Every January, Laurent's scouting division conducts an internal review of its evaluation criteria — not a wholesale revision, but a calibration. The fashion market shifts. Brand priorities shift. The qualities that make a talent strategically valuable shift with them. Our scouting framework needs to reflect those changes accurately to remain useful.

What follows is an honest account of what we are prioritizing in new talent evaluations in 2026, and why.

Presence over type

This has always been Laurent's foundational scouting principle, but it requires constant restatement because the industry continuously pulls toward type-casting. A type is legible, bookable, and low-risk. A presence is harder to categorize and considerably higher in long-term value.

We are actively seeking talent whose primary quality is not that they fit an existing visual template, but that they create one. Models who look like a specific version of an established aesthetic are easy to place in the short term and easy to replace in the medium term. Models who look specifically like themselves are harder to place initially and irreplaceable once established.

Our scouting conversations begin with a single question: does this person create a visual language or inhabit someone else's?

Physical confidence in stillness

Consistent with the restraint direction we have observed in luxury campaign imagery, we are prioritizing models who demonstrate what we call physical confidence in stillness — the capacity to hold a frame without activity, to generate attention through presence rather than gesture.

This is not the same as blankness. Blankness is easily readable and commercially limited. What we are looking for is interiority: the sense that something is happening that the camera is catching rather than something being performed for the camera to record.

In practical scouting terms, we observe this by asking potential talent to simply stand still for sixty seconds while being photographed. The quality we are looking for is visible in that minute. It either exists or it doesn't.

Intellectual engagement with the industry

We are increasingly attentive to whether new talent has a genuine understanding of and engagement with the fashion industry beyond their immediate participation in it. Not expertise — we do not expect a twenty-year-old to arrive with a comprehensive knowledge of fashion history. But curiosity, attention, and the habit of looking at images seriously.

The models who develop into significant long-term careers are almost universally people who treated the work as a discipline to be studied rather than a skill to be performed. We can identify the preconditions of that orientation in early conversations, and we weight it heavily.

Openness to development over readiness

There is a persistent myth in talent scouting that the goal is to find talent who are "ready" — who require minimal development and can be placed immediately. For some agencies with high-volume business models, this makes sense. It does not make sense for Laurent.

We are looking for talent whose potential is clear and whose development is incomplete. Our New Faces program exists precisely to close that gap — to build the technical, professional, and strategic foundation that transforms genuine potential into sustained career performance.

A twenty-year-old who arrives at Laurent already knowing everything she needs to know is not, for us, an interesting talent. A twenty-year-old who arrives with extraordinary potential and complete openness to the work of becoming — that is the person we are building for.

What we are not looking for

For transparency: we are not scouting for social media following, viral presence, or existing digital audience. We represent models, not influencers, and we make that distinction with complete consistency.

We are not looking for talent who have been extensively pre-trained by other agencies and are seeking relocation. We build careers from the beginning or we continue them from a point of established excellence. We do not rehabilitate.

We are not interested in urgency. If a talent or their parents are communicating pressure around timeline — needs to sign quickly, needs to start working immediately — that urgency is almost always a signal of misaligned expectations. Laurent's development process moves at the pace the talent requires. It does not move faster than that.

The applications are open. We review everything. We respond to what we find worth responding to. The process is the standard.