Every year, on campuses across India and well beyond, students who have never been asked to stand at the front of anything sign up for the fashion society, the ramp walk, the annual fest. Parents call it a distraction. Friends call it vanity. The students themselves rarely have the words for what they are looking for. But ask them what modelling gives them and the answers are remarkably consistent, and none of them is really about clothes. This article is about why young people choose modelling, the five feelings it offers, and what those feelings reveal about what a young person is missing everywhere else.
Young people choose modelling because it offers, in a short and socially legitimate window, five experiences that ordinary student life quietly withholds: permission to be expressive, freedom from an assigned identity, the shock of being seen differently, a physical form of confidence, and a brief taste of power over a room’s attention. The clothes are the pretext. The feelings are the point. Understanding this matters, because the same five hungers show up later in boardrooms and marriages, dressed differently but no less urgent.
The feeling of expressiveness: permission to take up space
Most young people, particularly in cultures that prize modesty and obedience, are trained early in the art of shrinking. Speak when spoken to. Do not draw attention. Be a good son, a good daughter, a good student. By the time they reach college, many have a face for the family, a face for teachers and a face for friends, and none of those faces is allowed to be large.
The ramp reverses the instruction. For ninety seconds you are told, officially, to be seen. To walk slowly. To hold a gaze. To take up more space than you have ever been permitted to take. Psychologically this is not showing off; it is the release of expressive suppression, the habit of pushing feeling and presence down so that nobody is inconvenienced by it. I have written before about how costly that habit becomes in men who learned it young, in understanding male inexpressiveness. Modelling is, for many, the first structured setting where expressiveness is not punished but applauded.
The feeling of freedom: a holiday from the assigned self
Every young person arrives at college carrying an identity they did not choose. The topper. The quiet one. The overweight cousin. The boy who is “not the confident type”. These labels are handed out in childhood and rarely reviewed.
Erik Erikson described adolescence and early adulthood as the period in which identity is negotiated rather than inherited, and the negotiation needs raw material. It needs experiments. Modelling is an unusually efficient experiment because it changes everything at once: posture, clothing, lighting, audience, and the story other people are telling about you. In self-determination theory, the framework developed by Ryan and Deci, one of the three basic psychological needs is autonomy, the sense that your actions are yours rather than imposed. The freedom students describe on the ramp is not freedom from rules; there are more rules on a runway than in a lecture hall. It is freedom from the self that was assigned to them.
“No one has seen me like this before”: the identity rupture
This is the sentence I hear most often, and it deserves attention because it contains two people. The “me” that walked out, and the “me” that nobody had seen. The student is not simply enjoying attention. They are witnessing, through other people’s reactions, evidence that they contain a version of themselves they had not been introduced to.
That is a genuine psychological event. Our sense of who we are is built partly from what psychologists call reflected appraisal, the process of assembling a self-image out of how others respond to us. When a room responds to a version of you that your family and school never called forth, the self-image is forced to expand. The old story, “I am not that kind of person”, develops a crack. Some students find that exhilarating. Some find it frightening, because a crack in the old story is also a crack in the certainties that kept them safe. Both responses are healthy. What matters is what happens next.
The feeling of confidence: borrowed first, earned later
Ask any student what modelling gave them and “confidence” is the first word. It is worth being precise about what kind.
There is a well-known line of research on enclothed cognition, the finding that clothing with symbolic meaning changes how the wearer thinks and behaves, not just how others perceive them. Some of the earliest studies have faced replication questions, though a 2023 meta-analysis found that later, better-designed studies do support the core principle. The honest summary is that what we wear does shift how we feel and act, and that the effect is real but modest.
That modesty is the important part. The confidence a student feels in a tailored jacket under stage lights is borrowed. It comes from the costume, the choreography, the crowd. It fades in the corridor afterwards. This is not a criticism. Borrowed confidence is how all confidence begins. The nervous system learns what it is capable of through evidence of behaviour, and the ramp provides that evidence in concentrated form: I stood there, I was watched, I did not collapse. Self-determination theory calls this the need for competence, the felt sense of being effective. Repeated often enough, borrowed confidence becomes owned confidence, which is why the students who benefit most are not the ones who walk once but the ones who return, rehearse, fail a turn, and walk again. I have explored the slower version of this process in overcoming self-doubt and building confidence.
The feeling of power: holding attention without asking for it
The fifth feeling is the one students are least willing to name, and it is the most revealing. On the ramp, you do not request attention. You command it, silently, and a room full of people gives it to you. For a young person who has spent years asking for permission, being interrupted, being overlooked, that experience lands somewhere very deep.
Power here is not dominance. It is closer to what happens in the body when the usual vigilance switches off. Most young people move through the world scanning for judgement. Adolescents in particular overestimate how much others notice them, a bias known as the spotlight effect, and the anxiety it produces is exhausting. The ramp is the one place where the spotlight is literal, and paradoxically that is a relief. You no longer have to guess whether people are looking. They are. You can stop scanning and simply be. Many students describe this as the first time their mind went quiet in public.
What the ramp is really rehearsing
Put the five feelings together, and a pattern appears. Expressiveness, freedom, rupture, confidence and power are not five separate pleasures. They are five faces of one experience: meeting a version of yourself before you believe it is yours.
I call this the Rehearsal Self, the version of you that first appears inside a performed role, a costume or a stage, before your identity has caught up with it. The Rehearsal Self is not fake. It is early. It is who you are becoming, borrowing a structure because it does not yet have one of its own. Almost everyone who grows meets their Rehearsal Self somewhere: in a debate, a first job, a leadership role they did not feel ready for. Modelling simply makes the meeting visible and gives it a soundtrack.
Three questions worth sitting with, whether you are twenty or forty:
- Which version of yourself have you only ever met in a role?
- What would it cost the people who assigned your old identity if the new one turned out to be true?
- What are you waiting for the audience to confirm before you allow yourself to believe it?
The clothes are the pretext. The ramp is a rehearsal for a self you do not yet believe is yours.
When the feeling ends: the risk worth naming
There is a failure mode, and it is common enough to state plainly. If the only place you can feel expressive, free, seen, confident and powerful is under stage lights, then the lights become the source rather than the trigger. The self stays borrowed. Applause becomes a supply. Some students carry this into adulthood as a hunger for external validation that no amount of achievement satisfies, a pattern I have described in why every success and failure is psychological.
The healthy path is different. The ramp shows you what you are capable of feeling. The work is to learn how to feel it without the ramp: to speak up in the seminar, to hold a gaze in a job interview, to be expressive at the family dinner table where it was never allowed. That is the transfer that turns a hobby into development.
The young person who walks the ramp and then walks away has learned something true about themselves. What they do with it in ordinary light is where the real story begins.
If you are at that point, in college or long past it, and you can feel a version of yourself that only appears in certain rooms, life coaching is a structured way to find out whether that version is a performance or a preview. Most of the time, it is the second.
