While working at Starbucks in 2007, a scout from Canadian fashion magazine LouLou broke up Chelsea Joynt’s unusually bad day with a question: “Have you thought of modelling?”
Since then, she’s done editorial shoots, runway shows, and look books. She’s worked in Thailand and Hong Kong. At 21, the full-time Carleton student is now a part-time model with Next Models Canada.
“I think anyone who stereotypes is sort of an idiot themselves,” she says about the commonly held belief that models are dumb and superficial.
And while Joynt says posing for designers’ look books can make her feel like a “makeshift mannequin,” she prefers the freer style of modelling for “creatives,” which are volunteer photo shoots that promote independent artists.
She met creatives photographer Daniel Weinand at a photo shoot for Trivium, an Ottawa-based clothing store. Joynt was posing with accessories while covered in glitter.
“She got really mad at me because she couldn’t get it out of her hair,” Weinand says.
The pair hit it off and have continued to go on photo shoot adventures together, including a spontaneous late-night road trip.
“She’s pretty much game for anything,” Weinand says.
He’s not joking — the road trip photo shoot lasted 12 hours.
Joynt says the friends she’s met through modelling, like Weinand, are family. Three months after returning from Hong Kong in March 2010, her mother, Jacqueline, died of a heart failure.
“We were very, very, very close,” Joynt says.
Her father, Ronald, passed away 13 years ago in a car accident and she says she rarely sees her brother Ryan, who lives in Edmonton, or her half-brother Jy Harris.
So once her mother died, Joynt says she “literally had nothing to [her] name.” That September, an opportunity to model in Bangkok came up, and she took it.
“I was really lucky to get away from all that emotional chaos,” she says.
Joynt’s booker and friend Frank Begin accompanied her to Bangkok. Begin took Joynt’s first-ever photographs at a shoot in 2009.
“What I love about [Joynt] is that she is very versatile in the way she . . . adapts to new situations,” Begin says.
Joynt says her Bangkok experience surpassed the time she spent in Hong Kong because she was working more. Her living conditions in Thailand were also an improvement.
“In Hong Kong, I lived in a room that was the size of a closet with bunk beds. There was black mould and I got chronic bronchitis,” says Joynt.
Her Hong Kong agency, Apple, set models up in a small, shared apartment and Joynt says they refused to pay the girls if they didn’t meet weight goals.
But Joynt says she was never treated poorly because the agency knew she could leave if she felt uncomfortable.
“When you start to think something’s wrong with you, that’s when they have the upper hand, and that’s what all agencies want,” she says.
Other girls weren’t as lucky as Joynt, like 16-year-old Yana, who came from a remote Russian village.
When Apple denied her pay because she didn’t lose enough weight, Joynt says all the girls in the house chipped in to buy her food.
Despite some rough patches while in Asia, Joynt says the overall experience was great and she has taken away many close friendships.
After a complicated past that includes being bullied throughout high school and switching schools multiple times as a result, as well as trying to be there for her sick mother, Joynt says she feels ready to turn her attention to school.
She’s in her first year of human rights at Carleton, but hopes to switch to global politics in the fall because she says it’s the perfect combination of her interests in foreign affairs and economics. She continues to model occasionally.
“I just don’t want to waste anymore time,” she says, noting she’s thinking of a career in pharmaceutical advocacy.
When her mom was sick, Joynt says she saw first-hand the lack of care and time pharmaceutical companies took towards diagnosing patients.
“They could care better for people and they choose not to,” she says.
After graduation, Joynt says she wants to travel and visit international friends.
If she’s ready for a break from school when next summer rolls around, she says she’s thinking of modelling in Tokyo.
Besides that, though, Joynt is ready to trade the excitement and unpredictability of modelling for a more reliable career.
“Right now, I’m comfortable,” she says. “I’m finally getting some security.”
