It was the image that changed fashion for ever. In January 1990, British Vogue placed five models on its cover – Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Tatjana Patitz and Cindy Crawford.
They would go on to become household names and tabloid fixtures, commanding higher fees than any models in history. The cover was subtitled “The 1990s: What next?” and, in just a few months, the answer was clear: the supermodels.
These original supers (later including Kate Moss) defined the era in fashion, and ushered in the age of model-as-celebrity. Impossibly glamorous and brimming with character – known for their tabloid notoriety and outrageous interviews as much as their looks – they set an archetype that suggested models could be compelling salespeople. Today, any influencer – or popstar, or actor – with a brand deal is essentially working from the supermodel handbook.
Now, 30-odd years on from that Vogue cover, the fashion world remains enamoured of that generation of models – sometimes to its own detriment. Since the end of the 90s, countless magazines have anointed new generations of supermodels. American Vogue proclaimed the era of the “Instagirls” with its September 2014 cover, while British Vogue crowned Paloma Elsesser, Jill Kortleve and Precious Lee the “new supers” in April 2023.
This September, Apple TV+ is set to release The Super Models, its long-awaited docuseries exploring the lives and careers of Campbell, Crawford, Evangelista and Turlington.
To promote the series, all four models appear on the covers of British and American Vogue this month – only the second time this has happened in the publication’s history. While nostalgia for the original supers had already been percolating on TikTok, the buzz around the show looks set to send it nuclear.
Today, the original supers are arguably as famous and present as they’ve ever been, with Campbell walking in an Off-White show in Paris, Moss starring in a recent Marc Jacobs campaign and Evangelista appearing solo on the cover of Vogue.
The few mononymous models of the younger generation – Bella, Gigi, Kendall – came from pre-existing family fame, and are known for their social media presence as much as their modelling. Why is it that, despite the industry’s best attempts – and an excess of nostalgia for the original generation – the world seems to be less interested in the idea of new supermodels than ever before?
***
Although a handful of models achieved name-brand status during the 80s, it wasn’t until the 90s that supermodel hype went into overdrive. The UK had entered a period of recession, after a period of fast economic growth, and there was an appetite for high glamour.
Richard Benson, who worked at alt-culture bible the Face from 1992 to 1999, recalls the supers emerging after “what had been a period of dressing down, with grunge in the US and acid house over here.
“There was a swing back to dressing up – the clubs became a bit more dressed up, there was quite a self-conscious, knowing appreciation of fashion.”
Kate Finnigan, a fashion writer who hosts the underwear podcast Hello Girls, was a teenager during the era. She remembers feeling “starved of glamour” growing up, and finally seeing it in the supers. She points to Gianni Versace’s March 1991 show, in which Campbell, Evangelista, Turlington and Crawford walked the runway, as the moment most people identify as the dawn of the supermodel era.
But Finnigan sees George’s Michael’s supermodel-heavy Freedom! ’90 video – inspired by photographer Peter Lindbergh’s 1990 Vogue cover – as the tipping point. “Versace would not have happened if it hadn’t been for George Michael,” she says. “Most people didn’t know about models – fashion was not the thing that it is now. We didn’t talk about designer labels and we certainly didn’t own them.”
While there had been some celebrity models before the nineties – Twiggy, Beverly Johnson– the supers were something different. The tabloids built archetypes around them, and gave people at home tantalising glimpses into what their real lives were like.
“Naomi was known as a diva,” says Benson, “and Linda Evangelista fit into that trope of the bitch a little bit, with the ‘$10,000 a day’ thing. Kate Moss was the London urchin, Christy Turlington was a sophisticated, east-coast matriarch-type figure.”
The fashion photography of the 80s, says Benson was “clenched, classical, cold” – think Crawford’s run of pristine, poised Vogue covers from the era. But photographers in the 90s preferred to shoot models in a more naturalistic style, which made the supers seem “like they were enjoying themselves”.
Like the Spice Girls and the stars of Sex and the City – also objects of fascination in the decade – these models seemed to suggest that modern women could express themselves in a multitude of ways (even if, ultimately, conventional beauty and access to money was still key).
It was in the interests of the big fashion houses to make celebrities synonymous with their labels. Sheryl Garratt, a culture journalist and author who edited the Face in the early 90s, says: “The 80s was seen as the designer decade, but actually it wasn’t until the 90s that all the big fashion houses became huge businesses.”
“These global monsters started to appear – you could get Calvin Klein or Dolce & Gabbana in Hong Kong, New York, London, every city in between. As these companies started consolidating into huge corporations, they needed supermodels to promote their stuff. The more of them you had on your catwalk, the bigger you looked.”
Still, fame was a double-edged sword. By the end of the 90s, there was a sense in the industry that the sheer celebrity of the supers was eclipsing the brands and titles they were ostensibly there to promote.
“It felt like magazines like Vogue wanted a more conventional kind of model back,” says Benson. Models such as Gisele Bündchen then came to prominence – those who were eminently bankable but lacked “the same kind of cultural charge or significance”.
It would be an epochal moment. Sarah Doukas, of Storm model management – the agent who discovered Kate Moss – says that in the 2000s “the models on the catwalk became very generic”.
An industry-wide need for a new generation of models meant that no one could get the same kind of foothold that the supers did in the 90s. This was compounded by a seemingly endless supply of new faces being pitched by modelling agencies and put on screen by reality shows such as America’s Next Top Model.
At the same time, Garratt says, brands “realised they could buy film stars instead”. The hugely successful mid-90s launch of InStyle magazine, which routinely featured celebrities on its cover, proved that there was a public appetite for celebrity content. By 1999, it was industry diktat, with Allure magazine’s editor, Linda Wells, declaring: “Nobody cares about models any more.”
“There was a point in the 2000s when suddenly you’re seeing [actors] Cate Blanchett, Keira, Knightley, Scarlett Johansson in the front row [at fashion shows],” says Garratt. “But then it quickly spun into using them in the ads. That replaced the need to find new supermodels.”
Even then, there was concern in the modelling industry that a shift in cultural preference from models to celebrities could impede “the next generation of Linda Evangelistas”, as agent Conor Kennedy told the New York Times at the time.
Looking back over the past 20 years, no single generation of models has captured public attention in the same way as the original supers, with only the occasional star – such as Cara Delevingne or Karlie Kloss – becoming a household name.
The desire to rubber-stamp a new generation of supers – as demonstrated on British Vogue’s “new supers” cover in April – speaks to a desire to return to a time when fashion, and fashion media, was a font of cultural power.
Biz Sherbert, fashion critic and host of the gen Z-oriented fashion podcast Nymphet Alumni, sees Vogue’s “new supers” cover as the magazine’s attempt to “reaffirm its authority on the status quo in fashion” and re-establish itself as a defining force against a tidal wave of TikTok and Instagram influencers.
Using their online platforms, these influencers publish fashion criticism that is often controversial, as well as the kinds of style and shopping guides that were once the purview of fashion magazines.
In this economy, new models are largely irrelevant – replaced by the influencers making their own content – while the original supermodels are sanctified and upheld as examples of fashion’s halcyon days.
Despite the best efforts of fashion media to establish new generations of top models, there is a sense that the sheer cultural saturation of the original generation can’t be recreated. As Sherbert says, “there are too many models now – the whole economy around image-making in fashion has become too big to narrow it down to a set of a few people”.
Labels are gravitating towards what fashion critic Lauren Cochrane termed the “if you know, you know model”. A recent campaign for Marc Jacobs’s gen Z-focused line Heaven, for example, featured niche, idiosyncratic celebrities such as Twitter personality Blizzy McGuire, art critic Dean Kissick and actor Michael Imperioli. The intention is to speak to the small community each model represents, thereby portraying an in-the-know coolness, rather than appealing to great swathes of the population.
As Sherbert says: “It’s testing your cultural knowledge and rewarding you for who you follow on Instagram, and your ability to point them out.”
Simon Chambers, who co-owns Storm model agency with Doukas, says: “Once upon a time, brands chose one face that represented the brand globally, that everyone related to. Now, because of social media, analytics and market segmentation, they can say: ‘We’re going to take our budget and share it between 30 faces, all of whom represent different constituencies within our customer base.’”
What’s more, some of the original supers are still around, often booking the few big-ticket global campaigns left – even beyond Vogue’s September issue, Campbell and Moss still get magazine covers. This, says Paula Karaiskos, Storm’s head of press, is an attempt to appeal to the “silver dollar” – older consumers familiar with the original generation of supermodels who now have more buying power. Brands booking these original supers also get the added bonus of attracting a younger generation who, thanks to 90s-focused TikTok and Instagram accounts, still obsess over these women.
Try as it might, it seems unlikely that the fashion industry will ever anoint a new generation of supermodels in the same way it did in the 90s. Culture now is simply too diffuse, and brands are too invested in utilising those with a pre-existing fanbase.
“I don’t see a world, realistically, in which we have a nuclear group of models,” says Sherbert. “We look at so many pictures of faces now, all day long, that I don’t know if we could look at someone and be like: ‘Oh my God, I’ve never seen someone who looks like this before.’”
