Women, fashion and glamour are synonymous in the modern era — but in the mid- to late 1980s this association intensified into one distinct cultural icon: the supermodel. While highly professional models with identifiable looks and personalities had existed since the 1950s (Christian Dior’s favorite was called Lucky), and celebrity models since the 1960s (think Twiggy), the 1980s version literally superseded their predecessors in stature, stardom and — most importantly — earning capacity. The supermodels were an elite group. Key figures included Americans Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington, Brit Naomi Campbell, Canadian-born Linda Evangelista and Claudia Schiffer from Germany. This grouping is not definitive and the term was applied to other high-profile models of this generation including Australia’s own Elle “The Body” Macpherson and later notably English model Kate Moss. A list of very specific characteristics secured the pedigree of the original supermodels.
First — self evidently, perhaps — were their physical attributes. While each supermodel had a distinct “look” (Linda’s old-world glamor versus Cindy’s girl-next-door) all of them had bodies of Amazonian proportions. Strong and lean as opposed to slim and diminutive, they embodied a powerful, intense and indeed mythical vision of female beauty. Second, as at home on the catwalk as they were in editorials, a supermodel was a supermodel simply by virtue of her market value. Witness Linda’s quip to journalist Jonathan Van Meter:
“We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.”
Celebrity status
Finally, real supermodels managed to transcend the world of fashion that had borne them and registered simply as celebrities with all that that entailed, including dating movie stars, hosting TV shows and becoming fodder for gossip magazines. The precise cultural circumstances that saw the celebrity cachet of models arise are difficult to discern, but it is clear that a number of factors aligned. Big-name celebrity designers such as Versace and Karl Lagerfeld became the figureheads for global conglomerate fashion, the worlds of entertainment and fashion merged through internationalized media networks, and, in Paris, John Casablancas of Elite Model Management championed a new, brasher version of the modelling agency.
One of Casablancas’ key strategies entailed marketing his “girls” as a group. This ploy dovetailed nicely with a genre of fashion photography that had been developed in the 1950s — the large cast fashion shoot. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, high-end fashion photographers, including Peter Lindbergh, Steven Meisel and Herb Ritts, developed compelling editorial spreads that featured groupings of supermodels lined up next to each other wearing variations on a theme. In these somewhat-disarming images, each model seems to trump the beauty of the next, resulting in a giddying excess of glamor. The supermodels faced the 1990s optimistically appearing en masse on the covers of the world’s most influential fashion magazines and attracting lucrative make-up endorsements. But meanwhile, the fashion clock was ticking.