Jordan Hampton, Bound For Success

All photos courtesy of Jordan Hampton.





JORDAN HAMPTON
Bound for Success

Look out New York, Jordan is coming! With her portfolio in one hand and her bag in the other, Jordan Hampton of Dublin is headed for the Big Apple. This seventeen-year-old model, with a classic model figure, is determined to be a successful model through hard work, determination, and the support of her family and a vast network of hometown friends, whom she graciously acknowledges and appreciates.

For all of her walking years, Jordan has loved to dance. She still dances four to six times a week as a way of staying in shape for her modeling career. Her diet usually includes chicken, fish, fruits and vegetables in moderate amounts. Though she will occasionally eat some junk food, Jordan typically prefers fruits to fries and chips.

Jordan’s dancing career began at the age of two at the Fancy Dancer School in Dublin. Her dancing skills have led to her being more graceful as a model and having a more athletic body, which helped her to recover faster than normal after a recent surgery on her knee.

“She is a ham, like her Daddy,” her mother says. “When she is on stage, she lights up!” Both of her parents are singers. Jordan actually has a good voice, but she never took up signing. She also inherited her father’s ability to pick out a tune on a piano.

As a young girl, Hampton never aspired to be a model. At the age of thirteen, Jordan was attending a beauty pageant in Atlanta when a representative of the Elite Modeling Agency approached Jordan and her mother and asked her if she was interested in a career in modeling. The Hamptons were skeptical at first, but when they learned that the Elite Agency was one of the top three agencies in the world, the offer seemed not only interesting, but extremely exciting. It was then that Jordan and the Hamptons were introduced to Victoria Duruh, of Elite, whoever since then has been very helpful to Jordan, almost as if she were her big sister. Just before her fourteenth birthday, Jordan signed a contract with the New York Elite Agency. During her four-year career, she has worked with the agency in Atlanta, New York, Miami, Chicago, and Barcelona, Spain.

During the last four years, Jordan has traveled around the world. She spent ten weeks in Singapore, Malaysia and five more weeks in Paris, France. Her brief stay in the French capital, one of the world capitals of modeling, was as a major stepping stone in her young career. Another highlight was working on eleven shoots in a single year as one of the “New Faces” of models around the world.

“I travel with Jordan everywhere she goes,” her mother said. As her “traveling buddy,” Roxanne Hampton helped her daughter meet the not only rigorous work schedule, but kept her on track in her high school studies. Through the aid of online courses and home schooling, Jordan could have easily taken the bare minimum courses required for graduation. But instead, she chose to take as many honor courses as she could, including extensive foreign language courses. Despite her demanding course and work schedule, Jordan finished high school in three years and with a 4.0 grade point average - an accomplishment to be applauded for any high school student.

As she prepares to move her home to New York, Jordan is financially set to work as a model without the need of a second job to pay the bills. Thanks to careful financial planning by her father, Dr. Derrick Hampton, Jordan was encouraged to put aside a large portion of her earnings early on, so that her savings would support her in a career once she got out on her own.

Modeling is hard work, more than just posing and smiling. Jordan often works from eight to nine o’clock in the morning to seven o’clock in the evening. All day long, Monday through Friday, Jordan, when she is not on a shoot, goes through castings with interviews, sometimes with six models and sometimes with two hundred all competing against each other. Sometimes when the photographer needs a background in busy metropolitan areas, Jordan has been called upon to pose for pictures in the middle of the night, from the rooftops of skyscrapers to the deserted predawn streets of Times Square in New York. Feeling bad or being sick is rarely an excuse to miss work. She once had to be a work with a temperature of 102 degrees.

The agency has high expectations for Jordan. Many who see her photographs think that she looks exotic and that she couldn’t be a good ole’ country girl from Georgia. Her grandmother sometimes doesn’t recognize and refuses to believe that the girl in the pictures is Jordan, but Roxanne affirms that it is, because she was there with her daughter on every shoot.

Jordan possesses a natural ability as a model, she is comfortable in front of the camera, and photogenic. She sees modeling as her calling.

With all of the confidence in the world, confidence that she will need to succeed in the highly competitive world of modeling, Jordan said, “I intend to take New York by storm and I want to be the next super model.” Another requirement to become successful in the business is a strong work ethic, and Jordan possesses just that. Each night, she plans and schedules all of her activities for the next day, and then thoroughly exhausted, she goes to bed.
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Realizing that the average career of a model is a mere ten years, Jordan is already busy planning her career after her modeling days are over. After the day long shoots are over,she wants to go into the modeling business, perhaps in design or in management, or maybe, just maybe, she might try her hand as a gourmet pastry chef. She also wants to go to college and take a few dance classes, but not as long as it interferes with her modeling career.

Her last year has been a difficult one, trying to graduate. Being between a junior and senior model - which involves a whole different world of clothing and poses, Jordan has struggled to persevere. But she stands tall in stature and tall in her determination to succeed. Confident and secure that she will be ready to move away from the comforts of home and go to the fifth largest city in the world, Jordan warns all New Yorkers, “ I hope y’all are ready, here I come!”