The star models (later referred to as supermodels or top models) of the 1990s were a group found, in whole or in part, on the catwalks of fashion shows who could afford their high salaries: Carla Bruni, Helena Christensen, Eva Herzigova, Elle Macpherson, Kate Moss, Karen Mulder, Claudia Schiffer, Stephanie Seymour or the French Laetitia Casta and Estelle Lefébure.
The best known in the profession, in the years 1980-1990, and still to this day, remain the British Naomi Campbell (born in 1970), the Canadian Linda Evangelista (born in 1965, who remains famous for having once said that she “didn’t get out of bed for less than 10,000 dollars”, a phrase she says she regrets today) and the Americans Cindy Crawford (born in 1966) and Christy Turlington (born in 1969). This top quartet was a quartet that won and brought in a lot of money, almost eclipsing the clothes worn.
Naomi, Linda, Cindy and Christy (their first names were enough to identify them) are the subject of a four-part documentary series, signed Roger Ross Williams and Larissa Bills, The Supermodels, for Apple TV, of which they are co-producers: no more that they have not left control of their image to anyone in the past; there was no question of giving the reins to journalists who were too nosy.
By surprise and without consent
However, the four fifty-year-olds, still superb and more or less active in the profession, where they remain idols for the stars of today’s catwalks (Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid, Cara Delevingne, etc.), lift the veil on more obscure corners of their personality and their lives.
Naomi Campbell links her use of narcotics to the death of fashion designer Azzedine Alaïa, in 2017, whom she called “dad”, and who would have filled the absence of a father who remained unknown and a mother whom she no longer saw . But silence on her numerous escapades in the 2000s (attacks on an employee, police officers and airport agents), which hit the headlines and forced her to do community service.
Linda Evangelista recalls the “abusive relationship” with a husband-agent who beat her regularly, between the ages of 22 and 27, without leaving a mark on her face: “He didn’t touch the livelihood! “, she quips. She also recounts her breast cancer, her double mastectomy and the recurrence of the disease, as well as a cosmetic surgery operation which went wrong and made her hide for four years.
Cindy Crawford (whose daughter, Kaia Gerber, is also a star model) and Christy Turlington did not experience such an ordeal, but they recall their embarrassment and their powerlessness, in their early days, to impose that their bodies belonged to them: Christy Turlington was the victim of publication without his consent of nude photos; Cindy Crawford’s ponytail was cut off by surprise and without her consent.
Abuse of the star system
The four women are intelligent, lucid, moving, often funny, and still seem linked by this friendship which dates back to their beginnings, when they met in New York, during the 1980s. Thus, the other three protested when Naomi Campbell did not was not part of the casting: “We’re only taking one black girl this season”, “black women can only wear bright colors”, his agents were told, as Edward Enninful, editor-in-chief of British Vogue, recalls. -even of Ghanaian origin…
And we shudder at the mention of an advertising campaign filmed in a former slave plantation, with Naomi Campbell, the only black person surrounded by six white people… “It was thirty years ago, another world …”, assures the photographer of the time, Martin Brading, in retrospect dismayed. “It made me decide never to let myself be treated like that again,” says Campbell – which may also explain some of the tantrums she later became accustomed to.
The other reason these four women were known as “a gang that worked together,” as stylist Donna Karan sums it up, was that a George Michael (1963-2016) music video, Freedom! ’90 (in 1990), propelled them to stardom, and even more so when Gianni Versace (1946-1997) immediately hired the quartet for his fashion show, with said hit playing in the background.
And, coming full circle, it was the death of the Italian designer who, in 1997, put an end to the abuses of the star system of the catwalks, but also the arrival of the grunge aesthetic which invaded fashion and called on models of another body typology: it was the glory hour of Kate Moss, who played poor people in chic rags like no other, as explained in this series, probably biased and partial, but richly documented, which portrays the evolution of a profession, an environment and its practices.
