At De Musterdpot campsite in Woudrichem you hear nothing but flapping tent cloths. Few people can be seen. Not only summer, but also the camping season is coming to an end. “It’s a good thing that our awnings are firmly fixed to the ground,” says Summer de Snoo. “It feels like force 10 here. But mum and dad have secured everything very well.”
11-year-old Summer is sitting with her knees up on a camping chair, under the flapping cloths. She is unmade, wearing an easy-fitting dress and slippers. In three days, the young teenager will be in the spotlight in a mega studio in the Italian fashion walhalla Milan. She has her own make-up artist, who powders her and touches up her lip gloss, and gives her hair just a little more volume. A photographer who only has an eye for her. And she sleeps in a star hotel.
But not yet.
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“You can say that I live in two worlds”, says Summer. She speaks in a soft voice, but with a hard Rotterdam accent. “In the modeling world, with glamor and all, and in the world with my family and friends.” A gust of wind, a tent flap flutters upwards. “I really enjoy it in both worlds.”
“It is good that she is also just here at the campsite with us,” says her mother Jessica (32), sitting next to her (with the same accent). “Keeps her nice down to earth.“
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Summer was 4 when she found the camera – and the camera found her. “She always knew straight away, without thinking, how to look, how to keep her head, where to put her hands, how to hold her position. It really is ‘everything for the picture’.”
And after that? “Back to normal. Playing with her sisters. Playing with her father. Playing football.”
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I don’t realize it
“It’s pretty crazy”, says Summer, “in those pictures I’m a girl, but actually I’m not a girl-girl. I don’t like dressy dresses, I never wear make-up myself, and I play football in a boys team. I didn’t like it with the girls. ”
She grins. “Nah… Not for me. Way too soft.” Jessica laughs: “Those girls were out on the field looking at their nails. Well, Sum really isn’t, right, Sum?” Sum nods.
But as soon as she is in front of the camera, there is nothing more of that footballing raw dew to be seen. As if she has a button, her mother says. ‘Model on’, ‘Model off’. Where is that button then? Summer presses her nose. “Here maybe?”
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The first shoot she had was when she was six, for a friend of her mother’s, who sold clothes in her webshop and was looking for a model. Jessica: She loved it. Those high heels, beautiful bags.
Oh my God
After that it went quickly. Summer’s career (so far) in a nutshell: she registered with a modeling agency in the Netherlands with the help of her parents and at the age of 8 she had her first shoot abroad. “Remember Sum, when you were in front of the camera for one second, and the photographer just wanted to take a test photo to see if the light was right? And then he said:”Oh my Gód, this is ít!’“
Summer laughs. Yes. She remembers that. “And mama, do you remember when we went away for the first time for a week? And that papa had to cry?” She had never seen her father cry. And it turned out that her father had sent an app to the cameraman who went along. Take good care of my girls.
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Summer knows she’s a lucky guy. With her family. With her football talent. With her appearance. She is allowed to play the lead in Noir, a film by a well-known Italian director. Ever bigger brands know where to find her, such as Guess and Mischka Aoki. “We always have trouble pronouncing that name,” laughs Jessica. “The other day I said: you have another job from that brand with that difficult name.”
Summer has now signed a modeling contract in America and Italy. The plan was also to move to America – news that was picked up by many media – but according to her parents, that would, on closer inspection, be too expensive. She could be seen after the contract news at Jinek and in RTL Boulevard. “So beautiful, such beautiful lips, such a beautiful nose: she is perfection”, said Nikkie Plessen about Summer.
What is beautiful?
Whether Summer likes herself? She smiles. A little bit shy. Dan: “I understand that I am not the ugliest. But what is beautiful? I am also not so concerned with looks. My mother has all kinds of tattoos, with our names. I don’t need to. Recently I really wanted braces. Not to get better teeth, but because I just thought it would be nice to have one. “
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Next Tuesday it will appear a three-part documentary about her life, after she was followed by a camera crew for a year.
“It may sound strange, but I sometimes don’t realize. That all this is true. I am eleven years old and already have two modeling contracts, I’ve been to Italy twenty times for odd jobs, I have 189,000 followers on Instagram. I realize it sometimes really not. “
Everything is fine
And yes, Summer also knows all the prejudices about young models. That they do it for the money, or because their parents want it. “But my parents asked a thousand million eighty times if I really really wanted it.” Jessica: “For all I care, she becomes a postman, or she sits behind the till. I don’t care. Fine, all fine. But she wanted this. Self. Yes, right, Sum?”
Summer nods. Yeah right.
And then the De Snoo family said: then we go for it. For the first shoot in Italy, Summer’s parents had to pay the travel costs themselves. “We scraped all the money together with difficulty. Because Sum has a chance we didn’t have.”
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The family comes from a deprived area in South Rotterdam, ‘to be honest, not the best place to grow up’. “Our parents lived there, our grandfathers and grandmothers. It’s the home of our family, that place is in our DNA let’s just say, but my husband and I have always said out loud: we want to do everything to make our three daughters a better place. to give life. “
Young pregnant
Because it wasn’t always easy, says Jessica. She met her husband, Summer’s father, young, in a nightclub in Rotterdam. She became pregnant young, she was 22. Summer was the first of three girls: Angel and Lovely were born not soon after her birth. “I worked as a hairdresser, my husband worked in construction. We did not have much money, it was exciting every month whether we could pay the mortgage.”
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Now things are better, her husband now has his own, thriving construction company, ‘but that did not happen automatically’. “We know you have to fight for your happiness. I have never had sleepless nights because we have learned a lot to live by the day. Thinking at the beginning of the month if you can make ends meet at the end of the month? That is of no use to you, is it? It’s crazy, but we’ve always been blissfully happy. “
Money to savings accounts
Now Summer is making more money than she will ever get in pocket money. And perhaps more than the average inhabitant of Rotterdam South. “People think we make a living from that,” says Jessica. So it said Faithful, after a TV interview with Summer: ‘But on balance, this girl is now becoming the breadwinner for the whole family’.
Jessica: Well, I have a message to those people: we will not do that. That money goes neatly into a savings account that she can access from the age of eighteen.
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Summer shrugs. “Money doesn’t bother me. Maybe later, when I have to support myself and have my own house. But what do I do with that money? And Mom, you know, haters are always there.”
Much criticism
She mainly refers to the comments she received after it became known that she would get a contract in America. Peter R. de Vries had in Boulevard criticism, which spoke of exploitation. In Jinek while Maarten van Rossum sat at the table, he thought that some photos of Summer have a ‘questionable character in a 9-year-old child’.
“I have a 9-year-old granddaughter and I’m glad she’s not a fashion model.” He was especially referring to the photos of Summer with wet hair and straps that had slipped from her shoulders. Columnists of the AD in Faithful wrote extensively about the broadcast the next day – and therefore also about Summer.
“That gentleman, what’s his name again, doesn’t he have a shoulder?” Says Summer. She sounds angry. “And I think this work is so much fun to do. If it is no longer fun, I quit. So I think it’s a shame for his granddaughter that she is not a model. And otherwise I don’t think about it anymore, what people have said all about it. “
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Jessica: “Summer can handle that criticism, she lets it slide.” Summer: “Not Mommy. Mommy gets sick. Sometimes I see steam coming out of her ears.”
Especially on her Instagram account, which Summer doesn’t run herself – she doesn’t like it, she lets her parents do that. Jessica: “I can hardly contain myself, I want to respond to any negative reaction. I want to stand up for my child. People say that we live on Summer’s career, that she is being forced. Go away.”
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Can I go on a date with Summer?
“But we also get a lot of nice responses,” Jessica adds. She nudges her daughter teasingly. Like those messages from all the boys (and there are many), addressed to Jessica: ‘Summer’s best mom. Can I go on a date with Summer? ‘
“That’s nice,” says Summer, “but I’m really not ready for friends yet. No dude.”
She is friends with boys. Like those on her soccer team. “In the beginning they weren’t so happy that I joined. At the end of our season, the trainer asked those guys: ‘Do you remember what you said about Summer?’ “One had said I was ugly. And someone else said I couldn’t do anything because I was a girl. Well. They took that back. I scored quite a few times.”
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This school year Summer will be in primary school for the last year. She sometimes gets exemptions from school to travel to Italy or other countries for shoots. Provided she does the homework she is given. That will fix Summer on the plane on the outward journey. Then she just had that. “We try to keep her in school as much as possible, also because grade 8 is an important year,” says Jessica.
Jessica always goes with her daughter. “She’s a minor, so a girl no way that I leave her alone in a studio with a photographer. We have never encountered anyone with evil intentions, but you do hear about those horror stories. “
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I am a child so I eat
Another horror story: models starve themselves to get mini dress sizes. “Well, I don’t,” says Summer. “I’m like a trash can. Step on my foot, I open my mouth and I eat everything.” She has a great love for chips. “I think I will have to be more careful about what I eat later on, maybe even during puberty, because I want to be very good and big in this world. But now I am a child. Right? Mom?”
Mom nods. “She can eat whatever she wants, but the modeling world has given us a better understanding of what is healthy. She used to skip breakfast; we don’t do that anymore.”
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Spaghetti
“I just don’t like eating abroad,” says Summer. Jessica: “Yes, she quickly thinks things look strange and then she doesn’t like it. She does eat my spaghetti, but when we order spaghetti in a fancy restaurant in Milan, she’s looking with a dirty face.”
Summer shrugs. She just likes her mother’s food best. And the food from Snackbar Friet van Aniet, near the campsite. A grin. “Better than all the food in all those fancy restaurants put together.”
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