Models of Influence

Nigel Barker

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780062345851
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Design della moda

New York Times Bestseller

Nigel Barker—fashion authority, photographer, and host of Oxygen's The Face —presents 50 of the most influential models from the 1940s to today through a wealth of full-color photographs from the world's most renowned fashion photographers and an anecdotal text that reveals each woman's indelible place in the pantheons of fashion and popular culture.

Interweaving 200 gorgeous photographs and informative and entertaining anecdotes, Models of Influence profiles 50 women who have made an unforgettable impression on fashion, the modeling industry, and our notions of beauty. Eight chronological chapters, each of which spotlight an era, feature the stories and images of women who made their mark.

These include Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, Dovima, and Dorian Leigh, who reigned during modeling's golden age in the 1950s; Twiggy, Veruschka, and Jean Shrimpton, who embodied the free spirit of the 1960s; and Lauren Hutton, Iman, and Janice Dickinson, models who revolutionized the notion of beauty in the 1970s. Barker profiles those who've become the million-dollar faces of their time, such as Christie Brinkley and Elle Macpherson; revisits the age of the supermodel, when Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Naomi Campbell rose to global stardom; and spotlights eternal chameleons Kate Moss, Stella Tennant, and Amber Valletta, among others. Also included are models who brought us into the twenty-first century, and those who are leading the way into the future, from Gisele Bündchen, Daria Werbowy, Liya Kebede, and Coco Rocha to Cara Delevingne, Karlie Kloss, Lara Stone, Joan Smalls, and Kate Upton.

Nigel Barker showcases each model's incandescent style—that special something that sets her apart, whether it's her unique physicality, a daring approach to image-making, or a particular energy that reflects the zeitgeist. Here, too, are models who broke the mold in their respective eras and turned the standard notion of beauty on its head.

Stunning in its breadth and beauty, comprising some of the finest fashion images over the last 70 years, Models of Influence is a celebration of fashion and a group of unforgettable women who have helped shape and change modern culture.

V.

THE SUPERMODELS

Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, and Christy Turlington, 1989. Photograph by Roxanne Lowit.

{Roxanne Lowit/Trunk Archive.}

BY THE MIDDLE OF THE 1980S, THE new rich were competing to outspend one another with abandon and wanted look-at-me clothes in which to do it. Karl Lagerfeld, who took over as Chanel’s creative director and head designer in 1983, remade what had become a conservative and dowdy brand into an opulent, sexy one. The other bold, bright high fashion houses, like Versace and Christian Lacroix, were candy for conspicuous consumers as well.

At the same time, high fashion started trickling down to a larger, more mass audience. European fashion imports were beginning to flood the newly wealthy American and Japanese markets, which meant that at the end of any given season, markdowns were deeper, racks were fuller, and more people could afford to buy into the dream. Some European houses started to consolidate, under moguls such as Bernard Arnault, who created the LVMH conglomerate in 1987, giving powerful new backing to iconic French companies like Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior. Designer licenses were also proliferating throughout Europe, the United States, and Asia. These lower-priced, lesser-value products affiliated with European houses were sanctioned by the mother companies, but instead of being manufactured in countries like France or Italy with age-old traditions, they were made more cheaply overseas.

At the same time, some high-end designers, like Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren, were launching diffusion, denim, and underwear lines under their own creative direction, building new customers on lower levels of the socioeconomic spectrum. The profit windfalls from the broadening and diversification of brands were most often directed back into marketing, which meant bigger budgets for advertising and fashion shows, and more opportunities for models to make an impact. Meanwhile, the same factories in China that captured all this legitimate business were also beginning to produce more faithful knockoffs on the side, at a faster pace, for immediate delivery to major cities all over the world for a public hungry for designer names and logos.

The tentacles of a rapidly advancing mass media reached ever further into the world, so well primed for fashion information. Both high fashion and street style were lionized on MTV, which turned what used to be regional trends into national and international ones, and even launched its own weekly magazine show, House of Style, hosted by the rising model Cindy Crawford, to appeal to young audiences hungry to know more. Designers were energized by what they saw and started to take their cues from the street rather than merely the other way around. This led to a fruitful exchange between high and low, between elite designers and expressive youth, that hasn’t stopped since. Mass media has energized fashion, making what used to sit in an ivory tower relevant to a much larger audience.

With more people paying greater attention to fashion, curiosity and fascination could only grow around the models who walked the runway. Model superstardom was now not just for the bikini babes in Sports Illustrated but also for the girls who worked with designers and photographers in a more artistic and creative way—bringing strong personalities into the equation. With more money to be made from cosmetics and fashion contracts, and the modeling agencies now fully at war with one another to obtain the best talent, rising girls such as Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, and Naomi Campbell—all muses of prominent photographers and designers—were able to take advantage of what was becoming a frenzy, pitting clients against one another and making enormous demands regarding fees and working conditions. Magazines were complicit in the star-making effort, routinely running models’ names in the credits and giving promising newcomers written profiles of a depth that was once reserved for established stars. Soon the top fashion models were bigger than their clients, and with the public fully aware of the fees they could command, their appearance in advertisements could make a young designer look like he or she had arrived simply by booking them.

When the major models of this era—Christy, Linda, and Naomi, as well as Cindy Crawford, Stephanie Seymour, and Claudia Schiffer—were at the peak of their power, they were ubiquitous: they worked in both advertising and editorial, and they had the power to select the photographers and designers they wanted to work with. But by the mid-1990s, there was a backlash against the fees, the egos, and the antics that such stardom can enable. Fashion magazines of the time started to put actresses on their covers—the same actresses who were once too shy or purist in terms of their public image to consider endorsing products. This started a movement that would only grow stronger as the decades wore on, to the point that today, models are only rarely on the covers of major fashion monthlies, as editors are seeking the larger audiences that movie stars attract. But at the dawn of the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the cover girl was still a model.

Models will likely never again have the same power they did during the 1980s and early 1990s. Even though it cost designers huge sums of money to work with these unbridled superstars, they are now often openly nostalgic for a time when models with intoxicating power and individuality brought sizzle and excitement to fashion at a level that is hard to imagine today.

Christy Turlington

Photograph by Herb Ritts, LA Style, 1998.

{Herb Ritts/Trunk Archive.}

Christy Turlington is one of the best models ever—and it’s almost impossible to find a photographer or editor to disagree with that assertion. A sublime combination of exotic and down-home, regal and approachable, enigmatic and familiar, and greater than the sum of her parts, Christy brings grace, intelligence, and serenity to almost every picture. With modeling skills, intelligence, and a strong sense of self, Christy has enjoyed a career of impressive longevity. From when she first started up to the present day, when overexposure is the norm, Christy has preserved her mystery and allure. When assessing her legacy and her ongoing modeling work—in 1992, the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art not only called her the “Face of the 20th Century” but also used her as the model for its own mannequins the following year—it’s impossible not to gush.

Discovered at age thirteen while riding horses in Miami by a local fashion photographer, Christy was uninterested in fashion at the beginning of her career. But anyone who saw her early pictures—taken when she still had braces on her teeth—knew she had something special. With feline eyes, a refined, upturned nose, and full lips, her perfectly balanced features were delicate but strong. Her mother’s Salvadoran heritage gave Christy a hint of exoticism, which, following the domination of blond, blue-eyed models in the 1970s, was no longer a curse. Her look was at once contemporary and evocative of a certain nostalgia. In Christy’s poise and elegance, photographers like Steven Meisel, who loved to restage iconic vintage images into contemporary homages, saw a throwback to the great couture models of the 1950s. But she could also pour on the glitz and personify the very 1980s exuberance and excess, as she did in countless Versace campaigns.

When she was fifteen, Christy decided to pursue modeling seriously and took exploratory trips to Paris and New York with her mother, followed by a summer stay the next year at the Ford Models Manhattan townhouse, one of the original “model apartments,” where agents would house and try to babysit their youngest new talent. During that summer, Christy landed a go-see with the photographer Arthur Elgort, a regular contributor to Vogue. The meeting went so well that suddenly Christy was working for Vogue almost exclusively. Her big break, though, came in 1986, when she was seventeen, upon meeting Steven Meisel. He had already built a reputation as a star maker, both through his playful, spectacular work, which really let girls perform, and his tendency to take young models under his wing and mentor and groom them for stardom. Christy met Meisel on a shoot for British Vogue, where Anna Wintour was editor in chief at the time, that teamed Meisel for the first time with hairstylist Oribe and makeup artist François Nars—a trio who would go on to work together constantly in the following years, helping to define beauty trends. The story, “Delicious Black Dressing,” in the August issue, sent Christy’s career soaring to the top. In it, she wore simple black dresses with very natural, almost nude, makeup, yet her range of dynamic poses brought so much life and variety of expression to the pictures that the industry took notice.

“CHRISTY TURLINGTON IS THE MODEL OF OUR TIME.”

—Arthur Elgort’s Models Manual, 1993

Meisel was smitten; soon other influential photographers, such as Peter Lindbergh and Irving Penn, were, too. With her ability to portray everything from a Hindu goddess to a harried mom, always with the utmost professionalism, Christy became very much in demand with advertisers including Revlon, Missoni, and Versace, who knew they would get exactly what they needed from her, and were more than happy to pay top dollar for her level of work. The most impactful of them all was Calvin Klein, who signed Christy to an exclusive contract in 1988, and made her the face not just of his Eternity fragrance but also, not long after, of ready-to-wear and lingerie, too. Klein knew that Christy’s look could speak to diverse ethnic groups, which was starting to become important at the end of the 1980s, and her timeless quality and quiet confidence had universal appeal.

Around the time that Christy first signed with Calvin Klein, she became close friends with fellow models Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell. Though she was famous before the other two, by the dawn of the 1990s, the three together had become a media phenomenon called “The Trinity” that changed modeling forever. The Trinity not only posed together on shoots, but also went to nightclubs, walked the runway, and were snapped by paparazzi together. This threesome increased media attention for fashion shows and made the general public more aware of and curious about designers showing their wares in real time.

Though Christy, Naomi, and Linda were legitimately close friends, after a few years of the Trinity phenomenon Christy began to chafe at being part of what she saw as a prepackaged marketing gimmick. In 1994, she took a step back from the business, enrolling at New York University to study Eastern religion and philosophy, and doing some advertising work for Gianni Versace and Calvin Klein. By 2000, she had become a vocal advocate for the practice of yoga, launching a line of activewear with Puma. And year by year, she has turned her energy more and more to activism, especially on behalf of maternal health issues, releasing the documentary No Woman, No Cry, which she directed, and creating her own foundation, Every Mother Counts, in 2010. She has come back to modeling on a part-time basis throughout all of this, and today she still holds lucrative and highly visible contracts as a face of Maybelline and once again with Calvin Klein, as well as seasonal campaigns for such impactful brands as Prada and H&M. They all know, as does everyone else, t...