Let’s see it, girls! You look amazing—one, two, three, wow! Give it to your fans. Tell them, ‘We’re back!’”
Two decades after the term “supermodel” entered the popular vocabulary and the once anonymous mannequins who graced fashion- magazine covers and glided down designer runways became global household names, Mario Testino has re-united six of the most famous supermodels of them all—Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Stephanie Seymour, and Christy Turlington—and is photographing them in a New York studio. Now in their late 30s and early 40s, they still look fabulous—their faces still flawless, their figures still fit—in flesh-colored, see-through, corset-style Dolce & Gabbana dresses.
“Let’s show those terrible actresses that it’s all about fashion, beauty, chic,” Testino exhorts, referring to the fact that for several years now Hollywood starlets have replaced models not only as Vogue cover girls but also as the highly paid faces of major cosmetics brands. “No, no, not terrible—lovely actresses,” Testino hastens to add.
“They’re the difficult ones,” says Naomi Campbell. “Not us.”
In between shots, Linda Evangelista tells me, “I gave Mario his break. I used him for a Vogue cover in Germany.” It’s a revealing remark, and Testino confirms that it’s true. At the height of their power, the top 10 or so supermodels—a category that also included Helena Christensen, Elle Macpherson, Carla Bruni, Veronica Webb, and the baby of the group, Kate Moss—were not only raking in millions a year but also dictating which photographers, hairdressers, and makeup artists they would or would not work with. They dominated the runways, the magazines, and the big ad campaigns to such a degree that “it became a nightmare, especially for the clients,” says Katie Ford, of Ford Models, which represented many of the biggest names. They dated prizefighters (Naomi and Mike Tyson), ran around with rock stars (Stephanie and Axl Rose), were linked with royalty (Claudia and Prince Albert of Monaco), and married movie stars (Cindy and Richard Gere, who exchanged tinfoil rings in a Las Vegas chapel). They posed naked for Rolling Stone, appeared on Entertainment Tonight and MTV, and even launched a restaurant chain, called Fashion Café. As designer Michael Kors told the Chicago Sun-Times in 1992, “Christy and Linda and Cindy and Naomi are movie stars. They’re the pin-up girls of the 90s.”
‘It was lightning in a bottle,” says Paul Wilmot, who was head of public relations at Calvin Klein in the late 1980s, when the supermodel phenomenon took flight. “Suddenly you had five or six incredibly glamorous and beautiful girls, and they all looked different. And they all were known by their first names. And they all palled around. That had never happened before. It was almost the female equivalent of Sinatra’s Rat Pack.”
Where did these girls come from, and how did they get together? Why was their rise so rapid and their reign so long? What brought them down? Are they really coming back? And who came up with the supermodel concept in the first place?
“Janice Dickinson created it—according to Janice,” says Cindy Crawford, referring to the self-promoting wild girl of the 70s fashion-and-disco scene. “I would never refer to myself as a supermodel. It sounds silly. It sounds like we change into our capes in a telephone booth.” Christy Turlington believes the term was popularized by Ford’s “Supermodel of the World” competition, which the agency started televising in 1983. “I think the press just found a name to label us with,” says Naomi Campbell, “and it wasn’t to our liking. But I’m so blessed to have been part of that era with such amazing women. It was just so much fun. We wanted to do things together. We wanted to hang out together. And we protected each other. My girls stood up for me to so many designers who didn’t want to use black models. They were like, ‘If you don’t put Naomi in, we’re not doing the show, either.’”
The rise of celebrity journalism in the 1970s, the globalization of fashion and cosmetics brands in the 1980s, and even the recession that followed the 1987 stock-market crash combined to create a demand for internationally recognizable figures who could move merchandise on the strength of their beauty and personality. It helped, Katie Ford adds, that politically minded Hollywood stars “wouldn’t do advertisements or be associated with fashion. So models took the place of actresses as icons of glamour.” Karl Lagerfeld said at the time, “For me, the really great girls today … are like the goddesses from the silent screen. Those girls sell dreams.”
The full-bodied supermodels became objects of male desire in a way that hanger-thin high-fashion models had rarely been before—Cindy and Stephanie posed for Playboy—while simultaneously embodying feminist ideals of strength, independence, and self-confidence. “We realize the power we have,” Christy told Time magazine in 1991. “We’re making tons and tons of money for these companies, and we know it.” Cindy says today, “We were the glamazons. You couldn’t be too tall, the hair couldn’t be too big, and the boobs were pushed up and out.”
By most accounts, the catalyst of the group was Canadian-born Linda Evangelista, the daughter of a General Motors factory worker. She signed up for modeling classes when she was 12, and she was discovered four years later by a scout from the Elite agency, Ford’s major rival, at a Miss Teen Niagara contest (which she did not win). She started working, she says, as soon as she finished high school. “It took me three years before I worked for any Vogue, and then it was French Vogue, with Arthur Elgort. It was a long, slow climb up the ladder for me.” Some say her career took off after she married the head of Elite’s Paris office, Gerald Marie, in 1987; others say the alliance she forged with photographer Steven Meisel was the key to her success; still others say it all happened because she cut her hair extremely short and went in quick succession from brunette to platinum blonde to flaming redhead, becoming the talk of the industry. By 1990 she had been on 60 magazine covers, was under contract to Revlon as the “Charlie Girl,” and had landed herself on the mass-media map by declaring, “I don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day.” She had also taken Christy and Naomi under her wing.
“I met Linda at Steven Meisel’s studio in New York,” recalls Christy Turlington. “She lived in Paris, and she was just a couple of years older than me, but she came in like this woman. She was so beautiful, so sexy, so sophisticated. She had this long dark hair and incredible eyes, and she had on boots that went to here. I remember thinking, Wow.” Unlike Linda, Christy had not set out to be a model. Her father was a Pan Am pilot, her mother a stewardess from El Salvador, and for most of her childhood they lived in Northern California, where Christy’s passion was horseback riding. “My sister and I trained every day after school,” she explains, “and a photographer took our pictures and got them in the hands of Eileen Ford, and the Ford agency invited me to go to Paris for the summer.” It was 1984. She was 15, and her mother went with her.
The following summer, on a job in London, Christy met Naomi, who was a year younger and just starting out, having been spotted by an Elite scout outside her school, the London Academy of the Performing Arts. The only child of Jamaican immigrants, Naomi got her first big break from Yves Saint Laurent, who put her in the TV ads for Jazz, his men’s cologne. “Yves’s people said, ‘Don’t talk to him,’” Naomi recalls. “Did I listen? No. I was like, ‘Yves, I don’t like this lipstick. It makes me look old.’” She credits Christy, however, for much of her early success. “Christy spoke about me to Steven Meisel, and the next thing I knew I was on the Concorde flying to New York to shoot with him. It was Linda, Christy, and me.”
Thus was born the original supermodel trio, or, as journalist Michael Gross christened them, “the Trinity,” a term they hated. Meisel, who became their constant escort on nights out in New York, Milan, and Paris, preferred “the Ugly Sisters.” “We’re an Oreo cookie in reverse,” Naomi told People in June 1990. “We’re only a third without each other.”
The ultimate supermodel moment may have been when Gianni Versace opened his March 1991 couture show in Milan with Linda, Christy, Naomi, and Cindy marching down the runway in black, orange, and yellow minidresses, lip-synching the words to George Michael’s “Freedom” while the music video of the song—which they starred in—was projected behind them. Michael himself had decided to cast the models after seeing them on the January 1990 cover of British Vogue, photographed by Peter Lindbergh. Along with Meisel and Herb Ritts, who had done the attention-getting 1989 Rolling Stone shoot, Lindbergh played a major role in promoting the supermodels as a group. Versace was the designer who pushed that concept the furthest—reportedly he would outbid the competition to ensure that he got all the biggest stars for the same show, in the process inflating their rates from $10,000 to $50,000 for a half-hour appearance.
Prior to the supermodel era, there was very little overlap of runway models, who were valued for their walk, and photo models, who were admired for their looks. The supermodels had it both ways. “That was the big change,” explains Wilmot. “The same girls who were doing print were doing runway. And they looked great on the runway. For the first time you had a photo op on the runway.” Linda Evangelista recalls, “Liz Tilberis [then British *Vogue’*s editor in chief] told me she was really happy when I did Armani’s show. She said, ‘I don’t have to cut the heads off the runway pictures any longer.’”
Stephanie Seymour, for one, found the transition from studio to catwalk unsettling. “I used to be booked for every show in New York and cancel the day before, because I’d have panic attacks,” she says. “Then Gianni [Versace] would offer you so much money that you couldn’t say no.” Stephanie had grown up in San Diego—“Mom,” she says, was “into photography”; Dad was “a party animal”—and got her start as a runner-up in Elite’s “Look of the Year” contest in 1984. She spent that summer in Paris, at the Hotel La Louisiane, on the Left Bank, where Ford was putting up Christy Turlington, and they became fast friends. The eccentric Paris couturier Azzedine Alaïa was the first designer to book her, she says, “because I had this kind of bubbly rear end, and for his clothes it worked. He took care of me, gave me clothes, introduced me to photographers.” In 1988, Richard Avedon—who had been making models famous since he created unforgettable images of Suzy Parker, in the 1940s—shot her for the cover of American Vogue, and she was on her way to superstardom.
Cindy Crawford also did a breakthrough Vogue cover with Avedon, in 1986. The daughter of an electrician from DeKalb, Illinois, she had her first modeling experience having her hair cut onstage at a hairdressers’ convention in Chicago. A makeup artist introduced her to Elite’s office there, and she was soon working every day for the only big-time local fashion photographer, Victor Skrebneski. When she was 19, Elite moved her to New York and touted her as “baby Gia”—after Gia Carangi, the sultry beauty whose career had come to a sad end because of drugs. “Everyone had loved Gia,” Cindy says. “So that’s how I got in. In one day, I saw Avedon, Scavullo, Patrick Demarchelier, Rico Puhlmann—all the big photographers at the time. The Vogue cover was like the stamp of approval. And from that came Revlon and all the other great things.”
By the time Claudia Schiffer made her runway debut, at the January 1990 Chanel haute couture show—and tripped—supermodels were full-blown celebrities who needed bodyguards to protect them from the mobs of fans waiting outside the shows. The youngest of the six and the only one from a wealthy family—her father was a lawyer in Rheinberg, Germany—Claudia landed her first major campaign, for Guess Jeans, barely a year after a Paris agent discovered her in a Düsseldorf disco. “I never had that period of struggling,” she says. “I just went in straightaway.” In 1992 she signed a three-year, $10 million contract with Revlon, the biggest deal in the history of modeling at the time. In 1995 she celebrated the publication of her autobiography, Memories, with a launch party at Harrods, arriving in a horse-drawn carriage followed by a troop of bagpipers.
The supermodel hegemony had been going strong for nearly a decade, which is like a millennium in fashion. Something had to give.
There had been signs that a fall was coming as early as 1993, when Valentino, Gianfranco Ferré, and Alberta Ferretti dropped Linda Evangelista from their new campaigns, and Women’s Wear Daily declared that supermodels were on their way out. The grunge moment of the early 90s was short-lived, but it led to the ascent of more androgynous models, foremost among them Kate Moss, who managed to be both a supermodel and a waif. Supermodels were equally inappropriate for the severe, minimalist aesthetic that dominated the rest of the decade—glamazons just didn’t look good in Jil Sander suits. On top of it all, the new generation of movie stars didn’t think there was anything wrong with dressing up in designer clothes or endorsing products. Revlon signed Halle Berry and Salma Hayek, and Saks Fifth Avenue’s ads featured Kyra Sedgwick. The final blow came in 1998, when *Vogue’*s September issue, always the most important of the year, had Renée Zellweger on its cover.
Linda retired. Christy went to college. Cindy retreated to Malibu with her second husband, Whiskey Bar proprietor Rande Gerber. Stephanie opted out of her Victoria’s Secret contract and married newsprint tycoon Peter Brant. Claudia traded in the high-profile American magician David Copperfield for the low-key English film director Matthew Vaughn, whom she married in 2002. And they have all become mothers.
Only Naomi—“the last supermodel,” according to the March 1999 issue of Vogue—continued working full-time, signing her first worldwide cosmetics contract, with Wella, that year, and still commanding a minimum of $40,000 a show. “I’m a workaholic,” she tells me. She says she was always told that she couldn’t have children, but she had an operation in Brazil earlier this year that corrected the problem.
“I always loved clothes, but I started not to love clothes,” says Christy, explaining why she gave up modeling for seven years after graduating from New York University, in 1999, with a degree in Eastern philosophy and comparative religion. Married to actor-director Ed Burns since 2003, she used those years to start two yoga-related businesses, Sundari skin-care products and Nuala sportswear for Puma. “I learned a lot about branding from Calvin Klein,” she notes.
Cindy also has her own skin-care line, Meaningful Beauty, and designs a mass-market furniture line called Cindy Crawford Home for the retail chain Rooms to Go. “It’s been a great gig,” she says of her modeling career. “I didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and I got to travel the world. I’ve been exposed to all kinds of people. Financially, I’m not just secure, I live very well. And my children will live very well.”
Linda has similar feelings: “I was able to set up a nice life for myself, thanks to modeling. I’m very appreciative and very proud. I didn’t go to university, but I have six passports full of stamps.” Long divorced from Gerald Marie, she has been dating Hard Rock Café billionaire Peter Morton for the past two years, though she refuses to say who is the father of her almost-two-year-old son, Augustin. As for working, she says, “I have a better pace now. Less comes to me, but I get to choose. And I’m not globe-trotting like I used to, without a life.”
Stephanie is also picky about which jobs she takes. “You have to protect your image; plus, I have four kids, so it has to be something I’ll enjoy doing. Or something that has a good paycheck at the end, so that I can buy myself a nice piece of art.” Her husband is one of the leading collectors of contemporary art, and Stephanie has commissioned a series of portraits of herself by such well-known artists as Francesco Clemente, Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, David Salle, Kenny Scharf, Donald Baechler, and Jeff Koons. “It wasn’t my idea,” she says, “because I’m very conscious of being too narcissistic, and I don’t think I’m narcissistic at all. In fact, I think I’m the opposite. I hate looking in the mirror.”
Claudia, too, has developed a taste for art, calling herself “a small collector.” She told me that, instead of giving her a ring when he proposed, Matthew Vaughn presented her with an Ed Ruscha painting of the words marry me. Modeling, she says, has been “so great that if I had to start over again I would. I’ve kept all my clothes. I have a hangar that is normally made for helicopters, and I’ve got all my clothes in there. It’s climate-controlled.” Although she’s much in demand these days, she restricts herself to assignments that don’t require long periods away from her family. “It’s not about money anymore; it’s about working with people I really admire.” Lately that has meant major advertising campaigns for Chanel, Ferragamo, and Louis Vuitton.
Indeed, the original supermodels seem to be making something of a comeback. Christy is working for Maybelline and Chanel again, and doing gratis ads for Bono’s (Red) campaign and care. Linda and Naomi, who took the runway by storm at Dior’s 60th-anniversary extravaganza in Paris last fall, also have big new contracts: Linda with Prada, Naomi with Citroën and SoBe Life Water. In addition, Naomi has been signed up to be the face of Yves Saint Laurent in print and on TV, despite her much-reported contretemps with British Airways in April. Two weeks after her arrest for assaulting two police officers at Heathrow, she looked absolutely smashing in a gold brocade evening suit, strutting down the red carpet at a Metropolitan Opera premiere on the arm of YSL’s young designer, Stefano Pilati. “Naomi has an almost untouchable power,” says Pilati. “She radiates life and beauty and strength.”
For many in the fashion business their return comes as a relief, after several years of anonymous, undernourished teenagers. To be fair, there have been some outstanding recent stars, such as Heidi Klum, Tyra Banks, Carmen Kass, Karolina Kurkova, and Natalia Vodianova, though Gisele Bündchen—with her curvaceous figure, $35 million annual income, and sex-symbol boyfriends (Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Brady)—is probably the only true supermodel around today. On the other hand, as Stephanie Seymour points out, the term has become so overused in the new century that now everybody’s a supermodel. “It’s very embarrassing,” she says, “when you meet, like, a Russian prostitute, and she says she’s a supermodel. And you’re like, ‘Hey, me too!’”
Bob Colacello is a Vanity Fair special correspondent.