Model Behavior

Brad Greiner was sitting in a rented limo driving down Sunset Boulevard with a contingent of fellow UCLA undergrads for a friend’s birthday when he first saw his billboard. He didn’t point it out, didn’t want to make a scene. But his accidental foray into the modeling world was now official. A few months prior, the Yorba Linda, Calif. native and defender on the Bruins’ water polo team had been scouted at the pool by an Abercrombie & Fitch casting agent. “It wasn’t the first time,” Greiner says with a smile of the agent’s visit. “We’re all in our speedos, so it’s sort of a popular scouting spot.”

Following that encounter, Greiner experienced what thousands of comely kids working at A&F in Houston or Tampa or Minneapolis implicitly desire when they fill out an application: the chance to be immortalized by Bruce Weber in an Abercrombie campaign, to be baring your abs in the larger-than-life, black-and-white photographs mounted in the entry way above a table of cable-knit sweaters, printed on millions of paper shopping bags and towering over busy thoroughfares on massive billboard ads. In many locales throughout the country, A&F remains the popularity standard, no matter how many Mad TV parodies or employment discrimination lawsuits it spawns. “Idolized and respected,” the company’s 2008 annual report brags, “Abercrombie & Fitch is timeless, and always cool.”

I’ve always wondered how much money these young specimens are paid to be the face of Abercrombie CEO Mike Jeffries’ $1.5 billion retailer for a season. And in my head over the weekend I imagined the answer to include the 25-year-old model-cum-Darfur activist Greiner showing up in a black Bentley for our chat at Le Pain Quotidien on Melrose (we planned on Urth, but how does anyone score a table there on a Saturday anymore?). Weber’s photos of Greiner, shot in Santa Barbara and Golden Beach, Fla. in late 2004, are among the most iconic in A&F’s artistic vault.

The Bentley was nowhere to be seen. Greiner, dressed casually in a Banana Republic hoodie, Chip & Pepper jeans and an old Christian Dior shirt, is quiet, warm and strikingly modest. 

And the answer? “It was $500 a day,” he says. For two days of shoots.

Greiner is briefly skittish of the admission, and obviously cognizant of the A&F trade-off. You may only be paid the equivalent of one month’s rent for a mediocre West Hollywood studio apartment, but you’re also plucked from obscurity and placed into stardom. “I’m definitely not bitter,” he says. “It’s certainly changed my life. To see myself on a five-story billboard on Fifth Avenue or on Sunset, it just blew my mind. And I had to use it as a stepping stone.”

Brad Greiner, shot by Bruce Weber in 2004 for Abercrombie & Fitch

Which he did. In 2007, Greiner co-founded the non-profit organization Team Darfur with Olympian speed skater Joey Cheek (Greiner’s interest in Darfur activism originally stemmed from his International Development Studies major at UCLA). More than 400 fellow athletes participated in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Summer Games in Beijing, where the organization aimed to draw international attention to China’s oil interests and sales of small arms to Sudan, fueling the humanitarian crisis in the nation’s Darfur region. As a result, Greiner and Cheek, who planned to attend the Beijing games on behalf of their project, had their visas revoked by the Chinese government along with two other Team Darfur participating athletes.

Since then, Team Darfur has become part of the larger Save Darfur Coalition. Greiner moved to New York briefly for runway work and campaigns, but his six-foot-four-inch frame often proved a hindrance, with shirt sleeves hitting well before the wrists or hems unintentionally hitting Thom Browne levels. “I made enough money to pay the bills, but I’m a little burnt out. I respect the industry, it’s just that there’s far more supply for male models right now than demand. And I’m not going to be campaigning to change the industry to [accommodate] tall guys.”

But he’s still using his A&F-derived celebrity for good. Greiner is now spokesmodel for Innovo, an under-the-radar green energy company. “It’s an exciting time, and I’m passionate about it,” he says of the renewable energy industry. The career move is likely a wise choice: The Obama administration has set an ambitious goal of generating a quarter of the nation’s energy through green power sources by 2025, and business is booming. “It’s the new Silicon Valley," he says. "Everyone’s getting into it. We just don’t yet know who the winners and the loser are going to be.”