Wow, there's a cottage industry for booking young models as fake national beauty contest winners to participate in fake international beauty contests. The quot

Wow, there's a cottage industry for booking young models as fake national beauty contest winners to participate in fake international beauty contests. The quotes are surreal: "My first stint as Miss America for hire had been that September, in the desert oasis of Dunhuang, for the city’s International Grape Festival. It was a surreal experience in which 40 models, including me, were paid to walk down a catwalk for about 2,000 locals. Later, we rode camels across the dunes of the Gobi Desert, crisscrossing the sand in single file. The photos of all 40 of us on camelback—some only in bras, to dodge tanlines—are wonderfully absurd." "For the second pageant, in October, I was hired to cruise around Dalian in a fake gold Mercedes golf cart with five other girls for three days, in an effort to lure potential buyers into investing in a miniature replica of Versailles. A printed guide to the event offered fictitious backstories in Chinese about each contestant, and her purpose there." "Of the nine 'fashion shows' I booked while in Beijing, only two were on a runway. The rest were fake pageants, car shows, and trade shows—but I was not informed of their nature until I was en route to the events. Models flagged as having low earning potential will do fake pageants frequently, as they’re easy to book. I once met a Russian teenager who was stuck traveling on a bus for 10 days across rural China as 'Miss Argentina.'"