Fashioning Models by Entwistle Joanne; Wissinger Elizabeth; & Elizabeth Wissinger

Author:Entwistle, Joanne; Wissinger, Elizabeth; & Elizabeth Wissinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

By the early 1990s the supermodels’ glamour, a new mix of approachable style and celebrity status, had definitely become part of pop culture, featuring not only in beauty products, fashion runway shows and print campaigns, but also in musical videos, TV, cinema, calendars and commercial ads for soft drinks. However, the 1990s economic crisis coincided with yet another change in beauty standards: the displacement of the ‘natural healthy looks’ and the arrival of the moda povera look, the waif, the grunge style and its blasé attitude. These new fashion trends demanded looks that eventually departed from supermodels’ high glamour, although some aspects of it still lingered.

Most famously, Kate Moss’s ‘super-real’ body made her into an icon of the antifashion statement that fashion was keen to espouse. She was the second model since Twiggy to incorporate her working-class background into her public persona. Despite stirring an outcry that the images she made with photographer and mentor, the late Corinne Day, resembled child pornography, Day claimed that ‘Moss’ minimal body epitomised the “honesty” naturalness, cleanliness, ingenuousness that the nineties are demanding after the “high artifice” of the eighties’ (Day interviewed in Tatler 1993: 30). In the words of Phil Bicker, The Face art director at the time of her famous 1990 cover, Moss as photographed by Day ‘represented something very real: the opposite, in fact, of all the unreal high glamour of fashion ... she had ... a freshness that matched the times’ (Bicker quoted in O’Hagan 2010). The trend established by Day’s documentary style spread, so one year later Spanish magazine Telva echoed: ‘everything is now ingenuous and clean.... Girls, not women are the healthy aspect of the 1990s’ (Telva 1994: 86, my translation). As a consequence of this new taste for younger looks, the age for starting a modelling career lowered and underaged models are now not uncommon.

As a backlash against supermodels, the early 1990s saw these trends developing in fashion modelling: using older models ‘with more meaningful lives’ (Irvine 1994: 11), models with ‘unusual’ features (Elle Sept 1993; Jeal 1994), or anonymous ‘real people’ (Dudgeon 1994: 15), that would accompany the move towards deconstructivist and minimalist design. Often, these ‘more real’ models were professional models or actors hired from agencies like ‘Real People’ in London. Calvin Klein, for instance claimed that ‘what is real is beautiful’ (Klein quoted in Irvine 1994: 11) since allegedly, perfect looks can be achieved through plastic surgery. Thus, since ‘perfection’ became homogenized ‘it’s no longer couture; it’s middle-market look’, as a consequence, ‘the unevenness of individual beauty adds value’ (Klein quoted in Irvine 1994: 12). The continuation of this trend, albeit with a different philosophy, can be traced to Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’.

These trends partly functioned as strategies to avoid supermodels’ fees and fame, which were said to be eclipsing the clothes. At the time, all the ‘style gurus’ agreed that the trend for real, ‘ordinary’ people was ‘just a revolution in fashion’s cycle of reversals’ (Klein quoted in Irvine 1994: 12). Nowadays,

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