Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

by Gross, Michael

  Perhaps Casablancas will again fall out of love with his latest Eliza Doolittle—and back in love with Elite. But for the moment he will only admit to a different worry, and it’s one that will likely hound him the rest of his life. “I really believe I have a very romantic relationship,” he says. “Aline and I get along beautifully. But will it last forever? Will she one day wake up and find out that I’m very old and not want me? It’s possible.”

  He pauses, and his voice turns querulous and almost vulnerable. “I’m the one who’s taking the biggest risk, in fact, you know?”

  In March 1993, just as their deal with Dieter Esch fell apart, a fire destroyed the country house Eileen and Jerry Ford had built for their retirement. The emotional toll it took on the couple was plainly evident. “We can’t afford not to work,” Eileen Ford said not long afterward in a heartbroken voice.

  A year later the Fords are ensconced in a rental—a neo-Georgian pile on a big property in Bernardsville, New Jersey—as they rebuild their ruined dream house. Wearing sweaters, chinos, and moccasins, the couple lunches on borscht with creme fraiche, chicken salad with bacon, and green salad in the large but featureless house. “I’d be having a peppermint schnapps if you weren’t here,” Eileen tells a visitor, quaffing a big glass of iced tea.

  After lunch Jerry takes his Audi full of family jumble—tapes, maps, crushed gloves, and wrapped red-and-white-striped peppermints—on the long drive to their fire-gutted house on a hill. It boasts an incredible view across the Jersey countryside’s rolling hills from the master bedroom, a sprawl of family rooms, three maids’ rooms, and an extra floor for more expansion. Not for models, but for grandchildren. A library with a seventeenth-century mantel and matching carved wooden walls and Jerry’s two-thousand-bottle wine cellar directly beneath it were the only rooms that survived the fire. That means they still have their two cases of 1961 Pétrus, but Jerry doesn’t like to drink the $600-a-bottle wine. “It’s obscene,” he says. So it sits, unappreciated.

  Jerry has to do this whirlwind inspection because he and Eileen are rarely at home anymore. Trips are what they do now that they’ve been eased upstairs to figurehead roles in the agency they founded. Trips for work. And lots of vacations, although Eileen will tell you that a model agent never stops working, as long as there are pretty people around. So Jerry and Eileen, just back from Anguilla, are off in two days to Snowmass and then Paris for the collections and so on and so on.

  Back at the house, Eileen is ensconced in front of the TV, intently watching the Olympics. Though she never once looks at the screen while a visitor is in the room, it’s abundantly clear what she’d rather be doing. After seventy years of living, self-analysis still doesn’t come easily to Eileen Ford. Neither is it easy for her to contemplate, let alone talk about, the possibility of her retirement.

  The Fords profess to be happy about their situation, but a discordant undertone sounds. “Every company that has a second generation in management has tension,” Jerry says about Ford’s new leadership. “We have three presidents. A strange phenomenon. I don’t care as long as they’re happy.”

  Though others say they’re being kept as far as possible from the office, Ford says he and his wife are delighted to still be hopping around the globe, promoting the Supermodel of the World contest. “Everybody wants Eileen,” he says proudly. “She is a unique figure. Who can replace that?” He pauses a moment and then adds, “But if the three of them feel we should go, we’ll go.”

  Eileen Ford looks up angrily. She has no intention of going anywhere. “There is so much work at the Ford agency that if Jerry and I left, who on earth would take our place?” she demands. “Nobody could do what we’re doing. Who will answer the mail? Who will send the Christmas gifts? Who has the time? Who has time to make all those phone calls? Who’ll travel for Supermodel? They all have too much to do. As long as I can walk across a room and remember a name, I’ll keep going.”

  She is quivering, outraged at the thought of a Ford agency minus Eileen Ford. Then, as suddenly as she blew up, she deflates, and the mother of modeling, the last pioneer, looks like nothing so much as another victim of the never-ending quest for beauty and youth. She can’t imagine stopping. Like so many models, she has nothing else. “There must be golden years, but I’m just too damn busy to find them,” Eileen Ford says angrily. “Paradise is when you’re dead.”

  NEW YORK, OCTOBER 1995

  “MODELS SUCK” reads the tiny T-shirt on the drop-dead blonde squirming past table 44 at Bowery Bar. She’s doing her best not to give away her purpose—but it just may be checking out who’s sitting at 1995’s celebrity bulls-eye, the bar’s prime booth.

  It’s models (of course), about six of them. As one talks on a cell phone, another tries to grab it, a third fiercely vectors for someone more famous than she, and another stares down glumly into a glass of wine. Contemplating Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, no doubt.

  The passing T-shirt notwithstanding, Modelmania shows no sign of abating. Cindy Crawford made a movie so troubled it wasn’t released until long after it had been advertised and publicized, but Cindy nonetheless made more magazine covers that summer than any politician, warrior or movie star. Top Model magazine has been joined on the stands by Supermodel magazine. A New York Daily News columnist has made a career of dispensing a diet of 95 percent model dish.

  Helena and Naomi have a catfight over a dress? Hard Copy comes to attention. Janice Dickinson marries a guy after three dates and soon announces her divorce? Christie Brinkley’s ski-slope marriage falls apart? Cheryl Tiegs gets suddenly single, too? Entertainment Tonight, Extra! and Inside Edition have all the scoops.

  The world at large is even more supermodel saturated than it was at the height of the Trinity’s reign in 1992. The same stars who ruled before are ruling still. While by all known standards they should have reached the end of their run (modeling generations typically last about seven years), Christy, Linda, Naomi, Cindy, and Claudia have yet to cede their places in the public’s appetites. And only Kate Moss has joined them, another rare angel dancing on the head of modeling’s pin. Karen Mulder, Meghan Douglas, Claudia Mason, and Shalom Harlow are great models, but they’ll never be as famous as the supermodels—short of skirting a scandal.

  In the image-hungry enclave of fashion the bell may be tolling for the cult of the skinny six-foot celebrity. Its devotees have always been addicted to novelty; the supermodel with staying power is the exception to their rule. The most immediately vulnerable, the models now hovering just below superstar level—the Meghans and Shaloms—are in danger of being superseded by fresh faces. Jodie Kidd, Irina, Navia, Danielle, Farrah, Ingrid, Kirsty, Trisha, and Chandra are already gaining on Helena, Nikki, Amber, and Stella. But they are flying below the general public’s radar. And for the moment at least that’s where they’re likely to stay. Even the supermodels are at risk of falling from favor.

  Consider some evidence. In April, Women’s Wear Daily reported a survey that showed that women in the fashion profession—who, not surprisingly, are among the biggest buyers of designer clothes—were no longer responding to ads featuring supermodels. Only 17.5 percent of them considered top models to be effective selling tools. Only violence scored worse.

  In early fall, Fashions of the Times, the New York Times’s twice-yearly fashion supplement, abandoned models altogether, stating in a manifesto that only “real women” posed for the pages that followed. And then, the always surefooted Calvin Klein proved anew his uncanny ability to connect with his moment when he hired Steven Meisel to parody a chicken hawk’s fantasy and half-undress a bunch of street kids—male and female innocents hovering around the age of legal consent, none of them known by name—in a series of ads for his CK line that flaunted glimpses of underwear at the apex of akimbo lower limbs, set against a backdrop of cheesy wood paneling. The ads stirred up a scandal and were quickly abandoned. But prescient Calvin knew that in 1995, a model’s greatest asset may well be anonymity. CK-logo clothes sta
rted flying off the shelves and Calvin, as always, emerged smelling even better than any of his notorious perfumes.

  As in photography, the antimodel mood emerges on fashion runways, too. At the fall 1995 ready-to-wear shows in New York, supermodels were conspicuously absent, at least partly in protest over a designer decision to draw a line on the runway over ever-rising model fees. The city’s designer trade group, the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), had briefly attempted to set a market rate for fashion shows in the tents they’d begun erecting for that purpose in Bryant Park. After a Federal Trade Commission investigation into price fixing, the threat of legal action led the designers to agree not to take such a step in concert again. But now it seemed they’d instead taken action independently (if simultaneously).

  Why were New York’s designers declaring war on models? With saturation coverage of fashion a fact of modern life, ever-savvier consumers were balking at designer price tags that reflect such costs of doing business as $250, 000 fashion shows starring models who won’t get out of bed for less than $10, 000. Indeed, in celebrating what the model industry considered a victory, runway agent Ellen Harth let it slip that superstar models now regularly receive $18, 000 per fashion show.

  Not for long, perhaps. Hints of incipient revolt were everywhere. At the 1996 resort shows, the big-name models were absent again, replaced by young, new fresh faces. “It’s so refreshing,” murmured veteran fashion critic Mary Lou Luther.

  Indeed, the latest crop of dream babies are a breath of fresh air, meant to captivate a new generation of consumers, and not the so-called Baby Boomers, now lumbering into middle age. Their aging taste in models has dominated the fashion culture ever since Jean Shrimpton. But Kate Moss, whose skinniness offends so many thickening old hippies, is really no more than a new generation’s Twiggy. Just as the Neasden girl annoyed one generation’s parents, the Croydon girl offends a new gang, who’ve apparently forgotten the enthusiasms of their not-so-distant youth.

  It’s ironic that Kate Moss and the other pierced, tattooed, and strangely shaven models of the moment are posing in the service of another claque of aging postwar babies—only in this case it’s one that won’t give up the ghosts of youth. Fashion pros like Patrick Demarchelier, Calvin Klein, Steven Meisel, and Anna Wintour ballyhoo their models’ independence but brand them with a handful of momentarily hip labels. The new models are being used to push products to a new generation of consumers at the very moment when the last “fashion” generation has turned away from clothes and begun investing its money and time in everything but. Generation X must replace them in fashion’s ever-renewable audience. So now, Kate and grunge models like Stella Tennant and Jenny Shimuzu are selling material representations of a new “rebellion.” The last youthquake, however misguidedly sold peace and love. But this one is sans content, sans message, concerned with images of insurrection only. The well-constructed facade is all (even if it’s extraordinarily ugly). The Potemkin Village of fashion passes for home. There’s nothing behind it but commerce.

  As the apotheosis of the “Top”-heavy Top Model syndrome, the opening of the Fashion Cafe, latest of the crop of theme park—like eateries that have popped up in midtown Manhattan as often as pimples appear on the faces of their just-pubescent patrons, was the most visible event in modeldom last year. It may well have been a defining moment, the moment at which the model phenomenon peaked. Ever since its launch in April, the Cafe’s cadre of PR people has relentlessly flacked the notion that Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Elle MacPherson, and (late addition) Christy Turlington are the Cafe’s “owners” and “partners.” The press bought that hook, line, and sinker and repeated it ad nauseum, like hostages suffering a fashion version of the Stockholm Syndrome, parroting the lies of their captors. “We make all the decisions,” Claudia told Time.

  Like so many fashion pictures, this one was a sham. And not just because the glitterati, who eagerly appeared on opening night, abandoned the place to the Calvin-clad masses immediately thereafter.

  A few weeks after the Cafe’s opening, Daniel Green and Frank DiGiacomo, reporters for the New York Observer, unearthed a public record of its ownership—its State Liquor Authority license. According to New York State law, any owners or partners would be listed there. But the only names that appeared were those of minority owners Tomasso Buti, husband of Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Daniela Pestova, his accountant brother Francesco, and their backer, a Los Angeles oral surgeon named Guido Bracetti. A lawyer for the partnership, Warren Pesetsky told USA Today that the filings would be amended within a week. Five months later he issues the same assurance. “It’s still in the works,” he says. “It will be done.” But the Butis and Bracetti remain the only listed owners.

  Don’t think for a moment the supermodels were superchumps, though. The word on the modeling scene had each of the pseudo-owners getting $500, 000 for the use of their supernames. Unfortunately, that also earned three of them a lawsuit after Buti sued Giorgio Sant’Ambrogio, co-owner of Milan’s Fashion Model, over the rights to the name Fashion Cafe. Sant’Ambrogio, who has owned a Fashion Cafe in Milan for more than eight years and has trademarked the name in Europe, countersued Buti and all the models except decision-maker Schiffer, because “she is a good friend,” he said.

  None of this, not even Turlington’s description of the place as “a tacky theme restaurant for tourists,” has kept away those tourists or the muchderided “bridge and tunnel” crowd from New York’s suburbs. They come hoping (typically in vain) for a glimpse of one of their idols in the flesh. Instead they have to settle for lank dresses, perfume bottles, and backpacks glassed-in like artworks, with plaques proclaiming they were “worn by” the likes of Nicole Kidman (once, in a photograph for a magazine). Those sealed vitrines are perfect symbols of the insular, airless little world the supermodels inhabit, out of reach of the hoi polloi who buy the burgers, the blouses, and the blue jeans that are the real bottom line of the fashion equation.

  Naomi, Claudia, Elle, and the rest may indeed be helping to seal their fate by pushing their fame past the boundaries of fashion. For the greed and snotty hauteur that were initially part of the supermodel appeal—and worked particularly well in the often greedy and snotty world of fashion—have all worn thinner than John Casablancas’s skin. And hubristic extracurricular efforts like the Fashion Cafe and the well-intentioned but nonetheless unfortunately named DISHES (Determined, Involved Supermodels Helping Erase Starvation) have done little to correct the impression that Supermodels have overstayed their welcome and come to believe their own hype.

  Amber Valletta saw the writing on the wall as early as 1993 and railed against her inevitable fate. On the brink of supermodel superstardom, she launched a tirade at a Reuters reporter who asked about the possibility that model fees might start falling for the first time in two decades. “Look at my face!” Valletta whined, “I have red eyes, my skin looks like crap and I’m losing weight. I’m not going to look this way and feel this way for nothing and I don’t want anyone telling me I don’t deserve the money.”

  Why shouldn’t she make out as well as Linda, Cindy, and Naomi, Valetta demanded. “They made their money, now are we going to be denied ours? We’re doing the magazine layouts and we’re selling the clothes. If the money is such an important issue, then the designers should think twice about buying their expensive luxury homes. If they don’t want to pay us, then they should give it to charity.”

  To DISHES, presumably.

  It isn’t only models who are having adjustment problems. The mid-’90s are a time of retrenchment and redefinition for the big model agencies. Elite, says a well-placed source in Paris, has recently reorganized its Swiss operations. Why? Jerome Bonnouvrier, now running an agency called DNA in America and fighting his most recent backer in court for possession of his Paris firm Partners, says that in spring 1995 French tax authorities published a confidential pamphlet warning its employees to be aware of how Swiss offices are used to shelter mon
ey from taxes, setting off a flurry of such reorganizations.

  In America, things were changing, too. Both Ford and Elite opened Arizona branches, chasing business that was fleeing the crime and sameness of South Florida locations. In an attempt at diversification, the two leading agencies also started licensing the names of models for clothing and accessory collections and opened celebrity divisions. Elite’s—booking “stars” like Nastasia Kinski and Drew Barrymore—was headed by Monique Pillard; but someone quite close to her said she’d actually been pushed aside by John Casablancas, who was determined to assert his authority in New York now that his Paris agency had been taken over by Gérald Marie. Early in fall 1995, reports even circulated that Pillard was set to leave Elite with several of its models. But although Pillard’s complaints were heard outside the agency, she stayed within, where her small equity interest kept her subject to the will of Elite’s chief model-monger.

  Ford’s top earners Christy Turlington, Vendela, Veronica Webb, and Bridget Hall joined its star board. But in July 1995, Hall left Ford for IMG. She rejoined Ivan Bart, her old Ford booker, there. Bart had left Ford the year before, as did Jeni Rose, director of Ford’s Paris office, who resigned upon news that the agency was reorganizing in France, merging with Clip, the last of Jean-Pierre Dollé’s agencies. In a move that solidified Ford’s until-then precarious position in Paris, Clip’s Jean-Michel Pradwilov was named to head its French operation. A decent young man married to the model Ilonka, Pradwilov had one of the best reputations in Paris modeling.