The Fall of the Supermodel

By Joel Stein

Within the next minute, in some small town, a clueless 14-year-old will slip white shoes onto her black-stockinged legs, and no one will stop her. No leonine six-footer will swoop down from the sky to grab the pumps from her pudgy little feet and rescue her from fashion disaster. No, the skies are empty today. Because the supermodel is dead.

She's missing from most fashion-magazine covers, replaced by movie starlets. She's all but gone from top advertising campaigns, beaten out by anonymous, awkward-looking teenagers. She has virtually disappeared from runways, her asking price too dear. Even rock stars don't seem eager to date her anymore. A little glamour has left the world. And so the world mourns, its makeup runny from tears.

The six officially anointed supermodels (in the fashion world, this is actually accepted as fact)--Christy Turlington, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Kate Moss--have faded. Moss, Campbell and Schiffer only bothered to walk one catwalk each at last month's Milan fashion shows. Evangelista has retired, and Turlington is a student at New York University. Crawford, after co-starring in one bad Hollywood film, is trying to be a TV star, but her recent ABC special, Sex with Cindy Crawford, came in last in the ratings for its time period.

Of course, even supermodels get old (like 25) and have to move on. But the generation that was supposed to replace them on magazine covers and in gossip columns has not come close to matching their star power. The should-have-been supermodels like Amber Valetta and current hot fashion darlings like Maggie Rizer aren't recognized on the street. "They want to make money, which is fine, but I don't know if they have the creative side," says Campbell. "They can show one outfit from another, but they can't differentiate one designer from another." Supermodels don't have to be nice.

Which is why the popular conspiracy theory explaining the supermodel's disappearance is that designers and fashion editors, sick of their "I won't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day" attitude, made sure a small group of models would never again have the power of the Big Six. "By 1995 several of the girls had acted up so much, there was a building resentment against them," says Michael Gross, the author of Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. "They'd sit in the back of limos and kick the driver in the neck with their high heels when they weren't happy with the way he was driving. Editors who had to deal with these girls probably weren't sad to see them go."

Actually, editors don't care. Charles Gandee, associate editor at Vogue, says high prices and poor attitudes contributed less to the decline of the supermodel than did changes in the fashion world. As clothes became less flashy--as Versace gave way to Prada--designers turned to models who were less glamorous, so they wouldn't overpower the clothing. "Maggie Rizer, Erin O'Connor, Karen Elson--those three girls are idiosyncratic," says Gandee. "Maggie has freckles; Karen has kind of dicey skin. You don't look at them and say, 'That's a pretty girl.' They not only weren't the homecoming queen; they might not have been invited to the prom." Magazine editors don't have to be nice either.

Rebecca Romijn, a swimsuit model who has taken over as host of MTV's House of Style after several high-fashion models failed at the job, says the new, odder-looking models aren't going to become famous. "Women don't want to look like the women who are now in fashion magazines," she says. "That's because the fashionistas call the shots, and they're not in tune with what America wants. They want to be edgy and progressive." But the new models are probably what fashion models should look like--all freaky and gawky and striking, yet elegant in clothes.

Supermodels really usurped the glamour business in the late '80s, when Hollywood stars like Julia Roberts decided to get grunged out in sweats and baseball caps for public events. What else was PEOPLE magazine to do? Then, at the 1995 Oscars, Uma Thurman showed up in some Prada dress that everyone seemed to like a whole lot, and sex symbolism returned to Hollywood. Now designers fight to establish relationships with actresses like Cameron Diaz, Tea Leoni and Claire Danes. And models get to dress badly. Last week Schiffer showed up at a New York City movie premiere wearing jeans and little makeup and downing popcorn, M&Ms, a box of chocolate-covered ice cream chunks and a huge soda. And it was not a very long movie.

"Nine years ago, you couldn't get more glamorous than going backstage at a Versace show," says Alisa Bellettini, the executive producer of House of Style. "Now you see Amber Valetta at a Beastie Boys concert with no makeup on and her hair back. They're not like goddesses anymore. They're real people, working really hard." So hard, they've formed a union. Maria Di Angelis, a New York model on the board of directors of the Models Guild, local 51, doesn't even know how to be a supermodel. "While I was dating Jim Carrey, I had so many people wanting to interview me. And I thought it was kind of rude." Wake up, Maria.

Many of the rising young models are thinking of runways as a way to get recognized by movie producers, or just a way to pay for college. Meanwhile the old supermodels are fading partly because fashion is inherently short-lived. "It became very dull, just seeing six people at the center of most magazines," says Katie Ford, CEO of Ford Modeling Agency. Gilles Bensimon, creative director for Elle and the former husband of Elle Macpherson, says, "Claudia Schiffer is the best example of the rise and fall of a model. For me, we don't need her. She doesn't represent anyone alive. After some point, you become a Barbie doll. If you have one more interview with Claudia Schiffer, people say, 'Again?' It's like hearing more about Monica Lewinsky and the President."

Even the supermodels themselves seem bored. In Milan last month, Schiffer talked briefly about quitting modeling to concentrate on her acting career. Romijn is already distancing herself from her modeling background. "I don't like modeling that much," she says. "It's been a great trip, but straight print modeling is so mindless." How far has the stock of modeling fallen? Kate Moss once dated Johnny Depp, and Cindy Crawford was married to Richard Gere; Romijn's husband is John Stamos.

Instead of models, hot actresses now adorn the lockers of teenage girls. Salma Hayek and Halle Berry do Revlon ads. Also modeling are Jennifer Lopez (L'Oreal), Kyra Sedgwick (Saks Fifth Avenue), Brandy (Cover Girl) and Gillian Anderson (Emanuel). Athletes, politicians, businesswomen and writers are getting ads: Katie Roiphe and Serena Altschul do Coach, while Anne Klein has a whole "real people" campaign featuring the likes of Ann Richards, Faye Wattleton and Kim Polese. The cover girl for September's Vogue, the biggest issue of the year, was Renee Zellweger, and last month it was a superglamorous Oprah Winfrey. Even the last fashion-magazine holdout against celebrity covers, Glamour, this month features Halle Berry.

Perhaps the greatest symbol of the end of the supermodel is the Fashion Cafe, the glitzy restaurant chain started to much fanfare in 1995 by celebrity part-owners Schiffer, Macpherson and Campbell--and now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Turlington, who later joined the venture, left the cafe last year, and the menu at the Rockefeller Center location can't even spell the name of one of its co-owners correctly, offering "Noami's Fish & Chips."

Campbell says she has little to do with the chain anymore. Still, she was shocked to learn of the typo: "My image is involved! That's terrible!" Supermodels--don't you miss them?