What Does the Decline of the Supermodel Have to do with Globalization?

In considering the decline of celebrity I have had something to say of the decline of the movie star, and the decline of the sports star.

However, one can also speak of the decline of the supermodel. One can see that decline as due to some of the same factors as the decline of celebrity generally--the broadly more fragmented and conflicted popular culture, for example. Still, just like the decline of the movie star and the sports star the decline of the supermodel has had its own, more distinct, features.

After all, consider those things with which we tend to associate supermodels. We think of prestigious brands of clothing and cosmetics, in lushly produced ads playing on your screen. We think of world capitals like New York, and Paris, and Milan, and the tropical getaways of the rich and famous that are the backdrops to so many swimsuit shoots, and other much-romanticized world capital/getaway locations like these, and jet-setting among them all.

Consider also the era in which the fascination with the supermodel emerged and really flourished--the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and after its arguable peak in the last decade of the century, the 2000s.

These decades together comprise the era of what it became fashionable to call "globalization" and what the more politically and economically literate recognize as "neoliberalism," with the peak of the supermodel phenomenon also the period in which globalization's champions' promises of opulence were most extravagant and widely heeded, not least in a "New Economy," dot-com bubble-era America singing global anthems to multinational corporations. These same decades also saw the digitalization of media we now take so much for granted, which saw the screens through which we took in the world beyond our immediate surroundings ever bigger and more ubiquitous, with, again, those same years in which the supermodel and globalization were at their peaks a watershed here with the Internet exploding into wide use at the very same time, all as an edgier, "extreme," aesthetic which had as one of its aspects a less restrained and sexier pop culture emerged, with advertising one level at which this was especially evident.

Within this context what the supermodel represented and what she helped sell was the fantasy of a free, cosmopolitan, gracious, graceful, aesthetic, sensual, luxurious life in the unprecedentedly exuberant, borderless world that unleashed markets and surging "innovation" were supposed to be making, coming at you through those screens bringing you the world as never before.

Indeed, looking back the then-novel and much-commented upon web-streaming of the 1999 Victoria's Secret fashion show, the images of the show playing on that giant TV screen over that crossroads of the world in global fashion capital New York's Times Square, seem a perfect symbol of the moment.

Of course, however crisply rendered through those larger and higher-definition displays, the fantasy was always just that, a fantasy, and indeed a fantasy built on top of another fantasy--the fantasy of neoliberalism, in spite of all logic and the lessons to be drawn from all of economic history, actually working as promised by its claqueurs. However, that more foundational fantasy has withered in the years since the Great Recession. And I suspect that in the wake of that event whether people think so consciously or not the glamorous fantasy described here has just moved too far out of reach for a critical mass of them in an age that feels ever more limited and stifling as they struggle ever harder to make it through the day, and that the painful reality of being at the bottom of the heap or close to it counts for more with them than the practical impossibility of their ever experiencing life "at the top" as what they see through their ever-higher quality and more inescapable screens increasingly leaves them overwhelmed rather than exhilarated in a profoundly un-sexy time. Indeed, amid the "We're all in this together" claptrap that filled the media as the COVID-19 pandemic struck a world that was already coming apart, and began killing tens of millions of people, damaging the bodies and minds of hundreds of millions more and traumatizing and otherwise upending the lives of many more still as it cut a swath among the least fortunate and able to protect themselves, even the courtiers of the elite were prepared to acknowledge the measure of alienation among the many. If they did so in only a limited way, for a brief moment, what now in media years seems a whole lifetime ago, still they did it, providing a rare public recognition of the reality well worth remembering for how it has endured beyond that short-lived readiness to even make the admission that such a thing as the pandemic exists at all.