Noah Sheldon
Taobao Model
Taobao is China’s largest online shopping site with over 400 million active users. This is a film about a model named Pin’er. Her clients are the stores that sell through Taobao. The website provides data on each product and how fast it sells. As a result, Taobao models are not only hired on their looks, they are also judged on their proven track record of driving online sales. Clothing is typically priced low, but the volumes sold are high. With an insatiable demand for new fashion, apparel makes up nearly half of the sales volumes on the site. We joined Pin’er for a day of shooting: she worked with multiple clients and had over a hundred and fifty outfit changes over the course of 13 hours, a fairly typical day for her.