This is an update of a May 2003 posting...
If you think the stuff you see is this Blog is obscure - you are right.
Thanks to AW, her friends and minions, and their "new aesthetic", the public has grown totally indifferent to today's "top" fashion models - the ones seen in the "major" fashion mags and in the various "top model" lists.
Despite the efforts of a small group of people to kill the original "supermodel" concept (according to which the top models have to be the ones with the best bodies and face features and with mass appeal potential) and replace it with their own version, most people still talk about Cindy C and Naomi C when they are asked to think "top model".
In fact, 2005 will be a "supermodel" year - you'll see once again many of the things that were hip in 1995, including rave fashions, and of course, the (high fashion) "supermodel". A grotesque version of Linda E is back, looking exactly like she did in 1995, and sharing campaigns with Paulina Porizkova and others.
The "specialist" reporter on the subject,
M Gross, who wrote the book
"Model", lost his column last year because readers of the
NY Daily News newspaper reportedly showed little interest in his (A-list) model-related coverage. He is back in the news, since a new "supermodel" movie is to be released in 2005, with backing from Madonna, and based on the "Model" book.
Most of the media "model reporting" is really nothing more than PR for model agencies and NYC fashion PR houses, like Krier, KCD and Betak - with almost all "gossipers" having something in common: Awe for publishing giants
Conde Nast and their high fashion mags. Other competing mags (US
Elle and
H Bazaar mainly) regularly get trashed, there are constant rumors about
H Bazaar's "troubles", while the main rivals to the
Conde Nast "contract photographers" - mainly P. Demarchelier and G. Bensimon- are routinely described as incompetent or talentless
(Demarchelier recently signed with
Conde Nast, so the critical CN lackeys will now learn to adore him).
The NYC high fashion clique has total control of NYC media reporting on modeling - although even major biz events, like fashion weeks, are today minor news.
Does the media indifference really bother the high fashion crowd - or was it achieved by design?
Yours truly is different- I have no ties whatsoever to fashion or modelling, English is not my first language, and not even Gerald Marie would hire me (Despite the fact that his Ukrainian wife is one of my Top 3 fave models, ever since 1997). I operate from somewhere in Europe, and couldn't care less about the NYC model biz "insider" stuff - I mention these open-sourced "gossip" stories mostly for their comic relief value, and to highlight the crass characters of many of the main participants. The truth is that the Milanese and the Parisienne are even more irrelevant - and they don't speak much English, so they are no fun at all.
Some of this "gossip" btw may help to explain why certain models do better than others, or why some agencies do poorly (in which case, it's the models again who suffer)- so it has some relevance.
I do like "new" fashion mods - but my interest has waned after the decline in overall fashion model quality, caused partly by the collapse of the "old-style" fashion modeling biz, which was run mostly by maturing playboys and various dillitantes - they may have looked weird to grown up women, but they sure knew how to pick the best girls. The quality of most of today's model "discoveries" is very poor, compared to what model agencies produced in the nineties, when the international frenzy with the "supermods" was in top gear.
My interest in all this started after I found out that many of the top girls in the (very few) major fashion model contests - the prime vehicles for discovering the best new mods throughout the nineties - were in fact better mods than most of the celebrated "top models".
That was back in late 1997, but I still feel relevant - many of the girls I met back then and in the next 3-4 years are only now becoming more visible. The delay is largely due to the "edgy" model wave that sidelined most quality models in the past 5-6 years (to call these "edgy" mods simply inferior in quality would be incorrect, since they were in effect "anti-models" - the people who promoted them wanted to destroy the image of the perfect, elegant, appealing model, that the "supermodel" era produced)
Girls like Michelle Alves had trouble finding jobs from 1999 onwards - it was only recently - after 9/11 in fact - that many got the success they deserved. Others, like Korina Longin and Noemie Lenoir, among the "soon to be big" in 1997, are still not widely known, in high fashion circles anyway. Rhea Durham, the "Revlon girl" after Cindy C, was "high fashion" for a time, but perhaps her beauty looked too "classic" for AW's purposes - she still works, got married, but the hipster crowd pretends she doesn't exist. The girls who were working before 1998 and "survived" without much trouble tend to share certain common characteristics - mainly the fact that they are favourites of AW/Meisel and their circle.
Not that I was ever into "supermodels" much - I was no more interested than the average guy, just following the supermod coverage on the TV news and all over the press, for much of the nineties. I still have the 1986
Sports Illustrated calendar - it was actually a present - with Paulina Porizkova's pics, but I never bought any mags with her editorials.
As for the "supermodel" story - most people credit
Elite's Monique Pillard as the inventor of the supermodel concept - helped by Marco Glaviano, who shot a series of calendars with Paulina Porizkova, in 86 and 87. Cindy Crawford was the top name in the late 80s - and beyond. Cindy, as well as S Seymour and 80s top model Hunter Reno were contestants in the first fashion model contest
Elite organised, in Acapulco, Mexico. Linda Evangelista wasn't there - but she did win the "Miss Niagara Falls" contest when she was 14 years old. In 1990, after the initial success of the "Trinity" (Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista) in which S. Meisel played a significant role, after he met Christy in 1986 - Gerald Marie, one of Elite's owners (who was also instrumental in the "Trinity" success story and used it to promote his new wife, Linda E) convinced several important designers,like Gianni Versace, that supermodels were worth much more than the standard pay rate. Gianni started the model "exlusives" game - he paid more than anyone else was willing to, so that a supermodel would do only his show during Milan fashion week. Other designers joined the bidding when they saw the media attention this concept brought to Gianni, and model rates in general skyrocketed.
The "Trinity" disbanded in late 1992, not long after Linda E made her famous "won't get out of bed for less that $10K" comment. That was effectively the end of the "high fashion supermodel" - interest in them declined throughout 93 and 94, and by 1995 they were absent from most FW shows.
S Meisel really became -internationally- significant again only after 1998, when he started shooting major European campaigns. Most of Meisel's friends actually were influential long ago, even before AW became the US
Vogue editrix, in 1988. US
Elle (whose launch in NYC and success in the late 80s contributed to the editorship changes in US
Vogue) and people like Demarchelier arrived fairly late, but threatened the clique's power.
The Gross book is probably the only source on Meisel's past, since he stays well away from publicity - here are a few things Gross mentions about him:
"
Meisel and a pack of powerful fashion friends were trying to resurrect the cult of the fashion photographer of the sixties...In the beginning, he was imitating his idol, Avedon, whom he worshipped since grade school...he copies anything from Horst to Bourdin and poses his models as actresses and mannequins of earlier times..." Gross also mentions an interview Meisel once gave to the gay mag "Advocate", in which he says he always liked to photograph "...
more effeminate-looking men, more masculine-looking women, and drag queens in hopes of teaching that there is a wide variety of people...there's absolutely a queer sensibility to my work...but there's also a sense of humor...a sarcasm and a fuck you attitude as well as a serious beauty"
This may be useful for those who claim that Meisel and Co are just doing their job and don't have any kind of agenda - one has to wonder how much of this "queer sensibility" AW shares with him.
The supermodels generated publicity not just by appealing to fashion's limited audience, but mainly by appearing in the mass media and in men's magazines, calendars, etc - they were in fact a mass-appeal "product". Designers, fashion magazines and the biz in general benefited from the increased public interest in all things fashion - if you look at the covers of most big fashion mags throughout the first half of the nineties, they are dedicated to "supermodels". The same was true for mainstream media - models outnumbered celebrities.
The big winners were of course the model agency bosses - the public demanded more of the same, and many new names joined the supermodel club after 1991 as a result.
In 1992 , the "grunge" trend was hot, along with Nirvana and Seattle music, and several "waifs" became big - with Kate Moss getting the
Calvin Klein contract. The few famous waifs (Meisel also
"developed" Stella Tennant, considered a waif at the time) were just a sideshow though. The public wanted tall, perfectly proportioned supermods - even Naomi C said at the time that she felt "inferior" when standing next to many of these "perfect" girls.
Here is the ancient
alt.supermodels FAQ which tells you more than you really need to know - this one factoid warrants special mention:
"...Amber Valletta, in 1995...was everywhere and then deliberately cut back on exposure to prevent saturation and self-distruction of her career".
I bet the hipsters are still laughing - Amber is of course a perennial fave of the NYC high fashion clique. Her
Versace campaign saturation did little to damage her career - although the same cannot be said for
Versace sales.
As for "everywhere" - I don't remember seeing her in any European (non-
Conde Nast)fashion mags until the late 90s.
The Gross book ends sometime in 1995. That was when terminal "supermodel boredom" hit fashion (although the trend started two years earlier) and Christy Turlington announced her retirement (but have since returned, retired again, etc).
What went wrong?
Gross offers some views - the major reason was that models became too powerful, and when even their agents got pissed (classic scene of JC in the back of a limo, blasting "ungrateful" Naomi) they got in trouble.
The supermod frenzy actually peaked in Europe in 95/96 - many "fashion/supermodel TV specials" were filmed at the time, mainly in France and the UK. In all of them, photographers like Demarchelier or Baily are shown waiting, sometimes for days, for the supermod to show up for her scheduled shoot. AW's alternative business plan certainly took care of that problem.
Many of the "top" mods who showed up between 92 and 96 disappeared not long after - Irina Pantaeva, Claudia Mason, Meghan Douglas, Jenny Shimizu, Laeticia Herrera, Iris Palmer, Fabienne, Patricia Velasquez (she did show up again recently, in beauty ads in US magazines) and so many others. Some, like Michelle Hicks and Guinevere van Seenus, Vogue Italia regulars, show up here and there and then disappear again. The 1995 "hot face", Kristin McMenamy, as well as Shalom Harlow, gave up. Bridget Hall is still around, like Chandra North, Georgina Grenville and Kirsty Hume, but hardly among the hipster faves. Others, like Maggie Wrobel, Michelle Weweje, Michelle Behennah, etc were successful commercially but got little respect from "high fashion". A great resource for model fans is
"Mr 88's" magazine lists, buried somewhere - but still accessible (Please, never link directly to any pics in these sites - use text links instead).
There were also many faces who were popular mostly in Europe at the time - Adriana Sklenarikova, Carla Bruni, Ines Sastre and others are far better known today than any of the "fashion" names mentioned above. Eva Herzigova is still considered a "GUESS model" by many NYC "pros" - her mass appeal in Europe is second only to Naomi's. Models like Valeria Mazza, Leticia Casta or Nieves Alvares are huge in their respective markets. Euro fashion mags did not adopt the "celebrity covergirl" swing that was so popular in the US - most mags still use models on their cover pages.
I don't know if anyone will do a book about post-1995 events, but it will probably be boring and far removed from the truth - nobody in NYC would dare go against AW and her clique. How are they going to explain the "Belgians" - as just another "beauty wave", like a clueless US
Elle person reportedly claimed?
So, what about the Madonna/Gross movie? Well, M Gross made a lot of money working for
Conde Nast magazines, and I doubt he'll risk his professional future to tell a truth that nobody really cares about.
In spring 2003, the news was that Michael Flutie was trying to buy the media rights to the Gross book. His
Company agency glory days were the post-95 years, so maybe he was going to expand on the book story he represented some of the best models at the time.
Flutie was not the typical model boss - he said himself once, that being gay made it easier for him to approach girls with modeling potential. His mods were rather "conventional" though - like Amy Wesson, perhaps the best US model after 1995 in my opinion, who had some trouble with drugs. While still popular in Europe, with several campaigns in France and Italy in past years, she still faces problems getting work in NYC.
NYC agents often display poor taste in model selection - or maybe that's the plan, since "good taste" is a no-no for the high fashion illuminati. The locals always talk about "the girl from next door" look, and until about 1996/97, the majority of the mods in their rosters were Anglo-Saxon, like their next-door neighbors.
Like their London friends, they are largely culturally ignorant - it's not that they knew and didn't care about Eastern European or other "ethnic" models, but they actually had no idea what these mods looked like - they probably assumed they resembled the evil spies in cold war propaganda movies. There were several hilarious "ethnic mod" articles in both US and UK media, inc one in the NYC
Paper magazine, which demonstrate their ignorance - in the
Paper story, a few years ago, a "
Wilhelmina agent" who was apparently ex-Elite, claims that there are really no worthy Russian models, and
Elite (the big agency at the time) wouldn't open an office in Moscow any time soon.
Elite of course worked with agency
Red Stars in Moscow since the the early nineties, and many of the top winners in their model contest - Tatiana Zavialova in 93 (3d), Natalia Semanova in 94 (1st), Irina Bondarenko in 95 (2nd) Diana Kovalchuk in 96 (1st), Vika Sementsova in 99 (1st) - were ex-USSR, and represented by the Moscow agency! Obviously
Elite's PR wasn't very effective, but such displays of ignorance are typical even today, when one reads the statements made by NYC biz people - most don't ever bother to read or look at the pics in fashion magazines (except the 4-5 "hip" titles, of course).
The truth is that very few people in any agency really know anything about models - and most of those who were competent, are long gone.
It's amazing how many US top mods come from poorer areas in the US midwest and south - Amy Wesson was spotted in Biloxie, Missisippi (in a trailer park, if we are to believe Mr Flutie) but she is probably the only one who doesn't show it. Up to the mid-90s, the modelling world was ruled by the Nordic blonde, preferrably of the native English-speaking variety. Past
Elite Model Look final contests used to include huge numbers of US and Canadian girls, who had limited success afterwards. That "inbalance" came to an end around 96/97, the same time many Milanese openly complained about the quality of "top" US models, as the fashion world was fast becoming more international (not in the narrow "add some black/hispanic variety" sense, as popular in NYC) and most of the hip US mods at the time didn't look very "cosmopolitan". Not surprising, considering their backgrounds.
Elite was pushing the second wave of supermodeldom back then - their "Supermodels of 2000" hopefuls - back in 96/97 -included Ines Rivero and Valeria Mazza (both from Argentina), Daniela Pestova (Czech Republic) and Ingrid Seynhaeve (Belgium). Note that none of the so-called "top NYC mods" - Amber Valletta, etc - on US
Vogue cover pages and editorials at the time, or any Anglo-American types, were included. In 1998, their "Latin queen" was Gisele Bundchen, a little known Brazilian model of German ancestry, who had won the Brazilian Look in 1994 but had done next to nothing since. The hyping followed the Linda E model - constant exposure for many months in a row, on different
Vogue editions. AW called her a "
Vogue supermodel" - it was obvious that some people were trying to re-engineer the "supermodel" business model, but by adapting it to their mentality.
With AW's clique post-98 domination, many of the "high fashion" waifs/superwaifs who had little mass appeal or even exposure outside the US/UK, got their revenge - Meisel keeps planting Amber Valletta everywhere, Carolyn Murphy was recalled from her Costa Rican surfing exile to appear on Roitfeld's
Vogue Paris with a radical salon hairdo - and then as a post-modern Grace Kelly for
E Lauder, while Trish Goff, Tasha Tilberg, Stella Tennant and others are still around - it's like time has stopped.
Other more promising models faced troubles - Angie Lindvall, an "Elle face" back in 97, became "cult" and then fell from NYC hipster grace, but seems to be back in favor with the hipsters in 2004.
Many excellent new US/Canadian mods like Bekah Jenkins, Noot Sear, Lindsay Frimodt, etc work mostly in Europe - while bland "next door girl" faces keep showing up every season and getting most of the high fashion hype. Originally the Milanese used them for such trends as "trailer trash chic" - known as "poverty chic" in NYC - but now they are everywhere.
An old site which was mainly Elite PR, supermodel.com, still exists. Buried in their
"reports archive", you can find NYC modeling biz factoids from late 96 and 97. You won't see many "edgy" faces - compare these mods with today's "A-Listers".
Notice the "Elite Party"
story - the agents are probably all gone, the new mods in the pics were Nina Heimlich, Jennifer Williams and a cute Danita Angell, still a junior in high school. Georgina Cooper btw is still around. The Model Look event
mentioned is probably from 1997, a NY preliminary. Note a very young Tracy Trinita (a 1995 Look finalist), Daniela Pestova - obviously their big star at the time - Rosemarie Wetzel - "Elite's next supermod" in late 1995 who still looks amazing in recent Oenobiol ads, and Larissa Bondarenko (not related to G Marie's current wife, Irina Bondarenko) - who showed up naked in
Italian Max, looking great for her 28+ years.
One of the "lost
Prada girls" is Sierra Huisman - allegedly an
IMG "discovery" in 1999, but notice her in a 1997
Shisheido party -and Alek Wek was there too - long before she was hip in NYC!
- here. The "Ford 50 years party"
item shows that
Ford did even worse than
Elite in wasting top model careers - the selection of Diana Kovalchuk as the 1996 Look winner was partly due to her resemblance to Patricia Velasquez, very hot at the time.
Russians and Argentinians/Brazilians were going to be the next wave, or that was what
Elite's people had in mind - but not the Russians of the sort that
Women agency promoted up to recently. Natalia Semanova and several others (
Dior face Christina Semenovskaya,
Wonderbra girl Inna Zobova, Tatiana Zavialova,
Clarins girl Olga Kurylenko, etc) were major stars in Paris/Milan, but never really appealed to the NYC fashion crowd - to the few knowledgable types anyway, since the rest probably don't know they exist - while Colette Pechekonova, said to have been discovered via the internet, did so, for reasons unknown.
I have the programme of the 1997
Elite international Model Look contest final - it includes a pic of Tatiana Zavialova, who was said to represent the soon-to-arrive "alternative beauty" to fashion modeling. That term, in later years referred to manly-looking, knobbly-kneed and generally quirky mods - but in 1997, an appealing Russian face was the "alternative" to the usual nordic blondes and the "next door" faces.
Even the
Vogue empire had selected the very impressive
Malgosia Bela as its "Face of 2000", according to German
Vogue - but Meisel reportedly still can't find the right hairstyle (!!!!) to revive her career.
As for the Brazilians, NYC modelling never liked "Latin" - looking models. Of course, few people knew about the mostly blonde gauchas from Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina back then - and Shirley Mallmann's success at the time was not enough to signal anything, since most people didn't even know she was Brazilian.
The success of Gisele Bundchen in 1998 had a lot to do with the "Latin" trend at the time, when stars like J Lopez and Ricky Martin were very popular. Gisele, spent over a year in NYC doing mostly nothing since she arrived there in Dec 96, while
Elite was ignoring the rest of their excellent 94-97 Brazilian model discoveries - they were in "development", which meant they had to wait for their turn. Most didn't, and left
Elite for other agencies.
Ford Models miscalculated also - along with
Elite, they had the two oldest modeling agencies in Brazil, and their local model contests produced the best mods (Adriana Lima and
Revlon girl Luciana Curtis were
Ford Brazil, while Isabeli, Michelle Alves, Alessandra Ambrosio, Ana Beatriz Barros, Fernanda Tavares, Caroline Magalhaes-Ribeiro and Gisele were with
Elite Brazil).
When Gisele got her US
Vogue cover in July 1998, it was agencies like
Marilyn and
IMG who had the Brazilian stars, almost all of them ex-
Elite and ex-
Ford Brazil discoveries.
In late 1999, J Casablancas changed plans, and
Elite promoted young Raica Oliveira as the new
Dior girl after she won the Look 99 title - but it was too late, as
Elite was in decline already. Soon after the international final in Nice, France, in September 99, a "sex, drugs and underage models exploitation" expose appeared on BBC TV. Nothing was actually proved, except that French playboys have a poor sense of humor, and that London agencies -
Select in particular- knew that some of their models were heroin/cocaine addicts and did little about it. In fact, the London
Premier agency lady boss declared that however bad things were, she wasn't going to play the "model granny". Instead of getting outraged at this indifference towards models, many people were "worried" about the threat old model bosses posed to underaged mods.
This is probably what the Madonna/Gross movie will focus on - Gross keeps talking about the sad lifes of some models who partied too hard and were exploited by the biz, to showcase the "ugliness" of modelling. Of course, "mediterranean loverboys" are the only villains - after all, Ivan Bart and Co cannot possibly be considered a threat to underage mods (even lesbian bookers are OK in this respect)
You can be sure that the demands hip agents/stylists make on 50 kilo/16 yo mods to lose over 10% of their already low weight before they can do "high fashion" is one of the subjects which will be ignored in the Madonna movie - which after all,is intended as a merchandising extravaganza, sort of "Sex and the City" travels back in time.
The 1999 "expose" accelerated Elite's decline and effectively eliminated the agency as the major modelling force in NYC, at least in the new "edgy" high fashion environment. What did JC really had in his mind at the time?
I don't know if
Elite was going to resist AW's new "modelling world order", but their Look 99 press release sounded like a defiant statement in defense of "classic beauty". JC showed weakness during that period - he tried to find new people to head
Elite NYC, but they in turn made all sorts of demands and then abandoned him. After he left NYC "as planned" for retirement in Florida, having sold his agency share to a Swiss financier, some minor bookers with connections to Meisel and Co took effective control, and eventually abandoned the agency along with the models they were managing.
Meisel wasn't always into "edgy" - he liked girls like Mexican Elsa Benitez a lot in 96/97. Her Pirelli calendar pics were amazing, and she was "the other" Elite major Latin star - and he used her a lot in
Vogue Italia eds. If Elsa had the "glistening breasts" that high fashion so adored in Gisele, I wonder whether she could have been the one in Gisele's place. In any case, it was Gisele who got the major hype, and as a result, the world discovered Brazilian fashion models - which is really what matters.
The London agency lady bosses did their best to push their "edgy" faves since AW became the "trendsetter" - mostly local aristotrash, nieces and girlriends of the glitterati, plus a few "provincial" girls - their successes included Karen Elson, Erin O'Connor, Jodie Kidd and Kate Moss - who suddenly was now the "top" name and not just a sideshow to the "true" supermods. The London mods can be superwaif, overweight (Sophie Dahl -
this UK Telegraph article on her beats any Monty Python movie script) or have other quirks usually not tolerated in "normal" mods - but NYC "anglophiles" will make sure they'll do well regardless.
S/S 2004 was the time for the major comeback of the Anglo-American model - new US/UK as well as Canadian and Australian faces dominated the high fashion catwalks. Even Karen Elson made a comeback - she now appears all over French fashion magazines as a beauty model, along with Omahyra Mota and other NYC beauty queens, and French
Elle (who had to explain to its readers what "edgy" was back in 2000) devoted a cover to her, even though she never bothered to do any eds for
Elle editions in the past.
Even though "pioneering" Karl Lagerfeld had adopted Stella Tennant in 1996 (Kate Moss lasted one year) and then Karen Elson in 1997 (who, he said, resembled an "alien mutant" - this April 1998
Salon story senses the new mood) things in mainland Europe took longer to catch up with Meisel's "new aesthetic" turn - even himself used to shoot faces like Amy Lemons and Elsa Benitez just a year before.
The turn went into high gear by the arrival of mods like Karen E and
Sunniva Stordal in
Vogue Italia. Karen's story is important since she was the "battering ram" used by AW's pals to impose their "new order" - her story was covered in several articles (in
June 1997 and
March 1998 and
as well as in this piece, when the "freak" was now conventionally "chic". (UK Telegraph - free registration may be needed). When Karen Elson showed up in Milan in Spring 98, the Milanese
called her "fat" and unsuitable for catwalk duty - but they soon understood what was going on, and never complained again. Karen even became a
Valentino girl in 1999/2000, underscoring the total surrender of the "high fashion" Milanese to AW's new business model. She recently
revealed her anorexia/bulimia problems in UK Vogue, but apparently it hardly impressed anyone in NYC.
The pivotal year for the swing to "edgy" was 1998 - that was also when Tom Ford, who was at the time thinking of leaving
Gucci for Hollywood, decided to stay on and expand the Gruppo - AW and her allies took advantage of that, along with the door that was opened by Mr. Arnaud and his friends into Paris, for AW's fave London-educated young designers (Galliano, McQueen, McCartney, etc) to replace such "stale" traditionalists as
Dior's G Ferre, who would have refused to go "trash" to appeal to the "It girls". Yves St Laurent was an easy target - the
YSL PaP ad campaigns by Sorrenti were amazing and a work of art, his designs were actually selling well, but AW had blacklisted Yves and he in response refused to advertise in her mag. The
YSL owners were looking for a better business deal - and AW's "new order" plan looked appealing. Tom Ford took care of the business penetration into Paris - the "creative" brain for both
YSL and
Gucci was in London - and the Parisienne, who send the Gendarmerie
to harass G Armani when he attempted a Paris showing, gladly collaborated - once again stupidly thinking that post-modernism was the salvation for their stagnating fashion business.
The relation between Tom Ford and AW is well-known, and if you needed proof, the "Goddess"
corporate PR, financed by Tom and hosted by AW, is one example. Tom Ford was one of very few people on whom AW could count on for ad revenue - and other things. He was also instrumental in helping to install his own stylist, Carine Roitfeld, as the editrix of
Vogue Paris - an irrelevant publication when Juliet Buck was running it, but nowdays the darling of every NYC hipster, second only to
Vogue Italia, Meisel's pet project, in that respect. For a fun article on Carine R and "coolness" check
this out - nothing like NYC "fashion journalism" can produce.
Yves wasn't the only one US
Vogue-only readers may be ignorant about - when
Prada financed Azzedine Alaia's comeback recently, he refused
Conde Nast employees entry to his Paris show as a payback for the treatment he had received from US
Vogue in the past.
Conde Nast editrixes can have very cozy relationships with their advertisers -
Versace is very important in their list, and gets special "protection" - for example, other designers who may be called "the new Gianni Versace", such as Julien McDonald, Elie Saab or even Roberto Cavalli, are ignored or trashed by the vogueys. It may of course be just a coincidence, that all three who design Versace-like fashions receive similar treatment. In contrast, Mr Elbaz, who was "stale" and "boring" as the last
YSL designer before Tom Ford took over, is now doing fine, since he presently works for an
LVMH firm, a major
Vogue advertiser
Conde Nast bigwigs are very much invoved in the philosophy behind their high fashion mags - SI Newhouse approves of the almost total absence of men in AW's publication, and has made comments about some Vogue editions being too "testosterone heavy", bacause they featured photos of men.
The absence of men in US
Vogue - pregnant women get photographed (only when having babies is trendy) by well-known lesbian A Leibowitz, while the men "responsible" are nowhere in sight - is interesting, but I doubt if NYC journalists will ever comment on the subject.
The "It girl" was the centerpiece of AW's business plan - but statistics showed that they had stopped buying "luxury" goods as early as mid-2000, after they were wiped out by the stock market crash. That was not the case in the mid-90s, as the exploding stock market was creating many new urbanite professional-class females, in the 19 to 35 age bracket, who were going to be the customers for AW's "high fashion" ideal. The newly famous fashion designers and their brands, brought out of obscurity in the late 80s and the first half of the 90s by the clever marketing trick of the "supermodel", plus the new London-originating "talent", would now go global with a unified message, but appealing to the right niche audience - so the mass-appeal of the "supermodels" was seen as irrelevant.
When Tom Ford started to re-organise
Gucci, he got rid of
Gucci licencees, and concentrated on branding and total control of the product. The fashion models were now going to be part of the total package - they didn't have to be appealing, but it was important that the target audience was to perceive them as "cool". In fact, if they had some quirk, that could add to their "coolness" and help differentiate the product. The plan was helped by "cool" publications, also targeted at the same newly affluent audience - yuppie lifestyle/fashion mags like
i-D, Dazed and Confused, Numero, etc. These mags (with the exception of
Surface and very few others) surrendered their faux avant-garde image to service the high fashion conglomerates - their new role was now to push the "luxury" conglomerate merch, and use the new "edgy" and "cool" mods, shot by new "cool" photographers - preferrably under
Conde Nast contract, since Virgos tend to be control freaks. Real anant-garde was the last thing that really interested the hipsters - not only
Surface, but other "alternative" fashion/lifestyle mags, like Helena Christensen's
Nylon, did not impress them - since they were not under their control, and they weren't really serving the "luxury" market and AW's advertisers. AW's friends showed their respect for models and designers alike, when the Prada boss said that "marketing is more important than design" - but the so-called "designers" proved spineless and none complained about the comment.
How the "high fashion model hype" system actually works:
The "hip" agents/bookers (being a
Conde Nast lackey increases your hipness value in NYC) grab some nodescript/"edgy" face out of a playground or find some bland face with little or no modeling history (as was the case with many 22+ year old "Belgians"), the contract "cool" photographers are instructed to shoot her for editorials scheduled to appear in cooperating "cool" artsy magazines like i-D, and the result is used as proof of the mod's "hipness" - next, the "friendly" conglomerates get them as "exclusives" for their shows or campaigns, in a game that benefits everyone - the mod's hyped "value" may then convince other (usually clueless, Germany's
Escada is an example) fashion clients to pay extra to get the mods for their own campaigns as well - they couldn't do any better than get the "prestigious"
Gucci/Prada girl, after all. When it comes to people like Testino, his polaroid is all that's needed for a model to make it big. Of course, people like Meisel and Testino are busy, and have little time scouting for models - usually the mods are suggested to them (or to their assistants actually) by fashion PR people or "stylists"- it was no accident that nearly all hip Russian mods, the first to really impress the NYC crowd after 1998, are represented by the same agent (Anne Vialytsina was an
IMG "discovery").
As for the fashion week shows, the major NYC fashion PR firms gradually took over the show management and organisation - they nominate the season's "hip" faces and bus them around to all the "major" shows. The hippest show
stylists are actually the same ones doing the "cool" styling for the hippest high fashion magazines - Meisel's
Vogue Italia stylist, the
Pop stylist, etc - so there is no danger of any "non-approved" mods displacing the "cool" ones from show castings. The hip agency bosses made a lot of money from fashion shows in past years - that balanced the revenue they were losing because their "edgy" models weren't suitable for any other work.
The big model powerhouses, who were behind the "supermodel" concept, and used their resources to find the "better" models were not needed any more - during the years that big agency bosses were in control, AW and everyone else in fashion played a secondary role, and that obviously had to change.
I actually never even heard of Anna Wintour - or any other editrix - even after watching and reading hundrends of fashion-related articles and TV reports, up to late 1997. AW couldn't rise to the top and become the "trendsetter" unless model bosses/mega-agents lost their power - and they did help their own demise by asking for 50+ percent fees, alienating everyone and behaving like nobody could ever threaten them. Their greediness was such, that they had started to threaten model fan sites with "copyright" laws - I learned from an
Elite bigwig in 98 that the agency had sold the model portfolios of all their models to a French multimedia company - and that those types could "get upset" if others published online photos of
Elite's mods (an argument helped by the peculiar French copyright laws)
Elite was the major power behind most top models/supermodels (by 1996/97 they had all the major girls) but their power was coming to an end - the agency effectively collapsed in less than two years, from mid-1998 to mid-2000. The owners of the new hip agencies were now the principal players, and they were welcomed by fashion's "new order" - remnants of the "old order" (
Karin, Metropolitan, Wilhelmina, Riccardo Gay, etc) were sidelined.
There are of course those people who think that AW is really incapable of such grandiose planning, and it was really her London pals in modelling and fashion (and perhaps some others behind them, who sought a chance to help Her Majesty's coffers) who "helped" her with all this - I tend to subscribe to that theory.
Is she (and her minions) really responsible for everything that's happening in the modeling world?
The truth is that her "trash chic" approach (every proper high fashion person is pro-poor taste and anti-bourgeois, whatever that means to the politically ignorant in NYC) and her ever-increasing strong preference for using celebrities instead of models helped reveal the true nature of most "creative" types in high fashion.
Up to a few years ago, most of the fashion gliteratti showed up on TV expressing their love for the mods in their shows, coz they allegedly personified the "drop dead gorgeous woman" ideal they so much adored. AW helped them to "come out" and express their true love - for "thinness", "new sexy" and "alternative elegance" - and show their (dis)respect for models in general.
Even "conventional" Alberta Ferreti trashed models when she said that "the difference between dressing an actress or a pop star and a model is huge...a star - the right star - humanises the clothes."
Imagine what sort of respect the freakier biz types have for fashion mods. So, some totally manufactured mega-fake "star", like pop tart Kylie, is more "human" than fashion models?
It looks more and more like the high fashion biz people would rather go back to pre-85 times, when only a few horsey blondes like Jerry Hall modelled - but they would also like to keep the fame and money the "supermodels" brought to them.
If it wasn't for models and their appeal, very few people would bother with any of them - as was the case 20 years ago.
AW and her pals, after their own fave anti-models failed consistently to help sell products, blaimed the mods and switched their attention to celebrities or model/celebrities from the past - even the one "Vogue Supermodel" - ie Gisele - is not that visible in the last couiple of years. AW's problem is how to find celebrities who are not widely known in the US, and who will then need her strong "support" - she seems to have chosen ex-Posh Spice for that role, she probably thinks she can do an "Ozzy" and charm the US public. We'll see.
The rest of the world still likes fashion models very much, and "classic" mods continue to appear on the covers of fashion magazines and TV around the world. In Italy, the big mobile phone companies who dominate the ad market use very appealing young mods, like Megan Gale or Kasia Smutniak, in their print/TV ads. Fernanda Tavares and L Casta look gorgeous in
L'Oreal TV ads - their people know that actresses/pop stars alone can't sell every product. Teresa Lourenco was in
Campari TV ads while many young mods, like Yfke Sturm, show up in French/Euro hair product/beauty/cosmetics ads - and the list goes on.
The "supermodel boredom" period coincided with some major model-related controversies - on the NYC side, the
Davide Sorrenti affair, the drug troubles of Jamie King, Amy Wesson and others, and the public outrcy against fashion biz practices that even forced President Clinton to condemn them. (Today, "conservative" and "family values" G W Bush sees nothing wrong with AW's anorexic world, and one of his nieces is part of the celebrity/model circuit)
London agencies were badly bruised by their own 1997 "heroin chic" scandals - when British designers had to announce, under public pressure, that they wouldn't employ any model addicts (imagine how widespread the problem was in London).
The UK Vogue editrix btw - infamous for a number of things, among them calling Sophia Loren "white trash" -
said in 1998 that heroin chic "may" cause harm - but not really.
The agencies did recover soon though, and were instrumental in providing models for AW's "edgy" wave.
The superwaifs that arrived with the "heroin-chic" look multiplied, but were still largely a sideshow - and clients weren't all that happy.
Omega watches threatened to pull its ads out of UK
Vogue in 1997 because of the "skeletal" mods - primarily Trish Goff - who appeared in the mag. Quirky/edgy mods in eds and on covers pages increased sharply from 1998 on - and up to early 2002, most of the "edgy" faces who arrived in NYC, came via London - Norwegians, Russians, Belgians, whatever the "trend" demanded.
The "Belgians" came and went as fast as the Antwerp designers who AW promoted - remember the US
Vogue special on them? Nowdays, ex-"edgy" Anouck L and Co are being "beautified" and marketed to Japanese cosmetics firms.
NYC has now become the one "model capital" - up to the start of the "edgy" wave, most of the top mods were based in Paris - and the rest in Milan.
Some top names didn't even bother to travel to NY
"...Isn't life a ball? Czech catwalker Eva Herzigova was spotted frolicking on the Sardinian coast recently looking every inch the supermodel, her perfect curves wrapped in a polka dot bikini and the arms of two millionaires. Staying at Flavio Briatore's famous Billionaire's Club on the island, Eva was seen laughing and indulging in a group hug with the Formula One boss, ex-boyfriend of both Naomi Campbell and Heidi Klum, and her boyfriend, Italian businessman Gregorio Marsiaj..."
