From the 1930s onwards, there were many women who could described as the world’s first supermodel; as well as doing modeling work their lives were documented in the various lifestyle magazines of the day. Models included Lisa Fonssagrives, Dorien Leigh, Gia Carangi and Jean Shrimpton and their comings and goings were reported in magazines such as Vogue, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar.
Lisa Fonssagrives on Vogue
To catch up with our previous article, the 1960s and 1970s were the decades when the term ‘supermodel’ came into common public usage. Where fashion magazines had previously printed photos without names, it now became common to print the model’s name beside the picture, adding another layer of characterisation to the person involved.
In 1974, Lauren Hutton started to earn big bucks when she became the face of Revlon – the first tie-in with a cosmetics company, then in 1975, Margaux Hemingway became the perfume industry’s first mega-earner when she was appointed as the face of Fabergé’s Babe perfume. The first black supermodel was probably Naomi Sims who appeared on the cover of Ladies’ Home Journal in 1968, although Donyale Lune in the mid-1960s and Beverly Johnson in the early 1970s could stake a claim to that title.
Lauren Hutton
French model, Inès de la Fressange, was the first model to be exclusively ties to a fashion house when Chanel signed her up in the early 1980s, but many others began to endorse products both inside and outside the fashion industry. As we stated in Part One, once the models began to become recognisable to the wider public it was an obvious step for non-fashion brands to use them for marketing purposes.
By the 1990s, the era of the supermodel was in full swing. They were not always popular; Linda Evangelista’s 1990 comment to Vogue that “we don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day” did not go down well in all quarters. She may have been joking but her contemporaries were indeed earning vast sums for modeling and other appearances. This was the era of Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Cindy Crawford; absolute superstars of the catwalk.
Jessica Stam
As the 1990s drew to a close, there was something of a sea change in the way that supermodels were slowly replaced by ‘celebrities’ from other industries on magazine covers. Perhaps the power of the elite group of ladies at the top of tree became to annoying for the magazine editors and fashion designers or perhaps contemporary culture was just gradually changing. Whatever happened, the heyday of the supermodel was over and they were replaced on magazine covers and billboards by equally pretty pop stars, actors and actresses.
Towards the middle of the 2000s, there was a re-correction again and models began to reclaim some of the cover space. A change of attitudes from a new generation of models such as Coco Rocha, Hilary Rhoda and Jessica Stam led to a mellowing from the editors but the term ‘supermodel’ is one which no-one wants to apply to themselves or anyone else. The word is a throwback to an era when common sense seemed to fly out of the window and the models were all-powerful. Those days are gone.