Woman With "The Perfect Bottom" Earns a Living Trying on Jeans

Pictured above is Natasha Wagner--or, more precisely, the part of her body that earns her hefty paychecks. 14 years ago, fashion consultants discovered that Wagner has the ideal butt for testing designs for jeans. She's 5 feet, 8 inches tall and wears a size 6. Her posterior represents the needs of a vast number of women who buy jeans in a wide variety of styles. When fashion designers want to see how their work looks on an ideal set of buttocks, they call Wagner. Vogue talked to designer Julien Jarmoune about Wagner's assets:

“Natasha has the perfect marriage of body types,” clarified Jarmoune. “Because if you fit with someone who is too curvy (tiny waist, big butt), or with someone who has a straight body (no hips), you are limiting yourself to just a certain body type. A jean that is fit on a straight body will never look good on someone who has curves. That’s why Natasha comes into play perfectly. She has the best of both worlds where she’s slim and she still has shape. Additionally, she has great legs that are the perfect length (she fits our standard 30-inch leg inseam flawlessly) so that our jeans will work for someone who is short or tall.”

But Wagner is much more than just her bottom. After doing this kind of work for 14 years, she's become an expert in jeans design:

Wagner, who owns more than 100 pairs of jeans herself, explained her “science of denim” further: “Once I had learned the jean terminology, I began to help designers flesh out details or catch things that may have been overlooked. They’re busy, they’re working on the current season plus a year ahead. I’m just focusing on fit and am able to point out specifics like if the back rise is pulling or if there’s bubbling or roping,” she said. Plus, she knows the jargon. “A lot of the time you’ll get what’s called ‘slippage’ on a jean, where the denim pulls and you can kind of see the weft in the garment. So I can recommend trying a different type of construction or a different side seam. I know how the body should look in the jean, so I’m able to tell them things like, ‘Kick out the back rise,’ or ‘Take a measurement from the top of the rise and add it to the bottom of the rise to give it a nicer butt shape and a lift.’ ”