This young girl was indeed an old soul, but she still expressed her opinions like a brash youth.

I teased her. “You’re more of an R. Kelly kind of girl, huh?”

She grunted, “Mmm, no comment there. He needs to…mmm.”

I couldn’t tell if that was good or bad, but it meant something.

I kept moving the subjects around. Young people like to keep it poppin’, you know.

“So what’s on your agenda for the rest of the month?” I asked her.

“Why, aren’t you coming out to the West Coast in a couple of weeks?”

“Yeah, but I was talking about your schedule.”

“Oh, well, I don’t have anything coming—Oh, yes, I do,” she stopped and corrected herself. “I’m shooting a fashion spread for Vibe magazine.”

“Oh, Vibe, that’s good. Is it an entire spread or just a page?”

“Whatever it is, I’ll take it,” she answered.

Then I decided to tease her again. “But isn’t Vibe kind of young, too? That’s Usher’s prime audience.”

“Yeah, it is, isn’t it.”

“You should be pushing for Essence, or getting involved with the Ebony Fashion Fair.”

“Oh, we are. But in the meantime—”

I cut her off and said, “This Vibe spread was not your aunt’s idea, was it?” I was quite sure that Paula knew better than that.

TaShay answered, “Oh, no, she doesn’t want me to do it. I just figured it would be fun to get a little funky in the clothes. Vibe gets funky with it. A lot of the other magazines look stuffy to me.”

Yeah, she was still young all right. Fashion modeling wasn’t about how the clothes looked as much as it was about the perception that people had of you while in the clothes. Funky in Vibe could also mean urban, and not mainstream to the main brands, which could lock TaShay out of a more lucrative modeling career.

I said, “Did you fight your aunt for this Vibe spread?” I just couldn’t see Paula going for it. Vibe was very much a part of the video culture they were trying so hard to steer TaShay away from.

“Well, I tried to explain to her that I need to be seen by as many people as possible, and not by just one particular crowd of people,” she explained to me.

I said, “You can do that through ads. You get her to pitch you to Rocawear, Baby Phat, and all of those guys for clothing ads, that way you’re getting paid more to do it, and you get more of a premiere spot with an ad.

“Less is more, and in your case, less is also best,” I told her. “In an ad, you would be pushed more as an individual, and you’re actually being pushed by a brand. That’s the major difference between regular models and supermodels. Supermodels get the brand names behind them.”

TaShay got real quiet on me. I didn’t like the sound of that. I didn’t want to come off like an overbearing father figure or anything, I was just expressing what I knew about the fashion, modeling, and magazine industries. So at the end of all of that, I backed off and said, “But that’s just my opinion. You could very well be right. Hip-hop is controlling everything now. It’s the new wave of the future.”