The hottest new trend in the fashion industry? Lawsuits.

Over the past few months, as New York models have defected from one agency to another in the hopes of breaking through an increasingly crowded market, a raft of high-profile suits have been filed in city courts. Top agencies such as Next, Ford, Click and Wilhelmina are suing one another for hundreds of thousands of dollars over claims of model poaching.

They’re also suing the models themselves for breach of contract; the models, in turn, are countersuing their former agencies, claiming they’ve been swindled out of earnings.

“I’ve never heard of this happening with top-tier agencies,” one working model, who asked not to be identified, told The Post. “Usually, if a girl no longer wants to be with an agency, the agency doesn’t want her there, either.”

In 2008, Elite sued Next for poaching Karlie Kloss — but Kloss is a supermodel, and losing her meant losing millions of dollars.

In this economic climate, however, each model is more valuable than ever. Even if she hasn’t broken through, there’s always the chance that she might get that huge contract with Victoria’s Secret or Sports Illustrated — and if she gets it after leaving her first agency, which invested time and money grooming her, the agency is increasingly inclined to sue.

“It’s become more problematic if a girl goes to a big agency,” said Suzie Sugerman, who booked supermodels such as Stephanie Seymour and Carla Bruni over her 17-year-long career at Wilhelmina and other agencies. “Because of the recession, girls aren’t working the way they used to.”

Poaching, one model told The Post, tends to be a lengthy process.

“Usually, it begins backstage at the shows,” she said. “They know what kind of face could be good for their agency, and that’s where all the youngest, hottest girls are. And as you travel around, and you have a lack of stable friendships, these people are traveling to the shows and they give you the sense that you’re friends.”

“The word ‘poaching’ makes it sound like a serious thing,” she added, “but it seems a fair thing to happen. In the end, you’re your own company.”

Over the past 20 years, celebrities have usurped supermodels as the faces of luxury brands and cosmetics — think Julianne Moore for Bulgari and Madonna for Dolce & Gabbana.

“There are no real superstars anymore in modeling,” ex-supermodel Paulina Porizkova told The Post. “Kate Moss and Gisele Bundchen are the tail end of that. The competition is much bigger, for the jobs and the agencies.”

Adding to the crunch: Since the recession began in 2007, so many department stores have closed that catalog work has become increasingly scarce.

The commercial-looking “bread-and-butter” girls who do catalogs could, pre-crash, clear up to $300,000 a year. Now that same model is lucky to make about $70,000 a year — and she’s competing with underemployed A-list girls.

“JCPenney and Neiman Marcus in Dallas — they’d fly in models from New York, and they’d get a half-day’s pay just for getting on the plane!” Sugerman said. “Now they’re booking local talent. And if they do book a New York girl, she has to pay for her own flight and find a place to stay — and these girls are doing it!”

Said the anonymous mannequin: “Young working models are pretty much broke all the time. It used to be that the agency and the girls were running the industry, but now it’s the clients. They say, ‘We’ll pay this,’ and the agency will go along, because the girl needs the work. And there are so many more jobs than there are girls. You can get a Russian who will jump on one leg for $200 — for the day.”

“It’s not like the ’90s, or even the early 2000s,” Sugerman said. “Things were so good back then that New York City was flooded with Eastern Europeans and Brazilians. Now, girls who used to get $5,000 a day are working for $1,500 a day — and they’re taking money away from the B-girls. It’s very hard for a model to think, ‘Oh, my rate and my value is going down.’ ”

Instead, according to these industry vets, a model will blame her agency for not booking enough work and defect.

“As a model, the only thing I knew for a fact is that there were disgruntled girls,” Porizkova said. “You always tend to rationalize it: ‘My agency’s screwing me over; they’re not sending me on enough go-sees.’ And you know what? Maybe they aren’t. But maybe it’s the way you look.”

“I left my agency for another one,” said the working model. She wasn’t sued, but said her agency tried to blackball her fashion-photographer boyfriend. This model said that she wanted to work for a bigger agency, that many of her bookers had left and she was getting lost among the new girls. But the main reason: “My checks weren’t coming on time.” This model spoke from Germany, where she was doing a shoot for Elle, and said she is still broke.

“Editorial work rarely pays,” she said. “Pretty much everyone I know is in debt.” (A model will typically earn $250 a day on a magazine shoot — but enough of those can, in rare cases, lead to more lucrative contracts.)

In a lawsuit filed Nov. 17 in New York, model Anna Jagodzinska accused her former agency, Next, of stealing $320,000 that she made modeling for H&M and J. Crew, among other major brands. Next claims that any money she’s owed has yet to be paid by the clients and that it’s not their responsibility to make good on those debts.

“The business model has always been in favor of the agency,” Porizkova said. “It’s like the publishing business or the record industry: The company makes sure their asses are covered, and you only make money if you make them a lot of money. Trust me — in the 20 years I spent in the business, most of the girls I knew fell by the roadside. They all lasted a year or two, then ran into debt.”

Such constant debt only furthers the suspicion among underemployed models that another booker at another agency may be able to make them, if not a supermodel, at least financially solvent.

“I’m less sure that the agencies are poaching than the girls are moving,” said Kelly Cutrone, founder of fashion p.r. firm People’s Revolution.

Cutrone finds the current spate of intra-agency lawsuits — at least five involving five models have been filed in Manhattan courts in the last seven months — puzzling.

“You don’t see CAA crying all the time if they lose an actor to William Morris,” she said. “It’s free enterprise. Contracts don’t mean s- – -. They’re semi-binding agreements for people who have the money to go to court. No one wants any of these cases to get in front of a jury. It’s a game — time-out the other person and drain all their money.”