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To exhibit—and sell—these glories, page after glossy page of models paraded past magazine readers. Historically, the model was the descendant of the come-on girl posted in front of a Midway show tent; socially, she ranked high above the chorus girl and not far below the movie star. In the bright parade, with the assurance of a duchess and the accomplished posturing of an actress, floated Lisa Fonssagrives. There was Lisa in a little black moire number (by Jacques Fath); there was Lisa invitingly recumbent in a black lace and taffeta ensemble (by Janet Taylor); there was Lisa wistfully bored in tulle, for McCallum stockings ("You just know she wears them"). Thin, slightly bony, gowned and groomed with superhuman perfection, she was undeniably beautiful, but in her pictures a bit distant and ethereal, and not altogether real.
Lisa Fonssagrives was, in fact, an artfully posed, painstakingly lighted, lavishly printed image which bore about as much resemblance to an ordinary woman as Plato's "forms" to their imperfect earthly copies. Recently, Lisa Fonssagrives asked a photographer friend what he thought of her. "Lisa," he said, "you are just an illusion."
But the model is an illusion that can sell evening gowns, nylons and refrigerators. She can sell motorcars, bank loans and worthy causes. She can sell diesel engines, grapefruit and trips to foreign lands. She can sell everything from diapers to cemetery plots, aspirin to Zonite. She is a billion-dollar baby with a billion-dollar smile and a billion-dollar salesbook in her billion-dollar hand. She is the new goddess of plenty.
The Birth of the Model. In the past century, America underwent a great economic revolution. Americans made more things, and created more power to create still more things, than all past ages put together. The force chiefly charged with selling this breathless, and sometimes choking, proliferation of wealth is advertising.
At the Victorian era's high noon, most businessmen were warmed by the belief that the biggest rewards would automatically go, by economic law, to the producer of the best and cheapest product. It was mainly patent medicinemen who "took advertising" regularly. In 1888, there were only two men in New York who admitted to being professional writers of advertising; one of them resided in a Bowery hotel, at 25¢ a night.