Minky Mink taps locals to model

By Sophia Afsar-Keshmiri, Chronicle Summer Staff

Minky Mink, the downtown Glens Falls women’s clothing boutique, is featuring local women modeling its clothes on its website and Instagram.

“We do high-style fashion photo shoots every month & love photographing women from our community. We invite you to reach out & work with us,” Minky Mink exclaims on its website. “Anybody can do it.”

“I think it was my sister’s idea,” says Maura Forcier, who owns Minky Mink. Her sister, Tess Bannon, is Minky Mink’s social media manager.

It took right off. “I just had so many people…reach out to me,” says Mrs. Forcier. “Every two months or so,” they do photo shoots for content “on our Instagram…our website…maybe some for advertising.”

“We don’t take anything too seriously,. It’s a fun light thing,” Mrs. Forcier says. “I appreciate it…it helps me.”

“Right after I have one session, we immediately book another,” she says, elaborating that the photographers she uses “are…super busy and I have to book them out…very far in advance.”

Mrs. Forcier said she has to “pick who we’re gonna use, and then I pick outfit[s],.It is super nice to include new faces, so every time we shoot I try to include one new face.”

She says she is inclusive of body type, race and age when choosing models. “Not everybody looks the same and I think it’s important to have that range so everybody feels included,” says Mrs. Forcier.

“I try to incorporate everybody.”

She notes, “My mom has modeled,” and “one of my employee’s mothers has…too,” she said when asked about the age range of Minky Mink’s models.

The store recently had a shoot for the fall season. “We did two outfits for every model, we had seven or eight” models, Mrs. Forcier said.

She says choosing outfits “does take a while because you can’t just pick the same thing for everybody. I try to pick the special pieces — not just something plain.”

For the shoot itself, “we coordinate with the photographer…come up with a vision…figure out if we need props and what we need to bring.

“We pretty much stay around Glens Falls. We’ve shot at different restaurants and around town.”

They like to kept the shoot close because “we really don’t want to pack the clothes up and take them to a different location because we are selling these things, so they have to stay intact.”

Glens Falls also works, Mrs. Forcier adds, “because this is where my store is.”

Minky Mink’s most recent photoshoot was “on a friend’s rooftop, which was kind of fun” and had “a fall, autumn theme.”

She says she’s also done shoots “in the parking lot of the Travelers Building…” and “a beautiful one in the park” — City Park, where the bandstand is.

I asked if Mrs. Forcier plans to utilize the new murals going up around Glens Falls. “That’s probably what we’ll do next,” she said. “I think that’s going to be a really cool aesthetic.”

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