Modeling the '80s Look

By John Skow

The faces and fees are fabulous

With lots of blusher but no shame, the peacock profession of modeling gives face and body to our covetous dreams, then mocks us as we press our noses against the window glass. What unimaginable delight made the pretty lady swirl and smile as the photographer snapped her picture? What season of debauchery brought the sulky thrust to this beauty's lower lip? At what groveling serf does the fine young lord in the Ferrari scowl with such contempt? Nothing; none; at no one; these glossy apparitions are as hollow as soap bubbles. The photographer has frozen moments that never were -- yet they tease us because their reality is beyond question, while our own stored moments, caught in snapshots and thrown into a drawer, are obvious and pallid fakes. Fascination sidesteps good sense, and we wonder: How was this lovely bunkum done?

Nearly three years ago, the leggy, blue-eyed model Cheryl Tiegs achieved an unbelievable victory. Her knee-weakening blondness had so dumbfounded the fashion industry that to be a brunette had become almost tacky. She was one of the very few models over the years (Suzy Parker, Jean Shrimpton and Lauren Hutton were among the others) whose names were known to the public, so that she was not simply the Virginia Slims girl, she was a celebrity in her own right who seemed to be endorsing the cigarettes personally. By being gorgeous, healthy and utterly unbashful about her age, she made it O.K. for women to be 30 years old. It was a first for Western civilization.

Today Tiegs is still dazzling, though in aid of Cover Girl makeup and Olympus cameras, not cigarettes, and it is now O.K. to be 33. But brunette models, muttering sedition, have come back from outer darkness and onto Vogue covers. The natural look that requires an hour and a half at the makeup table to achieve is still in high regard with editors and advertisers, but the artful windblown disarray that sometimes accompanied it no longer seems as fresh as it once did.

What is replacing it? Vigorous good health is still in fashion, and all may rejoice that we are not likely to see again soon what John Casablancas, head of Elite Model Management, calls "the asparagus look" -- white, limp and shapeless. Eileen Ford, the formidable housemother of the largest model agency in the world, the New York City-based Ford Models, Inc., regards the '60s in retrospect as "freaky" and the '70s as "slovenly," and sees progress now toward a strong, "classic" look.

Hungarian-born Zoltan Rendessy, whose Zoli agency is one of Ford's and Elite's strong cornpetitors, agrees that well-scrubbed class is at a premium. "Clean and healthy," he says. "I tell my girls to look antiseptic, clean, clean, clean."

A blend of freshness and classicism is the prescription then, with a jolt of celebrity chemistry and maybe some dark hair for a change. And where will the new decade find this miraculous mixture? It is unsettling to realize, but it is true beyond doubt, that the most striking face in the modeling business as the '80s take hold is that of a 15-year veteran of the game who is exactly 15 years old. Brooke Shields (see accompanying story) has been on the cover of Vogue three times in the past year, shrieking with chic. Brooke Shields, coltish and flustered but so beautiful that strong men forget to flick their cigar ash, is on the runway of Rome introducing Valentino's spring collection. Brooke on TV implies in those naughty ads for Calvin Klein jeans ("Wanna know what comes between me and my Calvins? Nothing") that she does not wear underpants. According to Casablancas, the Manhattan-born Spanish-Frenchman who had the impudence nearly four years ago to challenge the home-grown agencies by opening a New York edition of his Paris-based firm, Brooke embodies "the perfect synthesis of everything that will be successful in the '80s: a little bit of sex and a little bit of innocence; a lot of talent and intelligence but a little cloud of scandal around it; a lot of distinction and yet the warmth of youth."

Though still a sophomore in high school, she has just made her eighth movie, Franco Zeffirelli's Endless Love, due out this summer. No one doubts that it was her 1978 film, Louis Malle's haunting Pretty Baby, in which she played a twelve-year-old prostitute, that inspired whatever campy fad exists for very young models. Students of the ridiculous have noticed a trend, or at least a good, hard try at a trend, toward gunking half-sprouted twelve-and 13-year-olds with alarming quantities of makeup and pinning them into getups suitable for jaded jet-setters. The microboppers rigged out in their mothers' clothes have caused a few yelps on the fashion scene, but they certainly have not taken over the industry. (In fact, they may be less significant than the flowering of over-40 models, now in greater demand as America's older population burgeons.) Brooke Shields is quite another matter, says Eileen Ford. "She is a professional child and unique. She looks like an adult and thinks like one." But as for the other dressed-up children, Ford declares: "There is no such phenomenon. Brooke is the phenomenon."

Indeed. Her modeling fees can run as high as $10,000 a day, and she is about to sign a $1 million contract with Calvin Klein, who is convinced that he has made "a major statement" with the jeans ads. What is astonishing about these huge sums of money is that although they are outlandish, they are not unheard of. No advertiser wants to make a minor statement, and the major ones run into six or seven figures. Lauren Hutton in 1973 signed an exclusive contract with Revlon. Tiegs has a two-year deal with Sears under which she lends her name to a line of jeans and tops and receives more than $1 million, plus a share of the profits. The fine-boned Norwegian-American brunette who calls herself Clotilde is the Shiseido cosmetics girl in Japan and the Ralph Lauren girl in the U.S. (In this business in which young girls are women, the women are still girls; the terminology of liberation seems to have had no effect.) Some 5,000 of the 15,000 models who work in New York City make $60,000 to $80,000 a year, and perhaps 120 top models earn up to $150,000. But don't go away; there is also a cadre of about 60 top, top models who may earn $350,000 annually. Chief among these are such radiant blonds as Kim Alexis and SPORTS ILLUSTRATED Swimsuit Siren Christie Brinkley. It is these top-tops who may be lucky enough to sign the exclusive cosmetic contracts and break into the really big money. The ultimate stars of the contract girls, in turn, will come to be referred to with awe as "great, great" models -- Tiegs and Hutton, for example, and now maybe Brooke.

With all this adorable money wafting around, it is obvious that Eileen Ford's industry is in better shape than Henry Ford's.

The four major New York agencies -- besides Ford, Zoli and Elite, there is the No. 2-ranked Wilhelmina Models Inc. -- plus some 15 to 20 smaller outfits account for close to $50 million in annual billings. The action has attracted Sports Management Tycoon Mark McCormack, whose International Management Group represents such superstars as Bjorn Borg and Arnold Palmer. McCormack has now moved into modeling with agencies in London and Tokyo, and last month launched a New York outlet, International Legends.

Nor is the business in need of any protectionist legislation.

The balance of exports is heavily in favor of the U.S., which is flooding the world market with superb teeth, great bones and fresh skin. More than 60% of the top models working in Paris, Hamburg and Munich are American. A high proportion of the models on the runways and in the photographic studios of Milan's fashion industry are from the U.S. Japanese talent scouts are so avid for fresh faces that they hang around schoolyards hoping to lure pretty young Americans and other gaijins (foreigners) into the model industry; the proper International School of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo has had to issue a stern advisory to parents that it disapproves of this practice. In England, however, where Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton got their start, brutal taxes have persuaded most of the internationally known photographers to emigrate, and the business no longer flourishes.

Some agencies regularly send their U.S. girls to Europe to work, the way well-to-do parents once sent their daughters to finishing school. Manhattan, where fees and competition are generally twice as stiff as they are elsewhere, is the unquestioned capital of this gaudy world, and it is assumed that those with the right stuff will return there. In the meantime, says Casablancas, whose wars with the established feudalists did a lot to raise both the price and the gross receipts of modeling in Manhattan, "you send a girl over to Europe who's a little bit heavy, clumsy, a little cataloguish, pretty but not refined. European men are important abrasives in the finishing process; they tend to be male chauvinists, and "although that attitude has its disadvantages here, it gives the model an awareness of her femininity, which is an indispensable quality for her."

What is seen as clumsiness on the fast track of Manhattan is likely to be regarded in Europe as the freshness and innocence of an infant civilization and in Japan as exoticism. Editors and advertisers in both places are delighted. As Henry James and others have observed, American female innocence tends to spoil within hours if left unrefrigerated in Europe, so the supply never equals the demand. French model agents in particular regularly scout provincial talent suppliers in the U.S. As might be expected, blue-eyed blonds, undiscovered Christie Brinkleys with brows as broad and untracked as the Great Plains in 1820, interest the foreign raiding parties most. In Paris and Rome, brunettes, with a few exceptions, are only mildly exciting, unless they have black skins andean be regarded as exotics, like the exquisitely attenuated Somalian, Iman, or her friend, the first black superstar, Beverly Johnson.

In West Germany runway models, native and foreign, do not often pose in the studios, and it is they who, as mannequins traditionally are supposed to do, spend their nights in discos and their long weekends at Gstaad or the Costa Smeralda. The American photo models, at least in a widely sworn-to stereotype, are highly professional and somewhat alarming creatures who arrive punctually, work hard and project such Teutonic brown qualities as hair in youth, curlers vivacity, and radiance and good humor. They fit in well with the businesslike atmosphere of the German studios. Off-camera, they baffle local playboys with their armor of innocence and independence, and by going to bed early and alone.

After a stay in Munich or Hamburg, these impregnable Yanks move on, and none too soon, to the softening influences of Milan and Paris. Here the pace of business in photographers' studios seems lackadaisical; great blocks of hours crumble and disappear as assistants putter and the photographer unconcernedly takes his ease. There are still some in the business who have not learned about promptness. Yet business is the wrong word; what is going on in a French or Italian studio is the creation of art, and art must not be hurried. (The French and Italian editions of Vogue are rich, fantastical, lavish to the point of grotesquerie, photographed and laid out by whimsical dreamers.) Hence men like the renowned Paris-based photographer Peter Knapp are horrified by the American custom of paying models by the hour, so that the meter is running whenever she is in the studio. "Today the girls I see just want to make money," Knapp grumbles.

So the pretty students arrive in the Old World, blond by belief and upbringing if not always by hair color, innocent of French and of much else, and invariably, according to the agents who must take care of them, requiring advice about apartments, gynecologists and boyfriends. They learn to distinguish the Seychelles from the Maldives, and they learn about vacation houses in Marrakesh. They learn to eat Thanksgiving turkey stuffed with foie gras, and then, when the gloss they have acquired begins to shine through the lens of a Hasselblad, they fly back to New York, perhaps by now not wearing blue jeans, and have another try at the big tune.

And here, roaring up the fast track at about 420 miles an hour, well out in front, all 16 cylinders firing nicely, is ...

Something's wrong. The observer has been told to meet the international dazzler Clotilde, a model near the very tip of top-top, at a photographer's studio in a loft building above Manhattan's Union Square. He finds the address and introduces himself to the photographer, a small, quiet-mannered Japanese woman named Nana Watanabe. There are two or three other women in the studio from Danskin, a manufacturer known for leotards and tights, for whom Watanabe is shooting a couple of catalogues. And here comes another gofer of some kind, a plain-faced, skinny young woman in big tortoise-shell glasses, a grungy raincoat and sneakers. She plops down at the makeup table, opens a big handbag that turns out to be a makeup case and, as the onlooker tells himself that he is an idiot, briskly begins to turn herself into Clotilde.

"I'm an optical illusion," she says, laughing. A cab driver this morning gave her an "uh-huh" reaction when she said she was a model. The days are gone, clearly, when a model getting out of a New York taxi meant furs, a flash of great legs and a telltale hatbox. Clotilde's mufti is early L.L. Bean -- galluses, a checked shirt and baggy cords -- because it is easy and inconspicuous, unlikely to attract muggers in the scruffy neighborhoods where photographers' studios are often located. What Clotilde and most of the other successful models do a lot of is the misty, haunting Sears catalogue, and what they are paid for is to make polyester look like silk. A face that Botticelli would have admired helps a great deal, and after an hour at the makeup table Clotilde has drawn one on herself, cooked her long brown hair in curlers and As Photographer Watanabe shoots Polaroid stills to test the light and color, Clotilde waits. Like all the real pros, she is good at waiting. She daydreams of Paris, where she keeps an apartment. She sees herself doing the spring collections, "and Yves St. Laurent himself is tying my ribbon, and I'm going down the runway, and every reporter in the world is watching, and it's total magic . . ." Magic indeed, as, nearly three hours after this shoot began, Watanabe is ready to expose her first frame of color film. It is uncanny, but the Paris-in-the-spring reverie runs across Clotilde's face as if written there with subtitles. Click!

In another part of the forest there is Apollonia, called Apples, called crazy by friends who watch her in amazement.

"Come, let's go lie on the bed," she laughingly greets TIME Correspondent James Wilde.

She is slinky, auburn-haired, built for both speed and comfort. She is wearing a black body stocking, and the bedroom, the bed, her nails and the rubies in her ears are red. "Have some champagne," she says in her silverbell voice. Apples is Dutch; she speaks six languages. She lives her life allegro; she makes between $100,000 and $200,000 a year and needs it all. She lives on take-out Chinese food, and her kitchen, as it develops, is equipped with two plastic cups and one plastic fork.

Abruptly she decides to go roller-skating at the Roxy Roller Rink, a hangar-sized, strobe-lit, hard-rock hell just north of Manhattan's Greenwich Village, where she is capable of circulating for eight hours at a time. She leaves the Roxy, much refreshed, at 4 a.m. and goes home to her boyfriend, she relates later with enthusiasm. By 8 in the morning she is reclining in the studio of Arsi, her Rumanian skin specialist. Later she is sitting in the kitchen of Photographer Ara Gallant, being made up for the Italian edition of Vogue. Gallant's apartment is a good setting for Apples; the floors are white, with rivers of fake blood, the living room is solid black, and the dining room, where she will be photographed, has a stainless steel floor and walls made of thousands of tiny mirrors. The photographer, a wiry fellow from the South Bronx with a reputation for freaky brilliance, believes that a photograph should be "a lie with a small measure of truth."

By the time Apples emerges from the ministrations of Rory Bernal, the Chinese-Jamaican makeup man, she looks like Aphrodite in the year 2001. Gallant stretches her out across his glass dinner table and arranges her blouse to show her right breast. The makeup man starts a blower to make her hair blossom. Gallant clicks away: "That is great, wonderful . . . bring that hand just a little closer . . . that's right, give me tits again ... let me fix the hair. . ." Between shots Apples curls up like a cat and sings softly to herself. The next morning she is booked on a flight to Europe, and that night she is sleeping like an angel in Le Grand Hotel in Rome .

Tilt the cardboard tube and the glass shards shift; the pattern seen through the prism changes:

> Janice Dickinson is a fiery, funny brunette of 26. A few years ago , when blonds not only had all the fun but all of the modeling jobs, she managed to talk her way into a trip to Paris. Her eyes were supposed to be the wrong shape to sell magazines in the U.S., but she appeared on seven straight covers of Elle and came back to New York known a s a woman who could radiate a highly sexual kind of mischief. Now she is in the making past up year to she $2,000 has a day, worked in China, Bali, Grenada, Martinique, Rome, Paris, Germany , Japan and the U.S.

A few days ago in Manhattan, she filmed a 30-second commercial for Alberto VO5. Director, to Dickinson: "I want you to be a knockout." Dickinson: "You got it, Jack." Director , later: "Hot, hot, smiling hot. Now sparkle. Beautiful, beautiful.

Lots of shoulder. Hot, hot." Dickinson visibly strained to generate the required radiance. She is well aware that to be an exciting model you need more than mere static, knockout looks.

In fact, you may be a flagrantly flawed Venus; what counts is to be able to turn it on for the camera, to have a sort of shimmering communion with the lens. "You create an illusion," she says. "I have no breasts, but by holding my body a certain way I can create a cleavage. You can create cheekbones or take a bump on your nose and make it disappear with makeup. " After twelve spongy hours, Dickinson went to her West Side Manhattan apartment to share egg rolls and wine with her boyfriend, who is also a model. Nowadays, models tend to bunk not with princes or playboys but with other practitioners of their trade -- makeup men, photographers' assistants, advertising tyros. Before retiring, Dickinson removed her makeup with mayonnaise, washed her face with yogurt and then splashed apple cider on it as an astringent -- a ritual she learned from Makeup Wizard Way Bandy .

> Carol Alt, 20, is the youngest model to tie down an exclusive cosmetics contract. Hers is with Lancome, and she signed it after dropping out of Hofstra University, where she had been a straight A pre-law student. Modeling, she says, "can be a head trip, and you can get carried away. You have to be a businesswoman." She talks sometimes of returning to college to get a business degree. "I'm interested in the way that money works."

> Nancy Decker has her eyelashes dyed every six weeks but otherwise does little to her face except bathe it in moonbeams.

This seems reasonable, since she is only 17. She is a rarity, a blazing, natural redhead, discovered in Milwaukee in 1979. Top-Top Photographer Albert Watson says that Decker is a face to watch. Nancy, who makes $1,500 a day after six months on the job, thinks so too: "I feel like it's all of a sudden going to go boom, boom. I can just feel it. It's like when you're waiting for a pimple to come up." Not having had time to become jaded or to embrace a pragmatically spartan regimen, she still likes rock-'n'-roll joints like the Ritz and the Peppermint Lounge. She likes to eat a brownie, strawberry ice cream and whipped cream horribility, and as she does so she looks innocent enough to break an art director's heart. She is sufficiently seasoned, however, to set meticulously aside cab chits, makeup bills and other tax-deductible receipts every evening after work. She hopes to finish high school one of these days.

> Rachel Ward, like Apollonia, is one of Zoli's exotics. She is English, a former art student with a flamboyant figure (dress designers, she says, "were always strapping my breasts down") and an eye on an acting career. Modeling--she is this year's Lincoln Mercury girl and Revlon Scoundrel perfume girl--pays the bills nicely but does not interest her much. At 23, she lives in Los Angeles, and has so far appeared in two horror films, Terror Eyes and Bump in the Night. Brooke Shields, she says, arching her willowy neck, "is a rotten actress."

> Valerie Lohr is a ravishing, 18-year-old blue-eyed brunette who has been modeling for the Wilhelmina Agency for 2% years. She works for $1,200 to $1,500 a day, every day, "and I still can't rationalize why I make more than the President of the United States does." She has been through drugs--like many models--and out again: "I felt a lot of pressure to be what 'they' wanted me to be. Now I can stand around the dressing room and watch the girls snorting coke, and I don't care any more." Sometimes it seems to her that trading on her face and body is a form of prostitution, but she works hard at it, carefully scheduling more catalogue jobs than editorial sessions for fashion magazines, to avoid overexposure.

Some day, Valerie says, sounding for the first time like a young woman only a few years beyond childhood, she would like to be a cattle rancher, or maybe a politician. Neither the matronly married life nor the perpetual roundelay of cafe society holds much allure for most of today's models. If they are not would-be actresses like Shields, they have other aspirations. Iman wants to write children's books. Dickinson recently came back through the looking glass, moving behind the camera to shoot a designer showing for Italian Harper's Bazaar.

Ultra-reality is out there somewhere, like Ultrasuede. It resists stains, never ages. The sulky beauty and the scowling young lord will meet, frown gravely and mate with easy grace on designer sheets. The pretty lady swirls and smiles at her handsome tousle-haired divorce lawyer, who tells her that her ex-husband has been jailed for non-support and is being gnawed nightly by rats. Four ultra-people--two trim, tanned, shaggy-chested men and two radiant, perfect women--dash laughing, arm in arm, ou of the surf, up the beach and past us, never noticing that we are there. The observer is cracked and bent at the corners, like his old snapshots. He yells to his wife to bring him, as long as she is up, a stiff shot of ultra-booze. --By John Skow. Reported by Gear gia Harbison and Janice C. Simpson/New York

With reporting by Georgia Harbison and Janice C. Simpson/New York

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