Whether you are a production team or brand casting across the full range of real people, or someone who has never matched the traditional idea of a model and is weighing up modelling yourself, this guide is a starting point. It also sets out why this is not a recent shift for HHM: the instinct to make room for talent the industry overlooked has run through two generations of family ownership since 1991, even as the way it is practised has moved on.
For most of advertising's history, the people in the pictures were there to be admired rather than recognised. Tall, slim, young, symmetrical. A narrow physical ideal that a large part of any audience could never see themselves in, and that quietly told everyone outside it they weren't quite the point.
That has changed, and not mainly for moral reasons. It changed because it stopped working. Brands worked out that a campaign full of people who look nothing like the customer doesn't sell to that customer, and that audiences respond to faces they recognise as their own. Over the past decade or so the market has corrected, hard, toward real people of every kind. The practical result for anyone considering modelling is simple: there is more commercial work available now for people who were never the traditional type than there has ever been.
None of which is news to us. HHM has been casting for real, varied people since 1991, and the part of the industry that now treats authentic representation as a discovery is, from where we sit, arriving somewhere we set out from.
We have been doing this for a long time
Hired Hands Models was founded in 1991 by Steve and Judi Barker. In the 1990s and early 2000s, while much of the industry was still working to a fairly fixed idea of who a model was, they ran specialist divisions for the talent the mainstream tended to overlook.
One was Origin, representing talent from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds. Another was Role Models, built around real working people — the builder, the gardener, the person who looks like an actual customer rather than an aspiration. A third, Suits, covered corporate talent. The thread running through all three was the same conviction that still drives the agency: that the most useful talent for a brand is usually the talent that looks like the people the brand is talking to.
The Origin catalogue still exists. It's a physical book of talent cards — names, measurements, black-and-white headshots — and it's a more convincing record than anything we could write here, because it shows the agency genuinely representing this breadth of people thirty years ago, not claiming to in hindsight.
So when we say HHM has championed inclusive casting for decades, it isn't a positioning line written to suit the moment. It's a matter of record: we even have a book to prove it.
An Editorial note on past language used
We share that history honestly, which means being straight about the parts of it that haven't aged well.
The Origin division, and the way its talent was grouped, used terminology that was in mainstream use in the 1990s and would not be chosen today. Some of it is now rightly recognised as outdated and, in places, offensive. We've left that language firmly in the past. Our understanding has moved on with the wider culture's, and we no longer group talent by ethnicity at all — because genuine representation means diversity woven through the whole roster, not partitioned off into a separate category, which on reflection does more to reinforce a sense of "otherness" than to dissolve it.
We raise the history not because the words were right. By today's understanding, they weren't. We raise it because the intent behind it was. Steve and Judi were trying to create space and opportunity for talent the industry overlooked, well before that became a priority anyone else was acting on. That instinct was right then and it's right now. The implementation has evolved; the direction never needed to.
Why we back commercial modelling over fashion
Role Models — the everyday-people division — is the direct ancestor of something HHM still argues for today: that commercial modelling, not fashion modelling, is where real representation lives and where most of the actual work is.
Fashion modelling operates inside narrow physical parameters by design, because the garments and the editorial aesthetic call for a particular silhouette. Commercial modelling has no such constraint. A healthcare brand needs someone who genuinely looks like the patient. A pension provider needs a face with real authority and age behind it. A supermarket needs people who look like families. The brief decides the casting, and briefs run across every age, body type, ethnicity and characteristic there is.
Repeatable, recognisable, real people — which is exactly what Role Models was built on.
Why inclusive casting works
The approach behind all of this is straightforward: open the casting up. The traditional idea of who belonged in front of a camera was narrow by habit, not by necessity, and most of the people it left out are the same people brands are trying to reach. Casting across size, age, background, ability and presentation gives a more accurate picture of who actually buys things, and it gives more people a genuine route into the work.
That accuracy is where the commercial benefit sits, because audiences notice whether they are in the picture. A customer who never sees anyone like themselves in a brand's advertising tends to conclude, quietly, that the brand is not really for them. People respond to faces and bodies they recognise as their own, and no product is used only by some narrow ideal. Customers come in every shape, size, ability and background, so casting that reflects them reaches more of them, not fewer. The commercial case and the representation case turn out to be the same case.
It is also why authenticity does work that approximation cannot. A campaign that casts a genuine gay couple lands with the LGBTQ+ audience it is speaking to, because that audience reads the difference at a glance: the ease, the small specifics, the things a performance does not reproduce. Cast two straight models to play the part and the audience you were hoping to reach is the first to notice, and what was meant as inclusion comes across as a brand talking about people rather than to them. The same holds across disability and every other lived experience. Someone who actually holds it brings something to the frame that direction and styling cannot add afterwards, and the people who share that experience can tell. Authentic casting earns trust because it is true; the approximated version tends to get spotted, and spends that trust instead.
We make the point here for a straightforward reason: building a roster around real, varied people is what HHM has done since long before the wider market treated it as a priority.
Honouring what's specific to each strand
"Diversity" is a flattening word. The strands below have little in common beyond having been underserved by a narrow ideal, so each is worth understanding on its own terms — the demand behind it, and what casting it actually involves.
One thread does run through all of them: audiences increasingly expect to see real, varied people, while the industry still under-delivers.
Channel 4's 2025 '
Mirror on the Industry' audit found 77% of people now agree diversity and inclusion matters in advertising, up from 72% in 2023, even as several groups remain barely visible on screen. That distance between what audiences want and who actually gets cast is where a specialist roster does its work.
Size — curve, plus and body positive
Curve modelling covers roughly UK 12 to 16; plus size, UK 18 and above. The distinction is practical rather than political: different briefs call for different size ranges, and for ecommerce in particular the model's actual size has to match the sample being shot, or the imagery is unusable. It's also not only about dress size - fit and proportion matter, and a good deal of commercial size work still carries height and proportion requirements people don't always expect - with female plus size models, for example, generally needing to be 5'8" or taller.
The opportunity here is defined by a gap rather than a boom. Most women are above a standard sample size, yet visible representation stays thin and, at the fashion end, is going backwards: Vogue Business's
'Fall / Winter 2027 size inclusivity report' found plus-size models in just 0.3% of runway looks — a three-year low — against 97.6% straight size. That is exactly why commercial casting matters where fashion retreats: retailers selling across a full size range need imagery across that range, and brands have worked out that showing the size a customer actually is converts better than aspiring past them. Demand for male curve and plus size talent is real too, not only female.
There is a body-positivity dimension here as well, and it is commercial as much as cultural. A 2024 study of body-positive advertising,
'Perfectly Imperfect', found that ads featuring real, varied bodies drive stronger consumer engagement, working through the brand authenticity audiences perceive - and that simply showing diverse bodies outperforms loud, explicit "body-positive" messaging. That is how good size casting works in practice: representing real people, not making a performance of it.
Age — classic and older talent
We tend to say classic or older talent rather than "mature," because "classic" better describes what brands are actually casting for. The commercial case is one of the strongest in this whole piece, and it's well documented: older consumers hold real spending power yet are persistently underrepresented on screen — the pattern set out in Martin Eisend's review '
Older People in Advertising' in the Journal of Advertising, and borne out in the UK by Mirror on the Industry, which put people aged 70 and over in just 2% of advertising lead roles, mostly health or charity contexts.
The same report cites projections that by 2040, 63p in every pound spent in the UK will come from older audiences — so casting that skews entirely young is a commercial risk, not a neutral choice. Grey hair is an asset to cast for, not something to colour over, and this is one of the few areas you can enter later in life with no prior experience: the authentic presence of age can't be manufactured, and everything else is learnable.
Ethnicity — woven through, not partitioned
This is where our own history did its work on us. Having once run a division that grouped talent by ethnic background, we came to the considered view that segmenting talent that way reinforces a sense of separateness rather than dissolving it. So the current roster doesn't. Talent of every background sits throughout the categories, cast on suitability for the brief.
The data supports treating this strand differently from the others. On volume, the industry has largely caught up for several groups — Mirror on the Industry found Black representation sustained above population share, for instance.
Where it still falls short is authenticity: around half of ethnic-minority respondents in the same study said they only ever see people from minority groups portrayed tokenistically. That is an argument for casting real, well-matched people throughout a roster rather than filing them under a separate heading — which is also why ethnicity is the one inclusive strand we deliberately don't make a browseable category, while size, age, LGBTQ+, disability and visible difference are, because brands request them and talent choose to be represented that way.
Gender and orientation
HHM represents gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and non-binary talent across a full range of ages and presentations, and we make that talent browseable for a simple reason: brands ask for authentic LGBTQ+ casting, and the people on our roster have chosen to be represented that way. Demand is now standard across lifestyle, financial services, housing, travel and mainstream consumer advertising, not confined to specialist campaigns.
Supply hasn't kept pace. Mirror on the Industry found LGBTQ+ people in only 2% of ads and 1% of lead roles, with transgender and non-binary people absent from lead roles altogether, and what representation there is tends to lean on narrow cues. The appetite, though, is real and long-established: a 2019 GLAAD and P&G study in the US, '
LGBTQ Inclusion in Advertising & Media', found three-quarters of non-LGBTQ people comfortable seeing an LGBTQ person in a commercial.
The commercial reality is simply that this audience is significant and responds to being represented by people who genuinely belong to it rather than approximate it — which is the whole case against tokenism.
Disability and visible differences
This covers a wide spread: mobility impairments and wheelchair use, limb differences, sensory impairments, chronic and non-visible conditions, neurodivergence, and visible differences such as vitiligo, birthmarks, scarring, burns and alopecia. Healthcare, pharmaceutical and public-health work has the longest track record here and often briefs for very specific conditions, where accurate matching at agency level matters a great deal. Adaptive-product brands cast genuine users, and mainstream retail increasingly features models with disabilities and visible differences in ordinary seasonal campaigns.
This is also the strand with the strongest evidence behind it. A forthcoming Journal of Marketing study from Bayes Business School, '
Beyond Visibility: The Disability Inclusion Effect in Advertising', found across nine pre-registered experiments that featuring disabled people lifts how audiences feel about the ad, the brand and the product — for disabled and non-disabled viewers alike — but that the effect collapses when the portrayal leans on vulnerability or treats the disability as a token. It is a near-exact academic statement of how we cast: real people with agency, matched to the brief, not pity and not box-ticking.
The opportunity is wide open, too: Mirror on the Industry put disabled people in just 4% of ads and 2% of lead roles, against roughly 18% of the UK population.
It was never a trend for us
The market reaching authentic representation is a genuinely good thing, and we're not precious about having got there first. But it's worth being clear that for HHM this isn't a recent adjustment to the mood of the moment. It's been the approach for more than thirty-five years — from Steve and Judi Barker's original divisions to the agency Chloe Barker and Thomas Albone run today, with a roster of 250-plus vetted models that reflects the actual range of people brands need to cast. Two generations, one instinct.
The market catching up doesn't change what we do. It just means more opportunity — for the brands casting more honestly, and for the wide range of people who can now build a real career in front of a camera without being the one narrow type the old industry would have picked.
Sources
- Channel 4 & Tapestry (2025). Mirror on the Industry. https://www.channel4.com/press/news/how-representative-are-adverts-british-population-channel-4s-mirror-industry-audit
- Cossu, M., Estes, Z. & Vosgerau, J. (2026). Beyond Visibility: The Disability Inclusion Effect in Advertising. Journal of Marketing (in press). https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/37335/
- Eisend, M. (2022). Older People in Advertising. Journal of Advertising, 51(3), 308–322. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00913367.2022.2027300
- Roy Bhattacharjee, D., Pradhan, D., Kuanr, A. & Malhotra, N. (2024). Perfectly Imperfect: How Body-Positive Advertisements in Social Media Foster Consumer Engagement. https://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/49203/
- Vogue Business (2026). Size Inclusivity Report: Fall/Winter 2026. https://www.vogue.com/article/the-vogue-business-fall-winter-2026-size-inclusivity-report
- GLAAD & P&G (2019). LGBTQ Inclusion in Advertising & Media (US survey). https://assets.glaad.org/m/30c92ca3257ffc4c/original/2019-LGBTQ-Inclusion-in-Advertising-Media.pdf
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