that Sara Ziff and her nonprofit, the Model Alliance, had been lobbying for since 2022 passed the New York State Legislature.is sitting in her bright, airy kitchen in Bed-Stuy, sipping chamomile tea. It is perhaps the most relaxed I have ever seen the 41-year-old, an intense and cerebral native New Yorker and advocate for the rights of fashion modelsof which she was one for more than a decade.
or less than she expected and felt pressure to pose nude from a young age. Despite traveling the globe and posing for major magazines, she had never felt more powerless. Looking up at those two billboards in Soho, she’d thought, “If this is what it feels like to be at the top of your game, there must be something wrong with me, because I feel so empty and so depressed.”
The organization also went through some internal growing pains. In 2014, for reasons no one I spoke with would explain to me on the record, three people on the Alliance’s board of directors abruptly quit. “I had to make some tough decisions,” Ziff told me. With no staff and too little funding to pay herself a salary, she enrolled in a master’s program in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School, hoping to learn how to continue her work “in a sustainable way.
Nobody wants to be a victim. It’s just shitty and it’s also something that can take up years of your life — and, like, do you want to dwell on the past or do you wanna just move on? Where Ziff had felt ostracized by the fashion industry and many of her peers for her work with the Alliance, with the ASA, she felt for the first time like she had an army on her side. “Running the Model Alliance amongst so many people who are scared and didn’t want to stick their necks out was pretty demoralizing,” she told me. “Itpretty demoralizing.