Editor’s note: This is the second of two stories featuring Brookings County native Jake Sanderson, who works as a professional model in New York City.
BROOKINGS – Jake Sanderson went from being a South Dakota farm boy to a New York model, but it’s not all bright lights in the big city.
“It can be very glamorous,” Sanderson admits, but his Midwestern upbringing refuses to let him take it too seriously.
The glamorous life
The Brookings County native likes taking advantage of the opportunities modeling provides him, like experiencing the club scene and hanging out with “really cool people,” but he realizes it’s a job and there’s a lot of work involved.
First, there’s just getting a job. Auditions are called castings.
You have to have the right look, of course, but no one has the right look for every job. You might go on a lot of castings and not be offered a single job, but you always have to be ready, just in case.
Sanderson said his mom, Liz, gave him a solid nutritional base, so “it’s always been pretty easy for me to keep my diet in order.”
Sanderson, 26, has always been an athlete, participating in track and soccer as a Brookings Bobcat, and running track as a South Dakota State University Jackrabbit.
“I do a lot of different stuff. I don’t have a real set thing,” Sanderson said.
Depending on the day, he lifts weights, plays soccer once a week, shoots hoops, does YouTube videos for cardio workouts, and lives life in New York City.
“There’s a lot of walking in the lifestyle,” he said referring to the fact many New Yorkers don’t have a car. “It’s pretty easy to get your cardio in.
“Just make sure I get my heart rate up; that’s pretty much what it’s about, I guess,” Sanderson said.
When asked if he worries about injuring his face, he shrugs.
“Eh. I just hope I don’t get smacked in the face. It hasn’t happened yet … well, yes it has, just nothing bad. My play style isn’t too rough anyway, so I usually stay out of the bad challenges,” Sanderson said.
“It’s not worth it to me to give up things I love to make sure I don’t get hit in the face. I love playing soccer and love playing all kinds of sports. I’ll always be playing those. If something happens, it happens. It’s not really worth it to not be able to do fun things,” he said.
Keeping in shape to fit into the clothes is important, but the activity also helps him cope with the down time where you may not have a job for two months and have to keep your spirits up.
“There’s really, really slow periods and sometimes there’s fast periods,” Sanderson said. “There’s been times like that when all of a sudden I’ll get five or six different high-paying jobs in a month.”
On call all the time
Models have to be ready to go because they never know when their agent will call to say they’ve got a job, and then things move fast.
“Almost every job that you get, you don’t really find out about it until maybe like two days or one day, the day before,” Sanderson said on a recent visit back home. “Even right now when I’m on vacation, my agent could call me and say there’s a job, big job they want you for. They just might fly me out tomorrow.”
In fact, it happened to him.
“I had my flight to come home here scheduled for Dec. 14 for like two months out,” Sanderson said. “A week before you’re supposed to leave, you get scheduled for a job a day after or two days after your plane flight, so you kind of have to decide if you want to take that job and change your flight or just skip it.”
He chose the former option.
“This was a pretty good job for Nautica, which is a well-known brand, so that’s cool. I’ll just bite the bullet and get the other ticket and do my job. Hopefully, a job like that will lead to other jobs with that company,” Sanderson said.
Long days
“My favorite thing about modeling is actually working on the job,” Sanderson said. “The day goes by really easily, really quickly. The people I work with are usually awesome and nice.”
He did a photo shoot for MR Magazine in March of last year. The shoot took just one day, but it was 10 hours long. Most of that time was getting from location to location.
Hair, make-up and wardrobe is a big part of the business, with stylists fussing over models for long periods of time to get things just right.
“That can take a while, usually it’s not so bad,” Sanderson said. “Hair and make-up takes a lot longer for the girls than it does for guys … Usually it’s very minimal make-up for me, just a little under the eyes and some on the nose. And they sometimes clean up my eyebrows a bit because I have pretty crazy eyebrows. That’s one of my features that people like.”
His hair has its own story.
“I’m about due for a haircut,” he said.
When he started, it was longer and he did some shoots, like one for Men’s Fitness “with my really long, curly mop … a Roger Federer-esque picture, I would say.”
The look wasn’t working, so he decided to cut it short on the sides and back, leaving the top “decently long – that was a massive haircut,” Sanderson said.
“Usually they like to keep my hair pretty natural,” he said. “Sometimes they just really want to slick it down. I hate that, but that’s the look they want sometimes. My hair does not listen to products. You put it in, and a minute later, it goes out of place.”
Modeling is one of the few professions where females are more highly prized and make more money than the men. The payoff is that men can work longer.
“Males can model into their, like, 50s and on,” Sanderson said. “There’s a lot of different niches. The whole salt and pepper thing – that’s a thing. One of the most popular things is dudes with huge beards and tattoos. That’s really popular. It’s definitely not my look, but it’s a good look and people like it.
“Male fashion has been growing, so maybe someday there will be a lot more male models,” Sanderson said.
An eye on the future
He said he’s doing OK in the business, financially and otherwise.
“I’m definitely making strides,” Sanderson said.
That gives him the impetus to keep going, but with clear eyes.
“I’m just open to sticking it out and trying to do as well as I can,” he said. “If it becomes something that I can do for a very long time, I’ll do it. If there’s ever a point where I’m absolutely not working and it doesn’t make sense, that’ll be when I’m done.
“I like to take my life day by day and not sitting here trying to dig away at this ultimate end-goal and once I get there, I’m there. If something comes up that’s better than modeling that I like more and I realize I like it, I’ll do that, I guess, but I’d love for modeling to go for a long time or to venture into acting, because there’s a lot of opportunity for that, too.”
One of the things that keeps him going is the support of his parents, Liz and Jan, and siblings Josie, Noah, Abby and Lily.
“Noah’s a huge inspiration with all his traveling and stuff he’s done. He’s very vocally supportive and motivating,” Sanderson said.
He also gets support from friends like Dan Herman, another model from SDSU, and Matt Huska, as well as girlfriend Alexandria Suhr, “one of my biggest supporters.”
It means a lot to know he has them to lean on and he wants to pass that on to others. He said he can be found on Instagram at jakeysanderson, and he’s willing to answer questions or give information about the business.
“It’s pretty easy to keep going when you have so many people that believe in you,” he said.
Contact Jodelle Greiner at jgreiner@brookingsregister.com.
