Double Exposure

Even in this city accustomed to scores of beautiful models strolling its boulevards, Alhambra natives Kristy and Jaclyn Hunt almost always command a double double take.

It’s not just that the brown-eyed brunets are 5 foot 11 and thin enough to glide into size 4 designer gowns. They’re also identical twin models who’ve quietly been generating a small buzz within fashion circles.

As remarkable as their striking looks is the sameness of their mannerisms, thoughts, tastes and aspirations. The constant companions complete each other’s sentences, like an old married couple. They studied the same courses in college, pursued the same interests as children and only now do they spend some time apart--both live in South Pasadena except when Kristy visits her Florida boyfriend.

“It’s a twin thing,” explained Jaclyn. The difference in their faces and their personalities comes through when the reticent young women relax and grow chattier at a cafe near Paris’ famed Hediard gourmet store. Kristy is quieter, but more droll. Jaclyn has slightly finer bone structure. Both are direct and matter of fact.

“I call them thinking men’s beauties,” said Stasia Langford, their booking agent at LA Models, where they launched their 9-month-old career. “Women find them interesting and men don’t know, but there’s something about them.”

The 23-year-old twins possess an unconventional, slightly exotic appeal, a blend of their German-Mexican lineage. When they were teenagers, their looks caused L.A.-based photographer Norma Zuniga to chase them across a South Pasadena parking lot to hire the then-undiscovered girls. As Zuniga excitedly approached their car, the teens were apprehensive.

“We cracked the window only a little bit because we thought she was psycho,” recalled Kristy, who is quieter but more sarcastic than her twin. Zuniga became a friend who coached the reserved, inseparable girls through photo sessions in which they sometimes were completely silent.

The twins have matured to resemble a cross between models Stella Tennant and Rudi Gernreich’s muse Peggy Moffitt, whose ‘60s bowl-shaped haircut they now sport. It’s a look that helped them win acclaim in their first days as professionals.

Last summer, when they finally heeded advice to go professional, they attended local open calls for new talent. They struck a chord at LA Models. “It’s very rare that you find such interesting girls with height whose look is very right-now,” said Langford, who immediately sent their photos to New York Model Management, a companion agency with many high-fashion clients.

Within the first 10 days of their June arrival in New York, the twins scooped up a month’s worth of nonstop assignments at a range of international magazines. With their career just 2 months old, they shot an elaborate, 16-page spread of haute couture in German Vogue with revered fashion and art photographer Ruven Afanador. Days later, they scored a spot in a high-profile Banana Republic campaign, a breakthrough coup that sometimes eludes other beginning models for years.

“I would say that 70% of this business is personality,” said Langford. “These girls are really easy- going, and people like them. That’s half the battle.” It’s the other half that’s getting harder.

The twins spent most of March idling in Paris hoping to earn high-profile runway exposure from the fall pret-a-porter previews that just ended. They also hoped to make connections with magazines, stylists and photographers. But they landed little runway experience and sprinting to last-minute calls for show castings and magazine shoots grew tiresome.

Their luck, though, improved off the runway. Top fashion photographer Paolo Roversi hired them for a lingerie shoot, a tough assignment for even more experienced models that they completed with aplomb.

“It was supposed to be semi-nude because it was lingerie,” said Jaclyn.

“It ended up that Jaclyn was completely nude,” Kristy said, “and I was wearing stockings and shoes.”

“It wasn’t awkward at all,” Jaclyn said, explaining that the setup was private and comfortable. They also understood that the shots wouldn’t be published beyond Roversi’s portfolio.

Ironically, their professional composure in such a trying situation stems from their naivete. “At the time, we didn’t know who [Roversi] was,” said Kristy. “In a way, if we don’t know who they are,” said Jaclyn, “it helps us not be nervous.”

In addition to learning who the top fashion photographers, models and designers are, they’re also learning how to budget, because modeling agencies don’t front their travel expenses, causing them a degree of worry.

“We’re not getting a lot of work,” Kristy said as she and her sister waited backstage at the only runway show they worked in Paris--for the virtually unknown French designer Julie Schouvey. “Shows are really, really tough,” said Cheri Bowen, who represents the twins at New York Model Management. “There are 15 places in a show, and there are 25 huge supermodels. There are few slots for a new girl.” It takes years, Bowen said, for models to create relationships with the runway image makers. “As soon as they get one of those people to like them,” she said, “that’s when they will get their season.”

Runways also aren’t receptive to women with busty figures. Though their C-cup shape would be celebrated elsewhere, most designer samples are cut for less amply proportioned women. Their Paris agent, Marcus Pettersen, said newcomers often work fewer than three runway shows in their first try. But few are honored with a shoot by photographers such as Roversi. “It’s a very big thing,” Pettersen said. “I think I was more thrilled than them.”

For their upcoming trips to New York, London and Milan, they will concentrate on print work. The freer, risk-taking environment of magazine shoots is a good fit for the twins, who are often described as “editorial” in industry parlance, because they have an avant-garde, atypical look that fits with high-fashion magazines. Their biggest success has been with German Vogue, where Afanador cleverly used them to ease logistics.

“In shooting couture, it takes so long to do each look because everything is so involved,” he said. “Just to get a model dressed for a couture shoot sometimes takes three times as long as a regular shoot. The clothes are so layered and intricate. Having the two of them who were so identical made our time be more efficient,” Afanador said.

With two models, the pace was never interrupted, and Afanador could freely indulge in elaborate hair and makeup, which created some spectacular shots. Though he had never before met the twins, he said he was struck by their photos and their “special skin--like alabaster. I could tell by instinct that they had this quality that was more like a painter’s model,” he said. “I’m always attracted to this kind of look, instead of a look that is a fashion, trendy model look.”

Afanador’s shots make up a significant part of the twins’ portfolio, which includes other photos of them as a pair. They have decided to work only as a team, a decision that could both help and hurt their nascent career. Bookings may come easier because they occupy a rare niche, but jobs for twins are limited.

“The disadvantage is that sometimes they are only looked at as twins,” Langford said. “Once they run the gamut of the novelty factor, then you say, now what?”

The two are preparing themselves; they both graduated from Loyola Marymount in Westchester in 2001 with degrees in animation and have plans for more education. Instead of hitting Paris nightspots, the serious-minded twins--who sport hip-hugger jeans and pepper their speech with such youthful slang as “sucky”--stayed in an apartment far from the city’s core to study for their graduate entrance exams.

“The thing that keeps us going,” said Kristy, “is that we know we are working toward graduate school. This is something to do in the meantime, and we like to travel.”

Watching them chase jobs in Paris was an eye-opener, said their mother, Carmen Hunt, a speech communication professor at El Camino College. Their father, Fred Hunt, is also a teacher. “You have to have a real sense of confidence when you walk into a casting and someone in a second says, ‘Thank you, you’re out of here,’” Carmen Hunt said. “It takes courage to go on.

“It’s a very lonely business,” she said, “but they have each other. That’s what makes it work.”