaller, plainer mortals.

AFH: Are they really the Queen or are they just prettier pawns?

CJ: They are; they are replaced every few seasons.

AFH: Were you especially interested in any one of the girls, or were you more interested in them as a general type?

CJ: Oh yes, I was very interested in them as individuals. They are so different. There was one with a really big nose. She was good. And there was another who was very grouchy looking. There was one who Paolo said was very new to modeling and she kept her coat tightly-belted, as if her mum had told her to do that.

AFH: I am sure her mother had. These girls are all very young. As an adult among them, did you feel protective? Were you annoyed by their immaturity? What was your response to them as people?

CJ: I felt all kinds of things. I felt admiration. Beauty is amazing somehow. But I also felt a sense of its fleetingness, I was aware of their youth and how they cannot know it will fade. I was touched their mixture of confidence and innocence. Sometimes they seem like funny schoolgirls, which of course they are, especially when they were being chivvied and herded by adults. Inevitably there is also a feeling that they are being fed upon and commodified. I too felt that I was taking something from them.

AFH: Did you get a different sense of self-awareness from the male models?

CJ: There weren't any male models.

AFH: Do think all beautiful women suffer the same awareness of their fleeting beauty, or are models particularly pressed?

CJ: Maybe they do, I guess models are made much more aware than anyone else in a world where your face is put on billboards, and you are too old to model at 25. On the other hand, perhaps there is an intensity to how they possess that world even if it is brief. It's hard to know, and patronizing to presume.

AFH: Do you get the sense that the models feel empowered by the experience?

CJ: Again it's hard to say. It's so very far from my own experience of being 18, that personally I wouldn't have liked to have felt so pinned down, so itemized, and scrutinized. I felt everything was just beginning at that age. It's a bit like Tom Buchanan in 'The Great Gatsby' saying nothing was ever so good again as being a college football player. It's hard to feel that the rest of their lives will live up to such an experience.

AFH: Are you disturbed by the discrepancy between how these girls appear and how they are?

CJ: Each one is different. Some seem much more fragile and vulnerable than others.

AFH: Did you feel there was a noticeable difference between the more successful girls and the others? Personally, I think it is striking how much more articulate and intellectually engaging the top girls like Irina, Agyness or Coco Rocha are, versus the others. Perhaps it is just a question of confidence, but I often wish girls looking at magazines were aware that force of personality, intelligence and outside interests really count more than generic beauty towards a model's success.

CJ: Oh yes, not least because the hot models are surrounded by photographers and groupies. That made me feel sad for the others, though even at that level its all stratified. It's a bit chicken and the egg - which comes first, the attention or do they get the attention because they are smarter and funnier?

AFH: How close are the corollaries you see between models today and dancers in Degas's era?

CJ: The models seem more passive than Degas dancers. There is less of a close connection perhaps than I thought.

AFH: Do you consider modeling a physical craft? Walking on a catwalk is often mocked as "easy" but it is closer to dance than regular walking.

CJ: I guess so. Some are more graceful than others, but it's great when you see them all parading out.

AFH: Did you also consider painting dancers today?

CJ: No, there are too many bad paintings of ballerinas out there.