Any glamazon will tell you that beauty is pain: Apple TV+’s new docuseries The Super Models lets the fashion industry’s most iconic models reveal their own histories of runway agony and ecstasy. Here’s Cat Woods’ glowing review.
The Super Models: Miniseries
From the hubbub of New York in the late 1980s through to the present day, The Super Models recounts more than the iconic careers of four women who transcended their role as mannequins. It reveals genuine and lifelong friendships, power and politics in the fashion industry, and an evolution in attitudes towards beauty and ageing.
The Super Models delivers four episodes helmed by veteran documentary makers, and the final two episodes are poignant in their footage of chemotherapy appointments and childbirth. The series is co-directed by Academy Award-winner Roger Ross Williams and Larissa Bills (who produced On Pointe, revealing the real lives of elite ballet students). Over four episodes, they follow the rise and rise of “supers” Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington with footage from the catwalk, backstage, and present-day interviews.
Footage from the models’ childhood family videos, teenage modelling competitions, and photos of young Christy, Naomi, Cindy and Linda colour our understanding of these women who became larger-than-life icons. They don’t lose any of their lustre in revealing their story, but they do become eminently more relatable and fallible. Through each episode, we comprehend the extent of how hard the women’s work was, being assessed, judged, critiqued and cajoled; often treated as commodities rather than humans. It is an industry, and work, that could have destroyed these impressionable young girls from the suburbs if they hadn’t forged such tight friendships.
One of the most cringeworthy pieces of footage is taken from a 1986 episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show, in which Winfrey demands that 20-year-old Crawford show the audience her body, to justify why she is a model. “Stand up now…this what I call a BOD-AY!” cries Winfrey as Crawford awkwardly, silently stands on stage. The remainder of the interview is Crawford’s older, male manager explaining what Crawford thinks, feels, and aspires to. It’s “before woke”, as Crawford says, but she also acknowledges that looking back at it today, she is saddened at what she was subjected to on that show.
Likewise, both Turlington and Evangelista recall episodes as teenagers where they were alone with male photographers who insisted that naked photos—or hands-on “measurements” in Evangelista’s case—were part of the job. These are the tip of the iceberg, with documentaries like Scouting For Models: Fashion’s Darkest Secret revealing some of the most horrendous examples of grooming, assault, and abuse of young models.
The Super Models walks a fine line here, because while the exploitation of young (and not-so-young) models is deserving of a thorough and comprehensive investigation, this series’ intention is to firmly shine a spotlight on the extraordinary careers of four suburban girls who became household celebrity names and their continued work in business, advocacy, charity and—wonderfully—fashion.
The late Gianni Versace said, “in the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do.” The supers were the epitome of the nouveau-riche royalty, self-made queens of the fashion industry whose influence seeped deep into the post-80s cultural psyche. While Vogue addicts can likely name a couple of influential models today, their reach is nowhere near as pervasive or long-lasting as the catwalk veterans of the late 80s and early 90s.
Both on the runways and backstage, there was gloss, glamour, sex, drugs, high fashion and big money. Into this whorl of money, glamour, and designer rivalry, some surreally beautiful women catapulted from being pretty, suburban nobodies to globally renowned models. Not just models, though. Super models. “We have this saying, Christy and I…. we don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day,” Linda Evangelista told Vogue in October 1990. In retrospect, though she was labelled pompous at the time, Evangelista was simply recognising her immense power over her image and her career.
There are many men—and a bitter ex-magazine editor—who are quick to label the foursome of models as “difficult”, “egotists” or monstrously out of control in their demands. In fact, these are women who were willing to put some boundaries in place where they felt they had no agency over their own bodies, faces, reputations or voices.
As Evangelista sagely pointed out in the 1990s, what supermodels were paid was a fraction of overall advertising campaign costs, and those clients reaped profits well beyond what they’d paid the supermodels fronting their advertisements. Recognising their immense value to the fashion industry, the supers exploited their popularity decades earlier than influencers and celebrity-founded brands became the norm. There were Cindy Crawford aerobics videos, makeup lines, perfumes, clothing lines and lingerie. From the “Big Five” (Campbell, Crawford, Evangelista, Turlington, and Schiffer), the supers transitioned to the “Big Six” once young British model Kate Moss entered the fashion realm.
While tabloids are quick to exploit images of the supers with a wrinkle, or signs of cellulite, divorces, or betrayals, this series revels in the absolute glory of these women who rode out the excessive boom times of 90s fashion, including the devastating death of Gianni Versace, and the now-acknowledged predatory nature of agents (including Evangelista’s ex-husband, who was accused but not convicted of systematic and prolific rape and assault of young women), to continue to direct their careers on their terms.
Indeed, all four of the supers have featured on recent magazine covers and all of them have continued to model alongside their advocacy (especially Christy and Naomi’s extensive work in the fields of women and children’s health), activism and business pursuits.
For viewers like me, who have hungrily devoured all the international editions of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar for decades, this series doesn’t reveal any shocking new discoveries. But it reunites us with the women we’ve idolised, and it reminds us—as Evangelista says—that “youth is fleeting, but beauty isn’t”.
