The Rise and Decline of the Supermodel

The claim that the institution of the movie star has faded away has now been heard for rather a long time (at least, insofar as we mean an actor who is not simply well-known or well-liked or well-respected but a Personage so popular that their being the lead of a movie will serve to bring an appreciable number of people to the theater when it makes its debut). However, the claim does not go wholly unchallenged. Thus do we time and again hear that some newcomer nobody ever heard of, because (when one looks them up they see that) they haven't actually been in many movies let alone headlined a hit movie, has somehow "proven" that stardom still exists. Those who claim this may simply be engaged in so much claquing, but that they take this particular line in their claquing still says something of the readiness to believe that actors still do become movie stars.

By contrast I have not noticed anyone denying that the heyday of the supermodel is past--that we are a long way from that moment when the top models enjoyed the broad stardom of Christie and Cheryl, of Cindy and Claudia and Christy with a "ty" (especially if you are of a certain generation you likely knew instantly who I was talking about just from the mention of the first name), when it could seem as if the faces of those at the top of the modeling profession were "everywhere," when the Buti brothers founded the Fashion Cafe, and JFK Jr.'s political magazine George featured supermodels like Claudia and Christy in memorable tableaus on its covers. Indeed, a fairly commonplace narrative holds that with Hollywood becoming less glamorous than before in the "New Hollywood" era, fashion filled the gap--and held its place in pop culture until the supermodels seemed to be getting too pleased with themselves (a moment purveyors of the narrative identify with Linda Evangelista's offhand remark that "I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day"), after which backlash set in, and pop culture was never the same again (with recent revisitation of the remarks by the press, of course, giving the hacks of the press an excuse to go over it all again).

I can't say that I ever found that explanation satisfying. (For me these "One line blew it all" explanations never are.) Rather more was going on. Some of it seems fairly obvious--like that fragmentation of media culture that lets media hacks get away with pretending that somebody who has barely appeared in any movies is a movie star because no one person has any sort of handle on all that's going on anymore, which reflects how much less likely one is to feel that a particular face is "everywhere." There is also the reality that the celebration of physical beauty inextricable from the status of the supermodel has sat uneasily with those insistent on "inclusion," "body positivity" and the merciless thwarting and disciplining of the "male gaze" in media imagery getting so much influence in this cultural arena. (Indeed, if you had ever wondered what commercials for Revlon and Victoria's Secret would look like if the columnists at the Guardian had a say in their making, well, these past few years you didn't need to wonder any more.)

Still, it seems to me that rather more significant than the cultural warfare were the larger and more consequential developments in the world that exacerbated that warfare--not least globalization's wreck after the great financial crisis of 2007-2008, which seems to me the most important thing of all. The supermodel's natural habitat was a world of exuberant fantasy of luxurious, jet-setting glamour befitting an age of globalizing boom, or at least its appearance, which lost whatever credibility it may ever have had in these years. After all, the super-rich may be super-richer than ever before, but, despite the talking heads' fixation on this as if it were the measure of everything, the broad public is ever more alert to the fact that they are not super-rich, that indeed in many ways they are less rich than they were just a short while ago--all as the centibillionaires themselves seem uneasy, thinking less than before of the jet-setting good life and more the hope that, as Douglas Rushkoff had it, "as long [as] they have enough money and the right technology, they can break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to escape a disaster of their own making" in the way the plebs cannot.