The Supermodel's Moment: The Fashion World's Prominence in the 1990s

I suppose that spending as much time considering the '90s as I have it may be inevitable that I have come around to saying something of the place of the fashion world in that decade. After all, the public's interest in the broader world of haute couture would seem to have attained a peak of interest then, certainly to go by how it seemed to be everywhere in those years in which New Hollywood star Robert Altman directed Ready to Wear, and the original House of Style was on MTV, and the Buti brothers were opening their Fashion Cafes in major world cities, and FashionTV came to your cable package, among much, much else.

Was the prominence of the fashion world at this time pure coincidence? That seems to me very unlikely. After all, this same moment when the fashion world rode so high in the public consciousness was a moment in which modern life had become hyper-mediated, and media "high concept," combining electric imagery with a touch of high art, and the public, amid a rebirth of the visibility of and popular fascination with a kind of plutocratic luxury unseen in a half century or more, the more alluring for marrying the elegance of an earlier era (sartorially as in other ways) with a later jet-setting mobility and freedom and sexiness. Thus as some people gabbled about "heroin chic" an April 1995 TIME cover featuring Claudia Schiffer in Versace remarked of the couture "Simply Beautiful: Fashion Returns to the Classics"--and that was what really made the public pay attention. It mattered greatly, too, that the makers of conventional wisdom called on the broad public to aspire to the goods and the world and the fantasy with which they were associated in that "You can do it too!" way (likely the more effectually in as, not at all coincidentally, market populism was then at its height).

At the same time that uppermost tier of fashion brands were just beginning to really penetrate the awareness of a global public such as had never existed before--with the names of those brands helped by the names, and images, of the supermodels who served as their "ambassadors" to a wider world. (Certainly models like Claudia had a great many admirers who cared absolutely nothing for fashion as such--but came to know names like Versace nonetheless because of them.)

However, that hyper-mediated world just went on becoming more so, until it undeniably fragmented--people less and less looking at the same direction at the same time, though that is far from being the whole story. After all, the high concept aesthetic that was such a fit with the glamour ran its course--producing visual styles like the mannered and oblique commercials for perfumes that not only lost their effect as they grew overfamiliar, but in their apparent pretentiousness became the subject of endless parody (Calvin Klein a particularly notorious case), and the Mad Men looked to other, fresher, strategies (just as, in a different corner of the pop cultural world, they also did with the "extreme" marketing aesthetic).

It seems to me, too, that the images of luxury themselves likewise lost their impact as a result of their familiarity, while the trajectory of economic life--the growing gap between rich and poor, the tougher times people had at the bottom even as the haves had more and more--meant that the world to which that luxury belonged seemed ever more out of reach for ever more people, and the "aspirationalism" and the fantasy palled accordingly, even come to seem an insulting trick or cruel taunt amid never-ending Great Recession.

It may also be that just as at the movies the franchises became bigger than the stars, the brands the models helped build up became bigger than any model could ever be. (Thus did people come to know the names of particular models because they had represented Victoria's Secret, rather than know Victoria's Secret because of the models who were wearing their clothes in commercials and on the runway.) Meanwhile an age of war and pandemic, of trauma and emergency, of lockdowns and tightening borders, and the combination of a blistering identity politics that made that of the identity-mad '90s look like nothing by comparison with a New Puritanism that made open expression of an appreciation of female beauty come to seem a politically significant act (!) did not help (as, in an age in which Victoria's Secret had become a bigger name than any of its models, that brand refrained from staging its annual show for five straight years).

It seems symbolic of all this that the Fashion Cafe went bust before the decade's end, that a few years on FashionTV disappeared from the offerings of North America's cable packages, that House of Style went off the air (and when revived later sought its hosts from outside the world of modeling, a choice in its way suggestive of how few really Big Names are to be found there now), all as echoes of the moment like America's Next Top Model ran their course. The world had changed, the niche disappeared, and fashion lost its old prominence--all as for now I think its recovering it as unlikely as the return of movies to their old centrality in the culture, or professional sports regain the level of attention that they once enjoyed. Still, going by what I see online those of a certain generation, and maybe not just of that generation, still remember the personalities and aesthetic and ads of that earlier era with some fondness every now and then, and smile.