The Democratic candidate for governor was leading in the polls, and his Republican opponent hoped that a detail from his past would turn off voters: The small-town boy from northeast Iowa used to be a high-fashion model.
In a Wall Street Journal interview ahead of the election, Sand downplayed the brief chapter of his résumé that saw him walking Prada’s runway and appearing in fashion shoots while he was a college student at Brown. “It wasn’t that different from the rest of the jobs I had, other than, you know, it was part-time instead of full-time. In recent days, Sand has mostly been seen in casual attire. During the first televised general election debate in October and for his first news conference as governor-elect Monday, he didn’t even bother wearing a tie.
“It’s a job I had,” he said.
Now that he’s won , Sand’s supporters are embracing his high-fashion turn. It ran for almost two weeks at the end of the campaign. Politics is filled with former actors and pageant queens, charismatic people who turned their penchant for performance into the basis of successful campaigns. The pipeline from fashion model to politician is less common.
As of Monday afternoon, about 1,500 shirts had been sold, his campaign said. Zach Lahn, Sand’s Republican opponent, spent $1.9 million on the ad, placing it in the top 10 for dollars spent on an individual commercial by that campaign, according to AdImpact data. One exception is former President Gerald Ford, who appeared in the pages of Look magazine in 1940 with his then-girlfriend, a model named Phyllis Brown. Her agent, Harry Conover, said that Ford was also the model for an illustrated cover of Cosmopolitan in 1942. (An archivist at the Gerald R.
Photos of the governor-elect from that time have gone viral on social media, and his campaign website is now selling $32 T-shirts that read “My Model Governor” with a collage of images from his modeling past. Ford Presidential Library said no other evidence corroborates that it was Ford in the image.) “They cast young men from untraditional places,” said culture editor Laia Garcia-Furtado, author of the new book “Prada in the Nineties. The goal, she said, is to find models who have “a specific look that everyone else tries to adopt. “Historically, it has been a launching pad for new faces, often turning unknown talent into some of the most sought-after names in the industry,” Jaga Acquarulo, the men’s board director at the Society, a modeling agency in New York City, said in an email.
