Supermodel

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Recognition Is the Qualification

Many models work at the highest level of fashion without becoming supermodels, which shows that the term measures something more than booking quality. A top model is known inside the industry: to designers, photographers, editors and agencies. A supermodel is known outside it, by first name and face, to a general public that does not read fashion credits. The definition's requirements produce that result when they combine. Consistent and concurrent work in haute couture and commercial modelling means the same face appears in the most artistic editorial work and in the widest advertising at the same time, over years rather than a single season. Working for top designers and labels such as Chanel, Prada and Gucci supplies prestige; commercial campaigns supply reach. Either alone makes a successful model. Together, sustained, they make a public figure.

Celebrity then becomes convertible. Supermodels are able to convert their fame into product endorsement deals and acting careers, and may be referred to as sex symbols. The endorsements are the economic proof of the status: a company pays for a supermodel not to display a product, which any model can do, but to lend the product the recognition and associations the model already owns in the public mind. That is also why the status is fragile in a specific way. It depends on media systems, magazine covers, campaigns and television, that put a small number of faces in front of everyone. When those systems changed, the status changed with them.

From Fonssagrives to the Waif

The prehistory is longer than the word's fame suggests. Among those who could be considered supermodels by the standards of the 1940s were Cathee Dahmen, Dorian Leigh, Dovima and Anita Colby. In 1968 an article in Glamour described Twiggy, Cheryl Tiegs, Veruschka, Jean Shrimpton and fifteen other top models as supermodels, and the term gained currency in the 1960s by analogy with Andy Warhol's superstars. In the 1970s some models became more prominent as their names became recognisable to the general public, including Janice Dickinson, who claims to have coined the term supermodel, Cheryl Tiegs and Christie Brinkley. Individual looks drove each wave. Twiggy defined one decade's face; in the 1990s Kate Moss, a teenager with slim hips, prominent cheekbones and small breasts, became popular for an appearance called the waif or heroin chic look, prominent during the later 1990s. In the 2000s Gemma Ward's baby doll-like look inspired a new craze, with designer Lazaro Hernandez telling Teen Vogue in February 2006 that she looked like no one else at the time and that fashion is always looking for newness.

The decline of the supermodel era followed from the mid-1990s, and its cause is named plainly: the increased use of actresses, pop singers and other celebrities on the covers of fashion magazines and in advertising campaigns. A cover is a finite resource. Every cover given to an actress whose fame was made in film is a cover not given to a model building the recognition supermodel status requires, and celebrity fame arrives ready-made, with a film's publicity behind it. Models of the late 1990s and early twenty-first century referred to as supermodels, including Laetitia Casta, Gisele Bündchen, Heidi Klum, Karolina Kurkova, Tyra Banks, Adriana Lima, Liya Kebede, Natalia Vodianova, Alessandra Ambrosio, Carmen Kass, Stella Tennant and Angela Lindvall, worked in that changed market, where a model's celebrity increasingly had to be built through television, business ventures and media of her own rather than through covers alone. Male models were referred to as supermodels in the 1990s as well, including Marcus Schenkenberg, Tyson Beckford and Mark Vanderloo, though the term remained customarily applied to women.