‘Shy boy’ is TT’s Top Model

Arion Perouse will be heading to castings for the London and Paris Fashion Week in January.
Arion Perouse will be heading to castings for the London and Paris Fashion Week in January.

MODELLING was the last thing on 17-year-old Arion Perouse’s mind. Instead, the Manzanilla Secondary School A-level student dreamt of being a footballer.

Today, Perouse is TT’s top male model. Perouse and Sarah Jane Jones are the winners of Top Model Trinidad and Tobago 2018. Top Model finals were held on October 14.

In January, Perouse will be heading to castings for London and Paris’ Fashion week, his first move into the wider fashion world and industry.

When Christopher Nathan, Coco Velvet International Fashion and Model Management’s founder, saw Perouse, he knew that he possessed all of the requirements to go “straight to the top.”

Nathan estimates getting a top model with the “full package” is one in 100,000.

Getting the full package from them, he said, includes the right height, a slim, athletic physique and “a personality that draws you in.” And Perouse, he added, possessed all.

“Even though when I approached him, he was a little hesitant.... I approached him and told him what I was about and he told me he was interested in football. And that was his passion,” Nathan said at an interview at Hyatt Regency Trinidad, Wrightson Road, Port of Spain.

TT Top Model Male Arion Perouse.

Both Perouse and Nathan met each other when Nathan visited the school in March to introduce students to careers in the fashion industry.

When Nathan told Perouse he could become an international model one day, he did not believe.

“I was not really interested in fashion and modelling and stuff. He handed me a contract to join Coco Velvet International which I refused because I told him I was a footballer,” Perouse said during the interview with Nathan and his mother, Patricia Diaz.

“But he still gave me the contract and told me to think about it, ‘carry it home for your mom and let her read it over’. I said, ‘all right I will take it’.”

Male Top Model TT winner Arion Perouse, second from right, with Top Model judges from left, Wendy Fitzwilliam, John Bilboa, director Elite, Latin and South America, and Luis Domingo, representative of IMG Model Management London.

At the career day, he encouraged Perouse to attend the workshops, which he eventually did but missed the orientation at the National Library and Information System Authority (Nalis), Hart and Abercromby Streets, Port of Spain. The workshops ran from July 1 to September 26 and Perouse attended 50 per cent of the sessions, Nathan said.

Before he began attending the workshops, Perouse worked at Maharaj Budget Prices Supermarket, Sangre Grande, where Nathan saw him, again, and encouraged him to attend.

“He told me ‘You can’t be so for the rest of your life’.”

He said he missed a lot of the sessions because of transportation.

Initially, Perouse shared some of the negative perceptions held by many about males in the fashion industry. There were some who even tried to discourage him saying that “was for b------n.”

When he was approached by Nathan that day at school he had given Nathan his mother’s number. Nathan called Diaz and asked her to encourage Perouse to attend “because it is a great opportunity.”

“I sat down and said okay I will talk to him and I really did. I said, ‘You know Arion your plan is really to travel anyhow, because he is into football, he and his brother (Aaron).

“I told him to go and try it and see how it will be. I was not thinking he would have won. I was thinking he would have gone for the experience and all that,” Diaz recalled.

Top models Sarah Jane Jones and Arion Perouse at Trinidad Styleweek 2018.

Initially, Perouse was very “shy” and described his walk was “stiff.” Being on camera was also something new for him.

But modelling, Diaz noticed, built Perouse’s self-esteem and confidence.

It was after being chosen by all ten judges at the September 6 semi-finals that Nathan said Perouse really began to take it seriously.

He hopes to go as far as he can in the modelling industry. All ten judges, locally, chose him to be in the top ten and he sees it as “them having faith in me and I can make it far.

“But I am going to go as far as I can go within the three-year international modelling contract from Elite Model Management and five years locally from Coco Velvet International.”

For him, he sees modelling as a tool to help him “help out my family.”

When he was announced as the top male model, on October 14 Perouse was excited but also “didn’t believe it. I was real shocked. Overwhelmed.”

“I was emotional. I cried because Mr Nathan was talking about how he discovered me,” he said.

Although Nathan had visited other schools such as Matelot Community College, Toco Composite (now Toco Secondary School), Matura Secondary and Manzanilla and interviewed “maybe over 500 students” only five students came.

At the competition’s pre-judging, the judges “immediately picked him (Perouse) as the winner.”

“At the pre-judging, they decide who has the full package and immediately the chief judge told me Arion Perouse is the boy to win. I was really moved to tears because I remember our conversation in the supermarket and lo and behold this unassuming, shy boy has the opportunity to become an international superstar,” Nathan said.

“He will be based here in TT for the time being until he is ready to work and I will determine that by his maturity and his ability to stand on his own two feet.

“So we would not send him out in the deep end at first. I will go with him in January to make sure he is okay before he settles in.”

Nathan said the industry “is very difficult and for the men it is even more difficult because the women are taken care of. They have a chaperone. They put them in a model hotel. They pay for all of their bills initially. They do not do that with the boys.

“But he has a nice, easy-going personality and a positive attitude which is going to take him far. The industry does not like the negativity that you get from a lot of young people now and the ones who want overnight success.”

Nathan hopes that Perouse will one day become a role model and example to other local young boys who did not take the opportunity.

The world, Nathan added, is looking at TT as a hotspot for fashion and for modelling talent. “In fact, it is unprecedented that in one competition I was able to sign 15 models to international contracts; normally it is one winner or two winners,” he said.

He believes that people will be coming to Trinidad to scout models. “The foreign judges who came to judge TT Top Model were absolutely flabbergasted by the ethnic diversity of TT....I think that is what we are selling. That mixture where you can fit in any market,” he said.

Nathan, who has been in the fashion industry for the past 40 years, however, has retired from the local industry. He is “fed up of the politics in fashion in TT.”

“I have given 40 years of service to the industry and over the years, Coco Velvet International has laid a foundation for the fashion industry. We have never been recognised by the stakeholders nor the Government.

“That was the last straw that caused me to decide it is time to retire and I will only be managing the international models moving forward, but Coco Velvet Fashion Management is being closed,” Nathan said.

Nathan is now looking to take his expertise, international, with two options in Cape Town, South Africa.

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