Next Management Aims to Up the Fashion Quota for Its Talent

Rosemary Feitelberg
·2 min read

Next Management’s newly installed director of talent Josh Otten has mapped out his plans to make fashion a larger part of the equation.

After taking a year off, he joined Next a few weeks ago, following a five-year run at CAA, where he was one of the directors of its fashion division. Prior to that, Otten worked at IMG Models for 13 years, where he also served as a director. That latter experience in the modeling world gave him not only an unfiltered view of the fashion industry but also the opportunity to recognize the need that young musicians, actors and athletes have for “fashion representation.” Given that, he said, “At CAA, I somewhat pivoted from working with models and fashion creatives to really focus on this next generation of actors, musicians and athletes to build them up in fashion and to focus on that aspect of their career.”

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Eager to combine his fashion and entertainment know-how, he said Next aligned with that “vision to incorporate the model agency way of building up a talent in fashion combined with the representation of individual traditional entertainment talent.” What that boils down to is helping actors, musicians, influencers, professional, Olympic and collegiate athletes, “and anyone, who is not a model, to have fashion be a real piece of the puzzle,” Otten said.

While all of those fields fall under Next’s talent umbrella, the change is Otten’s plans to bring “the Hollywood management style into the modeling world,” he said. Not interested in limiting fashion to an endorsement deal point of view, Otten said, “That is an old-school way of looking at the fashion industry.”

With talent divisions in Paris, Milan, London, Madrid, Los Angeles and Miami, Next’s roster now includes Tommy Dorfman, Meadow Walker, Indya Moore, Corey Fogelmanis, Snow Wife and Adain Bradley. In addition, Next represents Amiah Miller, Sateen Besson, Abbey Lee, Diplo and Sage Elsesser.

At CAA, he learned “how to represent talent in a 360-degree way with their managers and agents to figure out ways that fashion can complement what these managers and agents are doing in the film space, music or whatever their core discipline may be.”

It’s not a matter of “working with celebrities, as you would a model, and just have their photos up on a website. It’s a holistic fashion approach working with their public relations teams, managers and agencies” — big or small — to figure out ways that fashion can complement their core disciplines, he said.

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