Cats have been most noticeably on the rise in fashion arguably since Lanvin's fall 2009 ad campaign included two black felines. Then Miuccia Prada unveiled a cat print for her spring 2010 Miu Miu collection. Riccardo Tisci also incorporated cat imagery (panthers, specifically) into his fall 2011 runway collection for Givenchy. And so the onslaught had started: Chanel dressed a model as a cat for its ad campaign, magazines started casting cats for editorials with increasing frequency — and then Choupette was born.

V, which has been photographing cats for years, will feature Choupette — the most famous fashion cat of them all, owned by Karl Lagerfeld — in the September fall fashion issue. The spread announces Choupette's representation by IMG, one of the world's top fashion model agencies, crediting the cat as an "IMG model" in the spread. (IMG was unable to comment on its relationship with Choupette at press time.) For the shoot, which was done in Paris, Choupette posed with model Laetitia Casta in front of the Eiffel Tower. "She looks a little terrified in the images, actually," says Cristobal, who was not present on the set. "But in a couple of them she actually gives kind of a model pose — she's a real natural, that one." V was able to book Choupette — a very in-demand cat — because editor Stephen Gan is close friends with Lagerfeld. The magazine was one of the first to tweet a photo of the fluffy wonder (which went viral) and the idea to shoot her for September followed. "We were very fortunate to shoot Choupette," Cristobal said. "From what I hear she's very well-behaved."

But to call Choupette's situation — her two maids, her unending fashion spreads in the top magazines — unique would be a serious understatement. Despite the explosion of cat fanaticism in the fashion industry, the business of cat modeling is going widely unregulated. Cats have agents, like Long, who fight for good monetary compensation and their well-being on shoots, but they do not have unions, and they will not get rich from a modeling career. Cat modeling has even lower financial rewards than male modeling. A successful male model is lucky to make $40,000 a year, while a successful cat model is lucky to make half that.

If you dream of getting your kitty in a magazine, you can probably forget about it. The cats you see in magazines by and large are not someone's pet who happens to appear in Vogue on the side. These are career cats, who spend their lives in show business and train for the spotlight from infancy. Cat fashion models often do the cat show circuit and belong to breeders. Others belong to animal trainers. (The two careers tend to overlap.)

Training a cat model is much more difficult than training a human model. Long says cats are the most difficult to train of all the animals she represents, and it has nothing to do with them being stupid or stubborn. "You can't calm a cat like you can another animal with a treat or a toy," she explains. Karen Hoeverman, a breeder and cat model owner, trains her cats from infancy by walking them around PetSmart on a leash because the store is "like a studio." She knows they're ready for jobs when, during these walks, they finally get bored and don't care about being in PetSmart anymore. When kittens get a little older, she'll start bringing them on shoots with the working cats so they can get used to the car ride and being around people and on sets.

Hoeverman's cats, Persians and Himalayans, have two agents who call when potential jobs come up. Her cats have appeared everywhere from the cover of international issues of Elle to British GQ, in which they posed with Victoria's Secret models.