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."