What It’s Like to Be a Casting Director in 2026

A couple of days before the Ann Demeulemeester show at Paris Fashion Week, eager models are standing in the foyer of the brand’s studio in the Marais, waiting patiently with their picture in hand. Casting director Ben Grimes sits with creative director Stefano Gallici and his team, and sequentially, models come in, say an enthusiastic hello, hand over their image, do a short walk across the room and back, and exit. Some are shy. Some have a little more bravado. Discreet ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘maybe’ piles of pictures appear on the floor, to be reviewed by Grimes and Gallici later. Those chosen for the second round walk again, looks are fitted, and after many, many other machinations, it’s time for the show.

“When someone walks towards you, you’re going to have two reactions. You’re going to have one that’s personal to you, and you’re going to have one that is very analytical, one that’s ‘right for my client’,” says Grimes, who worked on eight other shows this Spring/Summer 2027 season, including Jil Sander, Victoria Beckham, Missoni, MM6 Maison Margiela, and Erdem. While the live casting moment feels intense, the decisions that determine who walks, and who doesn’t, are the visible end of a process that starts long before any hopeful model enters the room.

For casting director Julia Lange, the process happens across 18 shows in New York, London, Milan and Paris. Lange launched her eponymous casting agency in 2011 and now operates a 17-strong team. We meet at a bar in Milan opposite the Fendi show venue. It’s the day before the Fendi show, and Lange has an impending meeting with executives, so we need to rattle through my questions. Her schedule runs like this for the entire fashion month, as she zips between clients on moto taxis, monitoring her several teams. “We have five team leaders that we are dividing between all the shows,” she says. One of them, Max Märzinger, is by her side. “Sometimes, it’s two clients a day. On two days of Paris Fashion Week, I will be between five clients. You just have to be efficient. Efficient is my middle name, I guess.”

Ten years ago, brands would largely select their own models for their runways and campaigns. “Casting has [evolved] because of the volume of projects that brands feel like they need to do,” Grimes says. “You can’t just have a campaign that’s out in magazines for four months and then move on to the next. People are scrolling all day, so they need new imagery to see.” Some of luxury’s biggest players will stage five or six runway shows a year, plus near-monthly campaigns for categories, from bags to eyewear.

It’s true that “casting has become much more of a job today,” agrees Lange. “In the beginning, there were only a very few casting directors out there, and clients would do a lot of the casting themselves,” she says. Lange started her casting career as the youngest ever bookings director at Vogue Germany in the 2000s, aged 21, producing shoots and securing models. Over the last 15 years, she’s built an impressive client roster spanning Fendi, Hermès, Versace, Phoebe Philo and Alexander McQueen, alongside buzzy younger names like August Barron. One moment she’s most proud of is casting Dario Vitale’s venerated, singular fashion show for Versace. “It was really wonderful to work with someone who has such a strong vision and to cast into that,” Lange says. “It was a long, interesting process with Dario. We were working on it for at least half a year and building a language together.”

Grimes was a model in her teens, so discovered casting from the other side of the coin, before launching her own agency in 2013. “I think the thing is, we know so little about [casting] because it is actually a really tricky subject to talk about,” she says. “You are judging people on the way they look, because ultimately, that is the job. I’m trying to question myself constantly around it and listen and inform myself on what beautiful even means.”

The process

Today, brands are looking for a combo of new faces, established models and maybe a celebrity cameo. But that wasn’t always the case. “When I started out, everyone wanted the same top 50 girls,” says Lange. She wasn’t able to secure the big names back when she was a newcomer, while working with young photographers like Harley Weir, so Lange looked elsewhere. “I was like, let’s look into small agencies and see if we find a hidden jewel. I also started casting on Instagram, and we went out on the streets. We started to look wider than purely model agents.”

Now, Julia Lange Casting has a dedicated scouting team tasked with finding fresh faces that fit a client brief. “Our team scouted all over Italy and beyond for Dario’s Versace,” she says. “There was a whole mix. There was a German actor who was walking, there was an Onlyfans star-slash-ballerina, and there was [Olly Elyte] who performs at the Cicciolina parties in Paris.”

Casting a show always starts with a conversation with the designer, to go over the inspiration for the collection, who the man or woman is, what the story will be, and the budget. Then, casting directors go away and assess who they want, who is available, and who they may need to discover, before presenting their ideas to the designer.

“Models aren’t available for every brand. It’s not the case that every girl they want, or that we want, is unconditionally available,” Lange says. “So there’s this very creative process where you need the right eye and the right understanding and vision for the brand. The other part is making those models available for it.”

Emma Matell is a casting director who worked on eight shows during SS27, including in her native Copenhagen. She’s made her name off of a penchant for street casting and a commitment to body diversity, particularly in collaboration with designer Sinéad O’Dwyer, who frequently tops the rankings in the Vogue Business Size Inclusivity report. “I guess part of me felt like I had something to contribute to casting, and that I could do things a bit differently,” Matell says. “I feel like with Sinéad, we’ve definitely managed to create attention at some point on key issues. When we put disabled models on the runway, for example, it caused a lot of conversation.”

The politics

In the model business, there are many variables. Getting up to 100 models in one place, ready to walk, is no mean feat. When asked if any disasters spring to mind that the Julia Lange Casting team had to overcome this season, one of Lange’s casting directors, Märzinger, chimes in: “You tend to forget, it’s like giving birth.”

The main hurdle is “probably the politics behind it all”, Lange adds, referring to the intense back and forth required to actually book a model, when the models and their agents might be holding out for a bigger client, or wanting to focus on a certain type of brand to boost their career. “I guess one of the biggest challenges is to keep the struggles away from the client. There are a lot of politics in terms of which model is doing what. Then, there’s this psychological challenge, where you have to tell people in a way that they understand and won’t get too offended that something is not possible.”

“There’s a lot of threads happening,” Matell adds. Sometimes, she’s speaking to more than 80 agents at any one time, negotiating who could do a show, before sending her final edit to the client. “You might have one agent saying, [this model] can do it, but her call time will be two hours later. But that girl needs a hair look, which is more complex, and so we need her to be there earlier. So therefore, we can’t have that girl. There are so many things with each individual model that you have to take into account and keep track of.”

Once the negotiations are done and the client makes their selects, typically from a slide deck of model pictures, they invite people to the live casting. The Cecilie Bahnsen SS27 show featured 30 looks; Matell saw 120 models over the two-day casting. Across the season, Lange’s team estimated they’d seen more than 800 models.

With smaller labels, there can be limitations making it harder to cast. “Nobody ever gives you the perfect ingredients,” says casting director Simone Schofer. “Either there’s no money, or there’s no travel budget, dates move, a person misses a flight, or doesn’t show up on set. There’s a lot of troubleshooting. But it’s also kind of exhilarating — it makes it quite fun.”

Grimes shares this sentiment. “There’s always a disaster, but like, no one’s died,” she says. “And as long as you fix it, which you have to, it’s OK. There are tons of things you guys never need to know about. We are putting out fires all the time.”

Finding personalities

At the Cecilie Bahnsen casting during Paris Fashion Week, Matell is stood watching models walk. She’s already cast several faces, including Danish curve model Ronja Josephsen — “It’ll be her first Paris show, it’s always exciting to have a debut” — plus, interesting faces Matell found across pop culture, like Danish actor Elke Eisenbender and Sabrina Fuentes, lead singer of New York band Pretty Sick. The models walking for Matell at the casting are hoping to book the remaining spots.

To keep things moving, Matell texts her assistants in the foyer quick codes, like “FTG” (free to go), so they know how to direct the models, keeping the process smooth and safe. “I am worried about having too many in the entrance, because it gets really crowded,” she says. “We’ve got to move fast.” Likewise, at Ann Demeulemeester, Grimes asks a team member to keep models moving smoothly, because she’s concerned if it gets too busy in the next room, models will have to stand outside the office in the rain.

“At the end of the day, models are people, and a lot of the time in this industry they get treated like they’re not,” Matell says. “It’s hard because there’s a huge demand for newness and for more and more and more. Finding time for the individual is really hard, but I really try to do that.” Matell explains that she briefs all models — street cast or otherwise — about how the process works and what will happen on the casting day, so no one is surprised or upset if not taken forward.

At Spanish brand Paloma Wool’s casting during Paris Fashion Week, Schofer is working with the brand for the first time. “I am determined to do a better job [for Paloma] than the people before me,” she says. “The brief was to create a community of people with cultural relevance in other fields, so to speak. Photographers, creatives, artists. People that do something other than modeling basically.”

Schofer called some of her community, including magazine editor Tish Weinstock and French singer-songwriter Santa (Samanta Cotta), who lives around the corner from the Paloma Wool studio in Paris’s 11th arrondissement. “[Santa] just came to say hi, and then we kind of roped her into [walking]. She looked great, and she really enjoyed it,” Schofer says. Like Lange, Schofer got her start working at Condé Nast as a booking director, across Glamour and Vogue, in the UK, before launching her agency in 2018. The bulk of Schofer’s business is in commercial and editorial casting, but she does a select few runway shows each season, namely Paloma Wool in Paris, Cos in New York, and Ashley Williams in London.

Schofer has worked with Cos for eight years, and in the early days, the band was keen to cast architects and real-life professionals in London. “We would go to [high-end restaurant] Coya and cast the chef, we’d go to Zaha Hadid [Architects], as that’s who they felt the customer was at the time. But after a lot of market research, this consumer was actually a very small percentage of who actually buys the brand,” Schofer explains. When new creative director Karin Gustafsson joined Cos, she wanted to shoot more prominent models over street-cast people. “It was a very long process to get there,” Schofer adds, but the brand shot Vittoria Ceretti last year, while major models like Awar Odhiang and Hejia Li just walked the show in New York.

No matter the direction from the casting director, ultimately, the clothes make the final call. At castings, designers and casting directors are not just reviewing faces, but how people bring the clothes to life. “There is definitely a big element of who works in which look,” Lange says. “And then there’s a casting melody that you can create in terms of who you put where. I’m asking, ‘How do they interact with each other?’ It’s like a picture you are painting.”