Of Linda Evangelista and Gwyneth Paltrow, Again

A while back, considering the "decline" of the supermodel, I spared some thought for the inane narrative that had Linda Evangelista singlehandedly ending the reign of the supermodel with a single backlash-generating quip about not getting out of bed for less than ten thousand dollars a day. The remark, coming as it did in 1990, at a time when the supermodel's cachet was still rising and was to go on rising for many, many more years, obviously does not have the significance that the members of that especially shallow portion of the press corps, our fashion journalists and the retailers of elite gossip in its more naked forms generally, commonly attribute to it. Still, it seemed to me interesting that the flimsy story about the remark's offensiveness and the backlash it brought on is so widely accepted when today it is so common for us to hear the rich and famous say so much worse without anyone so much as blinking--and argued for it as an indication of how much more brazen the rich and famous have become about displays of crassness, entitlement and snobbery, and how much more tolerant mainstream opinion has become of that (the more in as, again, I had always taken the view that Ms. Evangelista meant it as a joke that "sounded better in her head" which did no worse than fall flat).

I still stand by that reading of the whole episode, but I also think that there is something more to be said about it, specifically the question of whom it was that Ms. Evangelista really offended with those words. I strongly suspect there was no backlash from the actual public, especially given the sensibility of the portion of the public that paid much attention to such things (did anyone ever claim that the readers of Vogue are an egalitarian group?), and that any such reaction would have rather less easily been articulated then than now in that period before "everyone" was on the Internet and anything and every stupid little thing a famous person said in public made for a few hours' tempest in a teacup. Really if anyone was offended, it was the elite of the very small world of high fashion that was so, sentiment (perhaps genuine, perhaps merely opportunistic faux outrage) that the hacks of the press presented as if it were some public backlash, presenting what a small elite thinks as what "everyone" thinks--as those courtiers of the elite generally do (with the fashion journalist's "hard news" counterparts calling it "consensus").

The plain and simple truth of the matter is that the fashion industry benefited greatly from the phenomenon of the supermodel and the supermodels' role as "ambassadors" of the industry to the world, helping to fascinate that world with the fashion industry's products, its brands, and indeed fashion itself, imbuing it all with a mystique that it would never otherwise have had (fashion designers generally don't appreciate the fact that it is usually the models who make their artless and often unwearable "designs" look dazzling to onlookers)--just as the movie industry benefited greatly from the phenomenon of the movie star in its early days. But just like the movie industry showed its gratitude to the stars who enriched it by "putting them in their place" through shabby maneuvers when they seemed to be getting out of line, the fashion industry likewise seized on the chance to do the same to their stars, with this pretty much all there really was to the extreme reaction against Ms. Evangelista that has gone on echoing down through the years. (Indeed, returning to the disparity between the "reaction" against Evangelista's remark, and the reaction to the things Paltrow said, it seems hugely relevant that Paltrow's statements punch down at the plebs, not the patricians who have power over her, such that the press had no problem snarling at the plebs who really did get annoyed by her "You owe her an apology").

Still, just as the machinations of movie executives in the end had nothing to do with the decline of the movie star, the issue instead the decline of the studio system in changing commercial, technological, legal conditions that "disrupted" the industry back in that period when such things actually happened, the end of the supermodel was a product of larger developments. Where in the case of the movie studios it was the transformation of media in which the advent of television was just a first step, in the case of the supermodel it was a matter of the lifestyle fantasy they represented, inextricable from a world where "globalization" with its moneymaking and money spending, its ease of movement and its cosmopolitanism, had all been on the upswing, palling in a world where the vision was unraveling and hard times made such fantasy seem more remote and unlikely, something that could only ever happen to someone else--the moment going, going, gone, until it became something we now speak of as "recent history" rather than "current affairs."

In all that there seem to me to be lessons for people with interests very, very remote from the world of fashion (and lessons for people in the world of fashion too), but of course, learning is not one of the strong suits of those observers gifted with any platform from which one might reach an appreciable audience in these times.