Brandon Barker: Fashion Model and Show Producer

Brandon Barker’s comp card, 1974. Image courtesy of Brandon Barker.

Brandon Barker’s comp card, 1974. Image courtesy of Brandon Barker.

Transcript

“Hi, my name is Brandon Barker. I work as a designer. I produce events around the world.

After Sec Four, you go into National Service. And by the time I got into National Service, I had already started modelling. I never realised what I wanted to do and sort of went along with what was expected of me. All the opportunities that I got were actually offered to me and that's how I discovered that I wanted to do them.

I never considered modelling. I was asked to do it for Metro, I then went away, never saw the results of that shoot, I don't know how it was used. So when I come back to Singapore, I get contacted by Carrie to model for her, but I had not considered modelling up to that point. And it was a real surprise to me, and so I went in, saw her, signed the thing and never regretted it.

I was a full-time model. I would have been either doing National Service, or alternatively, in university at the time, but work-wise I was just modelling, I continue university for about two years, modelling as well. But what happens is that I'm actually not concentrating on my university enough. And I then decide that I will make the choice. And I actually choose to do university. And I've got a contract to do a whole series of shoots with the Hyatt Hotel in Southeast Asia. The first shoot's in Singapore and clashes with a university lecture. And I decide that I will not do the shoot and I lose the whole project. And I go to university and they cancel the lecture. And I never go back to university.

I start off as a model and then begin to find myself slipping into other roles that needed people to do them. Back in the 70s, there weren't a lot of people doing a lot of the work. There were more models than anything else. But show producers, stylists, art directors, there were nobody doing that, or not as many people doing that. I found myself in those roles as well. Even though, at 16 or 17 years old, all I wanted to do was model. I wanted to be on the catwalk more than anything else.

With photography, when they needed a stylist, I wouldn't be able to be the model. They would bring me in as a stylist as opposed to the model. I would have loved to have been the model. The same thing happens in show production and walking the runway. Till this day, I love to walk the runway, I love to be in front of an audience. But I'm always working backstage, I'm on a technical desk where people are not seeing the magic that we are creating, but just to be on the runway again, and having somebody creating the magic around me, is what I truly, truly would love to do. Commercially, I would have loved to be the model rather than the makeup artist, I would have rather been the model rather than the stylist. I would have rather been the person in front of the camera rather than lighting the model. And what I found was that all the other work that I did ate into the fact that I wanted to be a model.

I started in 1974 and I go on for a really, really long time. My career has really extended purely because I do lots of other things, which is why I know a lot of the models from later on. So I would have worked with people back in the 70s like Janine Siniscal, Kim Im, and then would have continued working up to the 2000s with people like Sheila Sim and I got to know all of them.

It was very exciting to me because it was just at the time when I was going to fashion shows. I was going to events and fashion shows at the time and beginning to realise that there were all these people about. I didn't know any of them at the time, but would get to know him and become really good friends with them later on. I used to really enjoy watching the shows and going to the events and getting dressed up to go to the events, but I never considered myself as doing it. I would be, say, going to an event at a hotel or something and there would be a fashion show going on there. And for me, that was a good enough reason to go to the event.

I would watch these shows purely for the purposes of entertainment. I would then go to shows because at the time there used to be shows on the swimming pool of the Goodwood Park Hotel and they would bring in foreign fashion shows. The early designers out of England. Some of the shows that I saw they were really, like, spectacular and really pleasurable to go to. It wasn't for me, it wasn't to go and meet people or anything like that, it was just to go and watch the show. For some reason the very first time I went to the Goodwood Park Hotel show, I was with Tina Tan, the model, who went on to owning a boutique and Gianni Versace and all of that. I felt like one of the youngest people there. I don't know if that really was the case, but it was really exciting. It was wonderful to go to. It was a really exciting thing. And it was so long ago and I was so young that I actually had to speak to Margaret Khoo Goodwood Park Hotel and ask her about the shows on the swimming pool that they had and where people sat and watched the shows and all that. Later on. I go on to do a show, one of the major shows in 1978, with Man and His Woman boutique, and it's on the platform of the Goodwood Park Hotel. And it's one of the things that I remember ever because I had seen the shows when I wasn't doing them and went on to actually doing them. 

I joined Carrie Models Agency, within the first year, I'm already choreographing shows. I do actually say to Carrie later on, 'You know, I was so young at the time, like 19 years old, how do you take a 19-year-old and be so confident as to make them choreograph a fashion show?

With no experience, nothing, and how do you actually see that the person is able to do it? You know, why did you ask me to do that?' And she actually wasn't able to answer and she said, 'Brandon, I was 22 at the time.' But she seems so old to me. She seems so old and so experienced, and she also said, because we become really good friends, and she said, 'All those years, why didn't you include me in the stuff that you were doing?' And I was like, 'You were the owner or the agency. I couldn't let you know what I was up to.'

First show, it was for Polaroid sunglasses. I was with Carrie Models, it was produced through Carrie Models. It was on the catwalk at the Hyatt Hotel in Singapore. I remember the music, I remember everything about it. The first song of that thing was Tina Charles' 'I love to love' and another song that was in it was Queen's, 'We are the Champions.' I can name maybe three or four of the models that were in. It's it was really a very, very big deal for me because I remember it all. And it was the first thing that I started doing. And it was then that I realised that to be able to do it, I needed to learn lighting, I needed to learn sound. There was a lot that I needed to learn.

To learn lighting, I would go and work in the sound rooms of all the hotels where I would go and offer my services and say, 'Can I come and help you out?' And then I would then watch what was going on and learn how to light, how lighting worked. I even did it at the Tropicana in the sound room.

It was a wonderful thing because later on I would know all the people in all the sound rooms and I would be able to go, say, into the Hyatt Hotel and watch a fashion show or Sérgio Mendes & Brasil ‘66 performing in the ballroom of the Hyatt hotel but in the sound room. I go into doing shows and shows were much longer at that time and that Polaroid show was one of the first shorter shows that ran for no more than 15 or 20 minutes.

Challenges that I face as a model in that I always looked very young. I would be rejected for jobs because I didn't look old enough. I also found that the industry was very small. People had their views of you, and you may not be anything like that. We were not judged purely on our ability. It was also your reputation, what people want, you know, it wasn't in my opinion, cold professionalism, which is what I love. It's only much later on in life that when I was say, working in Paris or something and I was choreographing a show with very young people that I realised that these young people came in with no judgments about what they were seeing or hearing. They judged you entirely on what you are giving them. So it was more on my ability.”