What Happened to the Supermodel?
According to Claudia Schiffer, “In order to become a supermodel, one must be on all the covers all over the world at the same time so that people can recognize the girls.” And she would know; the beautiful Schiffer at one time earned $12 million for being a top model, back in the era when magazines, runways, and advertisements were ruled by glamorous women famous enough to be household names: Claudia, Cindy, Linda, Naomi, Christy, and Kate. This is a look at the rise of the first supermodels, the cultural dominance they reached in their heyday and the reasons behind the demise of iconic models. The rise and fall of the supermodel spans decades and reveals much about not only modeling but about fashion and society in a broader sense.
The First Supermodel
The term “supermodel” was coined in the 1940s, although it did not come into popular use until the early 1990s. Many a famous model has tried to lay claim to the crown of the original supermodel (most noticeably diva Janice Dickinson), but Lisa Fonssagrives is generally considered to be the very first supermodel.
Fonssagrives was a highly sought-after face in the fashion industry from the 1930s to the 1950s. During that time, Fonssagrives appeared on the cover of Vogue magazine over 200 times, which is truly remarkable. The success of Fonssagrives as a model and her numerous appearances in Vogue helped both; the covers made the model a famous face, and Fonssagrives’ long career established Vogue as a powerful force in the fashion industry. To appear on the cover of Vogue became the pinnacle of the print modeling world.
Every modeling era reveals its nature by the type of model it chooses to represent itself. The post-WWII era in which Lisa Fonssagrives thrived was the Golden Age of Haute Couture. Christian Dior’s “New Look” was the signature style of the day, and it signaled a return to ultra-feminine beauty when women returned to being homemakers at the conclusion of the war.
Fonssagrives was known for her haughty, angular appearance, which was the ideal framework for showcasing the sophisticated creations from Paris. As she once said of herself, she was a “good clothes hanger”, and indeed her look was the perfect portrayal of the “new ideal of feminine artifice” which was the ideal of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Fashion photographers Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, and Cecil Beaton helped to capture the sophisticated, detached style of the earliest supermodels.
Twiggy: The Face of ’66
The youth revolution of the 1960s heralded big changes in the fashion world, and naturally, models changed right along with it. A 1968 article in Glamour magazine declared Twiggy, Cheryl Tiegs, Wilhelmina, Veruschka, and Jean Shrimpton (among others) to be the new supermodels. The rise of Twiggy signaled a drastic change in the feminine ideal of the 1960s. The voluptuous “New Look” woman idealized by Dior was out, replaced essentially by her daughter. Best known for her thin boyish frame, short haircut and large eyes rimmed with dark lashes, Twiggy was the sensation of the mid-to-late 1960s. Declared the “Face of ’66” upon being discovered at age 16, her 91-pound frame was the ideal hanger for the androgynous styles and mini-dresses of the time.
The emergence of the Twiggy look was not important not just in the fashion world, but in the culture as a whole. By 1967 Twiggy was such a global phenomenon that she was covered not only by Vogue, but by news and culture publications including the New Yorker, Life, and Newsweek. If one of the criteria for being a supermodel is becoming an integral part of the fabric of pop culture, Twiggy passed the test with flying colors. Her boyish frame spoke not to the mature woman celebrated in the 1950s, but the youth culture which was to take hold in the late ’60s and in some ways never completely fade.
Wilhelmina, Twiggy’s contemporary, is notable not only for her modeling career but for leaving the industry-heavy Ford Models to begin her own top-flight modeling agency in 1967.
“Sports Illustrated” Swimsuit Issue Popularizes the “California Girl”
One of the women declared to be a supermodel in 1968 by Glamor was Cheryl Tiegs, whose career ran well into the 1970s. Tiegs gained fame not only as a model but as the updated version of a pin-up girl. Much of Cheryl Tiegs’s popularity came not from the fashion world, but from her status as an all-American sex symbol.
She is best known for her association with the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, for which she was the cover model in 1970, 1975, and 1983. One of the fascinating things about the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue is that a sports magazine set the standards for ideal feminine beauty. Beginning as a few pages in 1964, the swimsuit edition was essentially a way to sell magazines during the less sports-intensive winter months.
In the early ’70s, a decision was made at SI to select models who embodied a healthy “California girl” look. Twiggy had retired in 1970, after only four years as a model, and the new sportier aesthetic embraced by Sports Illustrated turned the tide away from emaciated androgynous models.
The list of women who have appeared on the cover or within the pages of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue reads like a “who’s who” of supermodels; Tiegs, Christie Brinkley, Paulina Porizkova, Elle Macpherson, Heidi Klum, Tyra Banks, Cindy Crawford, Stephanie Seymour, and Naomi Campbell. In addition to their natural beauty, all of these models had a healthy womanly physique, a far cry from the boylike figure of Twiggy from the 1960s.
Source: Bellatory
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