London hottie Louis Harris-Tench is a guy you would have come across on MySpace or Youtube cos of his vocal talent. But creative expression is not limited to one form of art. He was a finalist in the recently concluded VMAN model search won by Rico Nieves. Its obvious that this rising star is bound to go places. I caught up with him for a chat:
What motivated to you to enter the competition?My cousin Rae Hippolyte is a recent graduate photographer from LCF and she told me about it. At first I wasn’t going to bother as the modeling world had yet to show me any love but 5mins before the deadline I changed my mind
What was it like to be amongst the finalists?
It was crazy – I never realized how big the competition was until they were flying the other guys and two cool workers from FORD over from the US. They gave me a brief history on Nick Knight (yes I was naive) and also showed me what previous winners had gone on to do – so it was amazing to be apart of that.
What sort of exposure has the competition given you?Quite a lot stateside. My name keeps appearing in blogs that I read and they’ll be random scans of me and the other guys: so it’s been pretty cool. A few nice girls have added me on Facebook too – which one will always encourage lol!
If you had to choose between music & modeling what would you choose?
Music would win hands down, everytime. Singing is what I’ve needed to do since I was a kid and that will never change. I am very excited by the modeling industry and the opportunities it can present but it’s quite two-dimensional and lacks a connection that transcends further than the page. I believe it can’t touch you, change you like music can.
Any plans to branch out artistically from modeling asides music, maybe movies? You won’t see me gracing the screen anytime soon: I know where my strengths lie and running up and down a film set pretending to be Will Smith isn’t happening anytime soon. I’m a poet so I’m doing that on the side. I’m in talks with a publisher at the moment so hopefully something will come of that.