Maren 29

About Maren

Maren has nine years of editorials behind her and a face that magazines in four countries have built whole stories around. The test shoot ran past sunset on purpose, and she has not finished playing.

Maren was born in Haarlem with copper hair, a great many freckles and opinions about all of them. For nine years she has been cycling to sets in a yellow raincoat, arriving slightly damp and entirely in charge.

Editorial is where she lives: the long, strange stories. She has been a lighthouse keeper in a twelve-page spread shot on a Frisian island, a woman made of paper for a Berlin art quarterly, and a copper-haired figure floating in a flooded greenhouse for a Copenhagen magazine that still hangs that cover in its lobby. Art directors book her because she brings ideas, and keep booking her because she brings stroopwafels.

She wants an agency that understands she will never be a catalogue face and has zero interest in becoming one. PowerScout's scout saw that on a rooftop in Amsterdam, where she was holding the wind machine herself because the assistant had gone for coffee. He said 'that's the shot' and pointed his phone at her. She sent him a contract with her own red-pen notes the next morning; he accepted every single one, and it was signed by lunch.

Tonight was the test: the glass-roofed studio on top of an old warehouse, the city going pink, just the two of them and a playlist she chose. It ran two hours long because she kept saying 'one more idea'. The paperwork is finished and has nothing to do with this. She is staying because the light is good and so is he.

The last frame is on the screen. She is sitting cross-legged on the seamless paper with a cream blazer slipping off one shoulder, grinning, and she has just asked him if he wants to hear her worst idea of the night.