Looking around, you’d have to agree. The early nineties have seen Aaron Spelling’s Models, Inc. join such nonfiction shows as Fashion Television, House of Style, and Style with Elsa Klensch on television; Australian swimsuit star Elle MacPherson’s appearance in the film Sirens; the publication of Top Model, a new magazine from the publishers of Elle; the release of calendars by Kathy Ireland, MacPherson, Claudia Schiffer, and Niki Taylor; and near-daily round-the-world coverage of such important news as the status of Cindy Crawford’s thing with Richard Gere (terminal), Elaine Irwin and John Mellencamp (holding steady), and Claudia Schiffer and David Copperfield (heading for the altar).
Strangely, just as the modeling business was poised to get bigger, models got smaller. The waifs, as the new generation was called, seemed like both a reaction to the excesses of the supermodels and a perfect reflection of a time of diminished expectations—in fashion and life. “The movement happened because we needed a change,” says Polly Mellen, who’d moved from Vogue to a new beauty magazine, Allure. And just as in the sixties the signs of changing times first appeared in England.
Sarah Doukas was a teenager, working in an antiques market on London’s King’s Road in 1972, when someone took her picture and sent her to an agency. For three years she modeled and sold antiques in London and Paris, before changing careers and managing a punk rock band, The Criminals, at the end of the seventies, when punk rock swept England. A few years later she met and married an American musician, the lead singer of a band called Earthquake. They moved to San Francisco, where they had a child and lived until 1982.
Earthquake had disbanded, and Doukas needed a job. A photographer friend sent her to Laraine Ashton. In six years there she rose from junior assistant to running the place, booking models like Jerry Hall and David Bailey’s then wife Marie Helvin. Then, with the help of the rock band U2’s lawyer, she put together a business plan for her own agency and began seeking backers, including Virgin Records tycoon Richard Branson, whose brother was one of her friends. In 1987 he agreed to give her interest-free loans until the agency, which she called Storm, got on its feet.
Working out of her bedroom, she recruited two bookers and began searching for girls. She found many of them on the street. “Wherever I was going, I was looking,” she says. “I found a great girl outside a garage in Battersby, in her school uniform.” Another discovery had pink and green hair. Clearly Doukas had a different kind of eye.
Once she’d gathered seven girls, she took their test photographs on a trip to Paris, Milan, and Japan. “So things progressed,” says her younger brother, Simon Chambers, who joined the company, computerized its accounts, and acted—he laughs—as “a reluctant babe magnet.” Fashion editors soon came sniffing around. Harriet Jagger of British Elle lived a street away, “and she would walk by on her way to work and come in and see who I had new, nearly every day,” Sarah says.
Sarah and Simon were on their way home from a scouting trip to Los Angeles and New York in 1988 when Sarah spotted a scrawny fourteen-year-old at Kennedy Airport. Kate Moss, a schoolgirl from Croydon, and her travel agent father had been waiting three days for standby seats back to England, where they were expected at a wedding. Kate’s father was arguing with people at the counter when Doukas spotted them. Luckily they made the flight. “As soon as the seat belt sign switched off, we rushed over,” Sarah says.
Kate’s father had seen Doukas on television and knew she was legitimate. The next day Kate’s skeptical mother agreed to accompany her to Storm. “She thought it was major con,” Kate recalled.
“I didn’t think I was going to change the face of modeling,” Doukas says. “But I’d found this amazing-looking girl. She came into the office, and she did a job immediately.” Doukas called all the magazines and faxed photographs of Moss to everyone she knew. “Nobody was interested,” she says. Moss was only five feet seven inches. Her career started slowly. “She was in school, and I don’t ever agree with taking anybody out of school,” Doukas says. “We worked on the holidays and stuttered along for a year. But she wasn’t greatly interested in school, and then she left, and then we started. Every day I said, ‘I’m going to make you a star.’ I didn’t know I was going to make her a superstar.”
Kate Moss photographed (as Anna Wintour?) by Peter Lindbergh for Harper’s Bazaar
Late in 1989 a young photographer named Corinne Day spotted a Polaroid of Moss and booked her for a shoot for the trend-setting English youth-cult magazine The Face. It was looking for a face to represent the magazine, and Kate’s clicked. Her first appearance was in March. Her first cover was in May.
Though she worked successfully for the next two years, Moss’s real break came in 1992, when she returned to America to shoot a cover for Harper’s Bazaar. Earlier that year Hearst Magazines in New York had poached Elizabeth Tilberis, who’d succeeded Anna Wintour as editor of British Vogue, and installed her as the American fashion magazine’s new editor in chief. For a quarter century Condé Nast had been the American magazine king of fashion, and its longtime rival, Hearst, had seemed rudderless. Hiring Tilberis was a bold move in Hearst’s quest to restore itself to glossy glory.
It would be an uphill battle. Through the early eighties Bazaar had registered consistent gains, more than doubling ad pages between 1977 and 1984. But in 1985 ad pages started falling, and revenue was flat. The downward trend continued, and by decade’s end there were constant rumors in bitchy fashion circles that Bazaar editor Anthony Mazzola’s days were numbered.
Elizabeth Tilberis had joined British Vogue during the reign of Wintour’s predecessor, Bea Miller. When Miller retired, Wintour “made changes, of course,” Tilberis says. “Excellent changes. It wasn’t the same as Bea’s magazine. We did less whimsy. We did a lot of running on the street.” Much as she approved, Tilberis almost went to work for Ralph Lauren in 1987, saying she was tired of traveling. She stayed in London after Wintour quit, she says, because “you don’t get offered the editorship of Vogue too often in life.”
Tilberis started talking to Hearst in October 1991. “It took awhile,” she says. “I wanted to find out how committed they were. They are totally committed to do the magazine I would like to see done.” That December Mazzola “announced his plan to retire early next year or as soon as a successor is found,” according to a press statement. Assurances in hand, Tilberis signed up in January 1992.
Her first issue, published that September, threw down a gauntlet. After a fierce bidding war with Vogue for the services of several top photographers, Tilberis had signed Patrick Demarchelier (who’d worked extensively for her at British Vogue) and Peter Lindbergh to exclusive contracts. She and her new team, notably art director Fabien Baron, then concocted a magazine that would stand apart and offer a clear alternative to Wintour’s cacophonous Vogue and its trendish chief photographer, Steven Meisel. The clean, airy, elegant publication she produced harkened back to the glory days of Alexey Brodovitch without seeming like a reproduction and quickly won acclaim, awards, newsstand sales, and attention from upscale advertisers.
While Tilberis was still planning, Kate Moss was on her way to America, where she signed with Woman, another new boutique agency. It quickly sent her on a go-see with Steven Meisel, who’d been shooting the Barbie-esque Shana Zadrick. Moss was something completely different, and Meisel used her for a Dolce e Gabbana catalog and an Italian Glamour cover. Woman also sent Moss to see Sara Foley-Anderson, who’d just been hired away from Wilhelmina’s exclusive W2 division to be Bazaar’s model editor. She and Bazaar’s editors “fell in love with Kate,” Foley-Anderson recalls. “We believed that models and fashion needed to be less hard-edged, more pared-down and accessible, less complicated and more open and real than they were in the eighties. Kate was the original herald of this movement, which, in its extreme, became ‘waif.’” The magazine immediately sent Moss to Patrick Demarchelier, who apparently agreed. A nine-page spread in Tilberis’s first issue that September, “Wild: Fashion that breaks the rules,�
� broke the rules concerning who could make it as a supermodel. Every month Moss gathered more Bazaar pages.
Demarchelier had also won the job of shooting launch ads for CK, a new, youth-oriented line by designer Calvin Klein. Marky Mark, the pop star, had already agreed to appear in the ads, but Demarchelier and Klein needed a girl. The photographer introduced Moss to the designer, says Doukas, “and before we knew it, we had a contract on our hands.”
A nod from Calvin Klein was a star-making moment in any model’s career. But Moss’s first ads were more than that. Demarchelier’s photographs of a topless Moss, straddling the buff body of Marky Mark, started a furor that continued long afterward. They also posed a challenge to the supermodels, several of whom criticized the ads in public. Claudia Schiffer’s comments about unnecessary nudity won her a blistering reply from Moss. “That’s how she made her fortune,” cried the waif. “She’s got an amazing body and big tits. She sold her body like I sold mine.”
With the Calvin Klein seal of approval, Moss was launched. “Calvin has intuition,” says Doukas’s brother, Simon. “He knew that this wasn’t just a modeling thing; this was a whole new generation. In the eighties young people, whether fifteen or forty, liked the same music, wore the same fashion, and da-da-da-da-da. But then the baby boomers got a little bit older, and their children came in behind them. Calvin knew that they had to have their own representative. The young want an icon like Kate, and the rest of us want our own. So there is also, simultaneously, a new realism in advertising, thanks to women out there spending money who want models to look realistic.”
Klein took the lead there, too, working both sides of the generation gap. The first indication that postpubescence had surged into fashion’s bloodstream came from Barneys New York. The store had just done an ad campaign using supermodels Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Rachel Williams. Afterward Barneys’ ad crew—baby boomers all—were sitting around talking about the disparity between the teens in the ads and their customers. Lauren Hutton ended up starring in a Barneys campaign that fall and again the following spring.
Then Calvin Klein booked his old friend Lisa Taylor. She’d found herself, early in the 1990s, in the office of a friend, contemplating turning forty.
“What should I do?” she asked Bryan Bantry, Patrick Demarchelier’s agent.
“You look incredible,” he told her. “Call Calvin.”
Soon afterward several misty ads were created for Klein’s collection. When they appeared in March 1992 magazines, they had an extraordinary impact. Clairol launched an ad campaign featuring twenty models over thirty years old. In April 1993 Klein began alternating waif models like Moss with five women who’d worked for him fifteen years before: Hutton, Rosie Vela, Jane Hitchcock (who’d started her career as a fourteen-year-old waif), Patti Hansen, and Donna Jordan. “They look just as right in my clothes now as they did then,” Klein said. “I have to be honest. I really don’t focus on age. I focus on the beauty of women.”
But the message was all about age. Kate Moss appeals to kids who buy jeans, Lauren Hutton to grown-ups who buy $2, 000 dresses. Klein—ever the cultural barometer—had cottoned on to something important. Baby boomers—the protagonists of the last youthquake—had seen their elders make fools of themselves at the time trying to act young, and they had no intention of doing the same.
“We’re like crusaders, pitching this idea and trying to get people to change what they think about women and age and advertising,” says agent Bantry. He’s signed up Haddon, Vela, Hansen, Marisa Berenson, Shaun Casey, Debbie and Janice Dickinson, Kim Alexis, Lois Chiles, Lisa Cooper, Ann Turkel, Donna Mitchell, Shelly Smith, Margaux Hemingway, and more as members of what he describes as an informal support group aimed at reinventing and reestablishing models of the 1960s and 1970s.
“This generation is healthier, living longer, spending more money; they’re much younger at forty than any previous generation,” Bantry says. “Clint Eastwood said he never dates women under forty. What would they talk about? The weather? I have that kind of respect for these women. They’re grown-ups. They’ve gotten through very difficult times in the seventies and the eighties and they’re better for it. At first people said we were nuts, but each month there are more bookings. Our girls are showing the rest of the world.” A pause. “I mean, our women.”
Still, by fall 1992 the waif look had conquered fashion. Corinne Day and Mario Sorrenti, Kate Moss’s model-turned-photographer boyfriend, began snatching up jobs that would have once automatically gone to Demarchelier or Meisel. That season Moss walked the runway in fashion shows for the first time, wearing grunge, gamin, and bohemian fashions that seemed inspired by the new wave of models. That December she made her first appearance on the cover of Bazaar. Early the next year she appeared in a campaign shot by Helmut Newton for Yves Saint Laurent.
In her wake came a wave of waifs. Another of the new breed photographers, Andrew Macpherson, called their look “elegantly wasted.” Storm signed up Emma Balfour, Louise Gander, and Patricia Hartmann. Lucie de la Falaise, Kristin McEnemy, Cecilia Chancellor, Kati Tastet, Amber Valetta, Beri Smithers, Janine Giddings, Benedicte Loyen, Simone Bowkett, and Shalom Harlow all signed with other agencies, which hurried to catch up. By March 1993 the waif take-over seemed complete. “Something had to give,” opined London’s Time Out. “Christy, Cindy, Claudia, Naomi et al. had to get their comeuppance.”
Ultimately, though, the waifs proved uncommercial. Moss’s scrawny form, seen the world over in advertisements and on billboards and telephone kiosks, inspired protests. “Feed me” was scrawled across her bare belly in a spontaneous graffiti protest. In June 1993 New York’s Daily News inveighed against Harper’s Bazaars “page after sickening page of skin-and-bones model Kate Moss who looks like she should be tied down and intravenously fed.” It wasn’t only Bazaar. “Every magazine got threatening letters,” says a fashion editor in a position to know. “There was enormous reader mail, and then all of a sudden you didn’t see waifs anymore. The best got absorbed, and the rest disappeared.” And 1994’s next wave of hot models was led by the taller, more traditional Nadja Auermann. “We are already seeing the pendulum swing back,” says Bazaars Sara Foley-Anderson, “but not all the way.” Bald and tattooed Eve Salail and pierced Stella Tennant symbolize modeling’s latest stage of diversification.
Kate Moss survived. She started hanging out with Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell, was regularly referred to as a supermodel, and even acquired the requisite hotel-room-smashing actor boyfriend, Johnny Depp.
The pendulum swung back in the modeling business, too. Finally a trend that began in the late seventies seemed to take hold in the early nineties, giving hope that modeling wouldn’t always remain a treacherous minefield for young girls.
There are now many women running their own agencies in all four of the world’s fashion centers, but the most forthright seem to be in Paris. Marilyn Gaulthier, a boisterous, buxom woman, was an English student when a friend suggested she become a booker at a model agency. “I thought being a booker meant taking care of books in the library,” she says, laughing. After six months with Guy Héron’s Cosa Nostra agency, Gaulthier went to work for Claude Haddad at Prestige. Though she says she never had a serious problem with Haddad, she still didn’t like his style. The worst thing was the way Haddad and his friends spoke about women. “I couldn’t believe it,” Gaulthier says. “I would not tell my mother to come and pick me up, even for lunch.”
In the early eighties Gaulthier left Prestige with several other bookers to start Delphine, an agency backed by Paul de Senville, a music business millionaire. When it fell apart, in 1985, Gaulthier opened her own agency, where she books stars like Helena Christensen and Storm’s Kate Moss and Carla Bruni. “After I left Claude,” she says, “I decided this is a woman business, definitely. So when I started Delphine, there was not a man in the agency. Not to put a nail in the wall. I was totally disgusted.”
Onetime Paris Pla
nning model Gaby Wagner spent a year at her agency, Zoom, before anyone took notice. But Wagner offered a real alternative. “I didn’t want to be part of all the crap,” she says. “I didn’t have a man in the agency. It was 1987. Problems had started in Paris with the men, with the owners of the agencies screwing around with young girls. The models were running away at night to the airport, no money, no suitcase, crying over the phone to their mothers. I was coming in against macho agencies as a woman, an ex-model. I got girls very easily, because they were afraid to send them to Jean-Luc or Claude Haddad or Gérald. I was safe, no men, only girls.”
Ironically Elite gave birth to the prototype sisterly agency, Fabienne Martin’s FAM. Martin worked for Viva when John Casablancas and the boutique agency’s founder, Christine Lindgren, went off to open Elite New York in 1977. “Christine came with me to New York,” Casablancas says. “But she did not at all adapt. She was crushed by New York, and so she went back to Viva.”
Martin soon quit Viva; Casablancas had promised her shares in it and hadn’t delivered, she says. But she found she missed working with Lindgren. “We had a wonderful understanding,” Martin says. “I was really a radical. Every time a girl [was booked for] an advertisement, I would ask to see the rough of the campaign, the text, how she was going to be positioned. I would lose a lot of money, and girls would leave me. In the end I could get them where I wanted them to go, so I was proud of my position.”
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 57
