They're beautiful, that's obvious. But they have something else: presence, or maybe allure, fascination or magic. Whatever it is, it hits the instant one sees Naomi Campbell in a yellow totem gown, a Nefertiti of the '90s. Or Linda Evangelista looking like a Scottish schoolgirl on the cover of Vogue. Or Christy Turlington gazing serenely from an ad for Calvin Klein's Eternity perfume. Naomi. Linda. Christy. They're everywhere. Vogue, Elle, feature pages, ad pages, gossip pages. Selling couture and catalogs, soap and sportswear. And during the fall fashion shows these three have sashayed their impossibly sleek, improbably long-legged frames down the runways in New York City, Paris and Milan.
They're the supermodels, and they're hotter than a curling iron. Whenever Evangelista, 26, dyes her trademark bob -- and that's often -- it's news. The fashion world quivers as her hair goes from dark brown to platinum blond to Technicolor red. Campbell's life and loves are chronicled as much as her face; her reputed affair with Robert De Niro has become a staple of the celebrity gossip pages.
Today's pretty women represent a new breed: mannequins with sex appeal, as glamorous as cinema legends, as visible as the designers whose clothes they parade. They earn spectacular loot from their spectacular looks. Because, more than ever, modeling is about money. At a time when spending is down, top mannequins can still make consumers buy, so they are paid millions. The worldwide recession and tough times in the advertising business have made the top models one of the few reliable sales tools.
The supermodels invest salesmanship with a class and seductiveness no longer found in movie stars who dress down in blue jeans and prefer environmental preservation to nightclubbing. The top mannequins -- among them Cindy Crawford, Elaine Irwin, Karen Mulder and Claudia Schiffer -- always seem perfectly coiffed and coutured, manicured and made up. Says Jerome Bonnouvrier, head of the Paris-based Glamour agency: "Modeling has become the new Hollywood."
The supermodels are something of a social anachronism: who they are is how they look. Yet feminism of a sort has come to modeling, at least behind the scenes. More and more top stars have learned how to exploit themselves rather + than be exploited by someone else. If anyone is going to control the product and the profits, they are. Says Turlington, 22: "We realize the power we have. We're making tons and tons of money for these companies, and we know it."
No matter that everyone in the business still calls them girls. These are women who involve themselves in every aspect of their careers. They have a hand in directing the mechanics of a photo shoot -- the lighting, the makeup, the poses and postures -- whatever it takes to make their pictures perfect. They decide which assignments to accept and reject, which exclusive contracts are too binding and which are too rich to pass up.
THE MONEY