They have stories of meeting one another at castings or shoots, and connecting via DM, less competitive than one-for-all, and all-for-Brawn. There is no one Brawn body - there are sportier Brawn guys and bulkier Brawn guys - and they operate as a friendly, go-bro fraternity, pumping each other up and celebrating every yard gained. According to the company, the Brawn division saw a 15 percent revenue growth in 2018 over 2017, and its models bookings were up 62 percent from the year prior. (Wilhelmina, a rival agency, also represents a number of bigger guys as part of its Titans division, which it launched in 2018, and recently partnered with Shaquille O’Neal on a model search competition.) But at IMG, business is booming. Three years in, IMG now has seven models in the Brawn division, one of the largest among the international agencies who supply the major fashion houses. Eventually he became, Stephens said, “more and more unavailable for bartending.” He began shooting for Target, Uniqlo, Nordstrom, Columbia, and Bonobos. The average American man’s waist size, according to the CDC, is 40 inches, just like Miko’s (never mind that, at five-foot-nine, the average American man is almost a foot shorter than him). But he began booking jobs, in a way he never did as an actor he’d said “tens of lines on television,” in his estimation, but was generally told by casting directors his size would make his prime years 50 and over and he made the better part of his living odd-jobbing. Miko and IMG got rafts of good press but whether it would translate to actual work was an open question. The Brawn division was more or less a guess. “Is there a market for that? I didn’t know anything about it - even though I’m a big and tall guy.” (It was Bart who discovered Miko, on Instagram.) “At first, it caught me off guard,” says Josh Stephens, whom Bart deputized to run the Brawn division. The onrushing tide of body positivity, with its push for inclusivity and representation in advertising and media, had already raised the profiles of curvy female models - Graham appeared on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue for the first time that year - and IMG Models president Ivan Bart made a bet that men could follow. When he was signed to IMG in 2016, Miko was the first (and at that point, only) model in the company’s new Brawn division, which aimed to elevate the careers of plus-size male models the way it already did for their plus-size female counterparts, like Ashley Graham and Candice Huffine. Photo: Joseph Bradley/courtesy of IMG models “If I suddenly drop 50 pounds,” Miko says, “I wouldn’t have any clients anymore.” Welcome to the new frontier of plus-size male modeling. Miko doesn’t earn less than the lanky models. Miko, 30, stands six-foot-six and weighs 290 pounds, more tank than twink. So the confusion is, perhaps, understandable. The sample clothes made for photo shoots are cut for their proportions: usually a 38 suit, a 32-inch waist. The usual male model is around six-foot-one, maybe six-foot-two, and falls somewhere along the spectrum of rawboned to gym-buffed. I follow them and they bring me over to a burnt-out outlet and they are like, ‘This is the one you have to replace.’” “Someone goes, ‘Oh, thank God you’re here,’” Zach Miko says. And when he arrives to work, spray-tanned and pedicured as the occasion demands, he is still sometimes mistaken for the electrician. He has been interviewed by Larry King, profiled by the New York Times, and flown to Australia to showcase swimwear. The most successful model of IMG Models’ newest division brings in a comfortable six figures per year. From left, Hunter Westfall, Zach Miko, and Matt Wirken.
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