"There wasn't that cushion, which gave me a lot of drive. "Mommy and Daddy weren't bailing me out," says Cindy. "It was like an amazing club." They worked hard, too. "These girls became great friends and they made great friends with their clients," says Doukas. Their close bond only added to the appeal. "They were all different and that made them almost like a girl band," says Chambers. Christy was the classic beauty Cindy the all-American girl Linda the chameleon Naomi the natural mover (she was a trained dancer). Now though, people wanted to know who these women were.Įach girl had her own selling point. "Models didn't get credited at all," says Doukas. There had been famous models before – Twiggy, Jerry Hall, Verushka, Gia – but largely, models were anonymous. "Luxury brands were suddenly marketing internationally, so when these girls were the face of a campaign, they were recognised all over the world," says Chambers. It was a time of big hair, big shoulder pads and big budgets, with the fashion industry becoming increasingly global. When Linda joined the gang they were christened "The Trinity" by photographer Steven Meisel. Christy and Naomi became friends, sharing an apartment in New York. Their careers took off at varying rates, but they were soon regularly crossing paths. Linda, from Ontario, Canada, got her break at the Miss Teen Niagara beauty pageant, from which she was introduced to notorious model agent John Casablancas. Naomi was scouted after school in London's Covent Garden. Christy and Cindy were each spotted by photographers as teenagers in their hometowns – Christy in Walnut Creek, California Cindy in DeKalb, Illinois. While the early 90s saw the supermodels peak in terms of hype, coverage and earnings, their rise began in the mid-80s. "The supermodel term is now thrown around very loosely, but these four are really the originals." "These women's lives were extraordinary," says Roger Ross Williams, one of the show's directors. Their reunion is largely thanks to a new four-part documentary series on Apple TV+, The Super Models, which tracks the women's trajectory from (not so) plain old models to global superstars. But three decades later, the four women from that Versace show are still in demand, fronting ad campaigns and landing magazine covers – namely, this September's editions of both British and US Vogue, which reunites the original supermodels – minus Patitz, who died earlier this year – for the first time since that seminal 1990 cover. "These weren't just models, they were pop stars."įashion is a famously fickle industry. One of her first assignments was to track down the supermodels for an interview. "You get those sudden moments in history and in fashion where everything solidifies and is defined by an image," says Anne-Marie Curtis, former editor of Elle and founder of The Calendar Magazine, who started her career in the early 90s. If you want to know what a supermodel is, take a look at those women strutting arm-in-arm down the catwalk glamour, confidence, power and money bouncing off them. It was such a hit – played in heavy rotation on the then-dominant MTV – that in March 1991 Gianni Versace sent four of the models down the runway to its soundtrack. That was soon followed by George Michael's Freedom '90 video – directed by David Fincher and starring the same five women – a cultural touchstone still reverberating decades later. The decade began with an era-defining British Vogue cover, shot by Peter Lindbergh, and featuring Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Tatjana Patitz, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington – the most in-demand models of the time, photographed on the streets of New York in Levi's and bodysuits. Truly iconic fashion moments don't come along that often, but at the start of the 1990s there was a succession of them.
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