The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 91

Model Use-by date-. 25 years I V-' At. i v1 Are you a v. re CM Use-by date: C-JifW. Til' It ill iS'M It's an awful moment just when you think you're next in line for that promotion you hear it's gone to someone else.

Someone younger. And that means your climb up the corporate ladder is over. Yes, every career has a use-by date -but how can you tell if you've reached yours? By Kate Nancarrow. Photographs by Dean Phipps. beautiful features under the mountainous burger? What if she usually comes long before retirement age.

They can be Let's rethink the past decade of Sarah O'Hare's life and give her a Siaiiig Doors experience. A young, beautiful girl has just finished school for the day and wanders out of the railway station, where Vivien Smith of Vivien's Model Management spots her. Vivien does the "I can make you a model" spiel and 10 days later, Sarah O'Hare is on the cover of Vogue. Ten years on, she's married to Lachlan Murdoch, has Revlon and Wonderbra contracts and is, in her words, financially secure and thrilled with her life. But what if at 17 Sarah was mired in teenage acne, at 20 had a bout of agoraphobia and never went near a train station, at 23 suffered a bit with psoriasis and, at 26, she's stuffing her face with a Big Mac at the very moment she passes the talent-spotting Vivien who, not surprisingly, misses her isn't discovered until this year, when she is 28 and married to Wayne, a blond surfie from her home town of Collaroy Plateau? She's still tall, blonde, slim, beautiful but 28.

Could she become a mega-model, could she realistically dream of becoming the face (and bust) of Wonderbra and snaring a Revlon contract, let alone of divorcing Wayne and marrying a media scion? Or would she be on the train to Nowheresville, past it before she even got started and destined never to enter the modelling world because she knocked on its doors too late? Many careers have trip wires ti iat can de-kaii, a career at 20, 25, 30 or 40 wherever it is placed, it physical models' looks fading, sporty types whose bodies won't do what they used to; they can be mental the mathematician who makes more errors more often; the advertising or design wunderkind whose ideas are no longer quite on the money; they can be stamina-related -investment bankers and lawyers, exhausted, divorced, burnt out (or all three) by 40. It doesn't mean you'll never work in the industry again but the opportunity to reach the top will have past You will become an also-ran. A spokeswoman for Vivien's Model Management, Janene Dethridge, acknowledges the past-it problem for most models but says there is a long career for those who begin young; they can move 6 SundayLifel.