For most of the year, midtown Manhattan adheres to the fin-de-siecle urban ritual of a working lunch. But during Fashion Week, held in Bryant Park every spring and fall, the bow-tied and sensibly heeled easily forgo risotto on an expense account for Quarter Pounders on a crowded lawn. Dazzled by the chic, they perch themselves near the heavily guarded white tents where designers unveil their seasonal collections. The businessmen, of course, do not come because they are interested in Richard Tyler's position this year on velvet. They want to catch a glimpse of the shows' real centerpieces: the famously angular beauties for whom surnames now seem superfluous: Cindy and Claudia, Linda and Christy, Naomi and Kate.
But when next fall's lines debuted last week, noontime oglers were largely out of luck. Most of the supermodels were absent from the runways. They have, in a sense, grown too big for the fashion world that created them and turned them into internationally admired adventuresses. Instead of modeling clothes in New York City, Cindy Crawford was in Miami shooting her first movie, Fair Game, with Billy Baldwin. Vendela fans could have found the towering Swede in Los Angeles, where she had recently done a guest spot on Murphy Brown. Naomi Campbell, usually ubiquitous all through Fashion Week, appeared in just two shows. She had intended to saunter down the aisle for her friend, designer Todd Oldham, but the budding movie actress (she co-starred in this year's Miami Rhapsody) had to decline in order to rehearse for a new film, details of which she won't reveal.
Richer, busier and more celebrated than ever, supermodels do not need the meager $5,000 or so the New York shows offer them for an appearance. (The major European designers, by contrast, pay up to $25,000.) They have better-or at least more lucrative-things to do with their time. Supermodels today reap millions of dollars in advertising contracts; they lend their names to clothing lines, host TV shows, star in movies. From the gossip columns to the Oscar preshow promenade, they are stealing the limelight from Hollywood's film goddesses.
A controversial new book by Michael Gross, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (William Morrow; $25), is notable not so much for its revelations of drug use and other wild behavior by supermodels in the past as for the amount of knowledge the book assumes we have about models-their rocker boyfriends, their rich contracts, their past traumas. "The media have blown up models massively,'' says fashion photographer Mario Sorrenti. "They have been made more special than they ever were."