February 27, 2017 • 47 mins
When did models begin strutting down the catwalk? Cristen and Caroline size up the history of modeling and how it's influenced beauty culture at large.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff mom never told you from how stup
Works not come hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline and fresh on the heels of
New York Fashion Week. We are doing something I'm kind
of surprised we haven't done before on the podcast, which
is looking at fashion. Yeah, fashion and fashion modeling, so
(00:28):
many loaded issues to talk about. So it's so perfect
for sminty, it really is. And here is the thing
I was not expecting when I set out to research
a history of fashion modeling, just wanting to know how
this whole catwalk thing began when women started being paid
to be clothed hangers essentially, and it was surprisingly hard
(00:52):
to find. Of course, there are all sorts of galleries
and listicles on the Internet of the most famous or
hottest supermodels, but what about the era long before supermodels,
when women began modeling. You it took some digging. It
did take some digging, and actually pre era of women modeling,
(01:12):
it was all about men modeling, and before men modeling,
it was dull modeling. Yeah, all of the digging folks
absolutely worth it. And I first want to call out
the source for a lot of this this early early
history of fashion modeling, which is coming from fashion historian
Caroline Evans in her paper The Ontology of the Fashion Model,
(01:34):
which will have a link to on our website because
the full text is online and you can access it,
and I highly recommend you read it because it is fascinating.
So why don't we start off with looking at the
very word model Because models did not begin as models,
that's right, and so the very word model is derived
(01:56):
from the Latin modelas, but it didn't mean fashion model
or even mathematical model until the twenty century. The first
fashion models were actually called demoiselle de magazine. Yeah, and
so from the eighteen seventies to around nineteen nine they
were first called mannequins, which was derived from the Dutch
(02:18):
word referring to an articulated doll used by artists. And
this use of mannequins to describe these earliest fashion models
was coined by a journalist in eighteen seventy, but writers
used a masculine gender for the words, separating the idea
from the person, and it would have earlier to call
(02:39):
someone a mannequin would have earlier been considered how super
pejorative words suggesting somebody who's empty headed, fashionable, but contemptible,
and it's negative connotations were maintained when it was becoming
used for women who were modeling clothes definitely evoked scorn
(02:59):
in the eight seventies. Evans writes that it comes to
suggest the theme of femininity as a kind of mechanical performance. Yeah. That,
and that refers to another book that she wrote all
about this, called The Mechanical Smile, all about fashion modeling,
and she talks about how the first fashion shows were
thus called mannequin parades. Now sometimes they were referred to
(03:23):
as living models, but it wasn't until really the mid
twentieth century that models became models referred to as models.
And initially the model though referred to the canvas twall,
which was a first stage dress, rather than the person
wearing the dress. So, as you can see, there's all
(03:43):
sorts of objectification constantly going on. If you think about us,
it's almost synecticuly being you know, the person being referred
to for the dress, and the fact that if we
think of mannequins today, you know, well, aside from Kim
Control and the movie Mannequin, and just thinking that usually
inanimate objects. But that's what they were paid to be,
(04:05):
inanimate objects, right, So let's get let's get creepy, let's
stat all creepy. Yeah, we got to talk about the original,
the O G model, which is a doll. These were
the precursors, the predecessors to fashion models, and basically eighteenth
century French dressmakers sent dolls that looked like the person
(04:26):
basically dressed in fancy clothes around Europe, largely because surprise, surprise,
fashionable women themselves really couldn't travel freely, which reflects so
much of the stuff that we talked about in terms
of women and travel in our summer series on women
and Travel last summer. And some could sure houses though
(04:47):
for that reason would make these doll body doubles of
clients to replicate her proportions, in other words, making a
custom mannequin for a woman that they could then build
off of. Sometimes designers would make those house calls. But
if you didn't live, say in downtown Paris, if you
weren't closely accessible to a designer, then yeah, you would
(05:09):
get a doll in the male creepy delivery. Hello, Hello,
and hello Also to the men who were the first
live breathing human models in Paris. Yeah, because men were
free or to parade around public spaces, so naturally they
were the first walking closed advertisements. And it's really started
(05:33):
in the eighteen twenties and only lasted about twenty years.
When Parisian tailors would hire handsome dudes called mannequins. They
really put the man in mannequins to wear their fancy
clothes and then they would just go out to hip
spots in Paris. They would go to the races and
be like, hello, dandies, you like how I'm dressed. I
don't know why I'm not speaking with a French action,
(05:55):
and no one can understand me because I'm also speaking English. Well,
the mannequins were largely looked down upon as posers. Basically
they were wearing nice closure, but they had to give
them back at the end of the day, and they
were described as a man whose profession was to rent
out his body. He had to be elegant enough to
appeal to dandy's but poor enough to require a wage
(06:20):
every day. Yeah, and keep that whole renting your body
out thing in mind, because that's going to come up
a lot in the early perceptions and last team perceptions
really female models in particular. But there was one great
example that Evans mentions in the Ontology of the fashion Model,
which is from an vaudeville performance that features a mannequin
(06:45):
named Hector. And I'm talking again like a fashion model mannequin.
He was also an artist model, but the sky named
Hector who arrives on the stage singing, brilliant model, faithful
me raw, I sparkle with light and fire. I wander
everywhere setting the vocal the new looks in the catalog.
(07:08):
I love it so much. Little Hector to scout tap
dancing and his in his trousers than his velveteen trousers
light and fire. Um, I'm not going to be able
to recover from that all day. Basically, all right, Well,
if we if we moved past Hector the vaudevillian uh,
(07:29):
and we get into the eighteen fifties and sixties, we
see courier Charles Worth, who's credited with being the first
to use actual live breathing, living with blood in their
bodies female fashion models. And he kept it in the
family because his wife, Marie Rene, who was a sales clerk,
she became essentially the chief mannequin CMO Chief Mannequin Officer
(07:52):
and was quite possibly the West's very first fashion model.
And she was just pretty dedicated to her crap. This
woman worked twelve hour days in general, but also through
both of her pregnancies. Yeah. Yeah, it was not easy
to be a mannequin back then, and uh Evans talked
about how this was perhaps feminizing the advertising gimmick first
(08:16):
established by those tailors and their male mannequins um because
they also would send well dressed women out to the
races and other hot spots as well. And Charles Worth
though also instituted the idea of a pre designed collection
rather than dresses made for one woman, and so he
would use living mannequins to show customers the dresses. Yeah,
(08:41):
and so then we get into the eighteen seventies to eighties,
Instead of those designers paying house calls, essentially the aristocratic
women began visiting them. And that's when we see fashion
modeling becoming more widespread because you had those living models
lounging about showing off their weares. And so by the
eighteen eneas in it was common for wealthy women to
(09:02):
just spend their afternoons watching the mannequins at top couturiers
of the time, like Charles Worth. And so that's when
we have this link between modeling and the association with
high end dressmakers, wealthy clientele, the status symbol kind of thing,
although of course there was a vast socio economic gap
(09:23):
between the mannequin and the client. Yeah. And so by
the end of the nineteenth century, the profession had been
thoroughly feminized. Most models were women, although of course at
this point they still weren't called models. They were still
called mannequins because models were associated with the women at
this point who posed for artists, another type of woman
(09:45):
who basically showed off her body for money. Yeah. And
there was just one image that comes to mind that
I saw in the research, which was all these well dressed,
beautifully dressed mannequins who were walking in a in a
very you know, post kind of way, but walking about
in a back lawn somewhere of a lovely estate. And
(10:07):
then you have the wealthy women just sitting around watching them,
seeing how the seeing how the clothes moved. Because that
was another important facet to this was this new found
interest in actually seeing the clothes in motion. That was
probably the appeal of seeing it on a person who
could move around rather than you were personalized doll. So
(10:30):
creepy um. But the working conditions for models at the
time weren't exactly glamorous as you might imagine, because imagine
standing post for a portrait, but for hours, because you'd
essentially have to stand passively while the dressmaker would pull
and prod and poke at you, creating his dress on you,
(10:51):
and while wealthy aristocratic women would come in and pull
and poke and prod it you looking at the dress,
and all this would be happening while wearing an to
ankle black satin mayo or four oh underneath to preserve
modesty and also to protect the gown from getting dirty
and evans sites another source talking about how quote this
(11:14):
denial of the body is also a way of the mannequin,
long despised, living off her body like a prostitute. But
it's interesting to look at culture at large at the
time because in literature and psychology we also get a
lot of fear about doppelgangers, automatons, and the line between
(11:36):
animate and inanimate, live and dead. Yeah, there was a
lot of anxiety um surrounding even these mannequins, and Walter
Benjamin in particular had a fascination with fashion at the time.
You described fashionable women as mimicking the mannequin who enter
history as dead objects. Tell us all you really feel, Walter. Yeah,
(12:00):
And and fashion reporters and just I mean reporters in
general at the time reported these mannequins, these models as
being robotic and doll like well into the twentieth century,
and we see the same thing reflected on catwalks today.
I mean a lot of times, depending on the look
of the designer, models don't necessarily look all that human, right,
(12:23):
But if we go back to those points that we
hit earlier about you know, showing off your body from money,
things like that, these working class women who ended up
being these fashion models were right widely regarded as living objects.
So they were literally objectified, but they were also stigmatized
as being sexually promiscuous, whether you were modeling fashion or
(12:45):
modeling nude for an artist, because you're just you're this
passive body who is making a living wage or maybe
not a living wage by using your body. Yeah, I mean,
you're selling your body. And there was also I mean,
it was fairly common for these women too, I mean,
because they were they had to be attractive, you know,
(13:05):
they were slim and attractive. They were models, and it
was common even back then for them to end up
marrying wealthy men, and that was the way that they
entered society, which of course was looked down upon by
wealthy women who were like, you're nothing more than a mannequin.
Kim control, get out of here. Um. And then we
(13:28):
see in the early twentieth century the models who were
walking in the very first fashion shows having to master
a sliding, undulating walk in order to move in the
tight sheath like dresses that designers were making that also
emphasized their legs in new ways. It's this desire to
preview the clothing in motion. Yeah, because they not only
(13:50):
had to see how the clothes looked, but also had
to learn how to even wear the clothes to move
around in the of Um, there was something uh actually
this was a little bit before those sheath like dresses,
but in the late nineteenth century there was this sort
of a fashion fag called the Grecian Bend, which wrote
(14:14):
about for a blog post on Stuff I've Never Told
You dot com, which essentially was because of the combination
of corsets and bustles and high heels. The only way
to move around was to be bent over. You're literally
waited over by this, and so you have all of
these illustrations of high fashion women at the time tottering
around bent over as if they're looking for lost contacts
(14:36):
on the sidewalk. So we've always been slaves to fashion, yes, yes, absolutely,
except maybe in the loincloth days. Loinecloth seemed pretty low key.
I don't know, Christen, that's really oppressive, yeah, or just breezy,
it's real breezy. Um. But these high end customers were
resistant though, to the rise of ready to wear, as
(14:56):
they could still pay for custom clothing. So keep that
in mine too. As we see this sort of economic
stratification of fashion starting to emerge as modeling then arrives
in the twentieth century in America, and we're shipping sources
to to another influential paper fashioning models, image, text, and industry.
(15:19):
So then we see in the World War One era
more Parisian designers coming state side. You have in nineteen
o eight Lady Duff Gordon opening her first US house
in Manhattan called Lucille, and she's introducing Couturier modeling. She
brought six living mannequins with her to display her work
(15:40):
and gave them exotic sounding names, similar to you know
how women's names are exoticized in brothels or strip clubs. Yeah. Again,
there are so many parallels constantly to modeling and prostitution.
And no, we're not equating the two, but at the time,
I mean, it's just it's just there. Um So in
(16:02):
the nine twenties, though, Duff Gordon's Fashion house becomes the
first to have celebrity models when some of them become
hired for the zig Field folly. So you have Gamella
and other of their Madonna esque fashion models showing up
on these early catwalks in nineteen fifteen, in fact, there
(16:23):
was a transparent catwalk built for a zig Field show. Well,
so you have popular model and Zigfeld performer at Dolores,
which I love that that's like a model name because
I just pictured Dolores like this, a little old lady
with glasses. But anyway, Dolores became known essentially as the
Goddess of clothes. She modeled in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and
(16:45):
Town and Country, a subscription for which My mother signed
me up unprompted, and I love to flip through it
and just laugh laugh at how I can't afford anything
in that magazine have a town in country subscription. Yeah,
do you want to know? I just love learning these
things about you. It's all Sally Man. She she signed
me up for that. She also signed me up for
(17:05):
the following magazine in eighteen, Vanity Fair, which I never
have time to get through. God help me, reported that
no other woman, speaking of Dolores, had been more widely
posed or photographed. Yeah, so we start to have the
first supermodels, sort of. I mean that that's about as
super as you could get. But in nineteen twenty three,
(17:25):
after we have Dolores and her kind showing up in
Zigfield shows getting a lot of attention, there's an out
of work actor named John Robert Powers who is thinking
about what to do with other underemployed or unemployed theater folk,
and his wife makes an excellent suggestion to join photographers
(17:49):
and create the first modeling agency in the United States.
And John Robert Powers really hits the jackpot with this
idea thanks to the trans position also happening at the
time in the advertising industry where you see a shift
beginning toward photography. Yeah, but you've also got a demand
(18:09):
going on from the ad industry for sanitized female sexuality
to sell goods. This is when we see the development
of this quest for the natural girl, looking clean and
like an upstanding citizen, somebody that you'd want to emulate
with the products. But she's still she's still attractive, and
this is still something that we think of in modeling today,
(18:30):
where it's looking for someone who has the look. What
is the look? At the time, it was sanitized female
sexuality because yeah, I mean female sexuality is terrifying. Well yeah,
and unless it's if it's unsanitized female sexuality right to sanitized,
I'm just thinking of like hand sanitizer all the burning.
(18:53):
But a year later, after John Rbert Power starts up
this first modeling agency in the US in ninety twenty four,
Jeanne Putau hires white American women to sell his clothes
so that customers could more easily identify with them and
in the process of doing this essentially being like models,
(19:14):
they're just like you. It elevates the status of modeling,
making it more of a socially accepted profession. So no
longer are they primarily perceived as prostitutes. There's a little
bit of respectability about it now, so more of something
that you'd want to aspire to. Suddenly, the aristocratic women
(19:34):
buying the fancy clothes want to be like the slim,
beautiful ladies wearing them, as opposed to looking down on
them for being like prostitutes. Well, and we also have
to keep in mind the rise of mass media and
photography at the time. We're seeing these photos of people
like never before as well. And this is also coinciding
with the rise of the earliest celebrity culture in Hollywood developing.
(19:55):
So a lot of forces combining to create this new
beauty culture. So during World War Two, it's interesting to
talk about the images that developed, the models that are used,
the image that designers want to present. Balenciaga, for instance,
showed his clothes on shorter, stockier women to reflect his
(20:17):
real life clientele, and during World War two this look
develops among models that pursues a more ordinary image, more cheerful,
to offset all of the gloom around the austerity during
the war. Yeah, so the war doesn't I mean, it
might take a little bit of attention away from modeling,
(20:37):
but it's still absolutely developing and growing. And so in
ninety seven, do yours Knew Look comes along though, and
it was highly controversial at the time because this is
when we really see fashion moving away from the practical,
and it was not great timing for it, because even
(20:58):
though the war might have been over, there was still
a lot of austerity ripple effects of austerity, particularly in
Europe at the time, and during one of the Oars
shows at this time, a model was physically attacked by
outraged and impoverished onlookers who were saying, how could you
even suggest that we would wear these clothes in a
(21:19):
time like this? But the new look nonetheless created a
whole new look for models. They were sophisticated, They had
haughty eyebrows and groomed hair. In Caroline, I have a
new eyebrow aspiration, and it is for haughty eyebrows. I
like that the eyebrows themselves are haughty. They got real tude.
(21:42):
But yeah, so the top models in New York ended
up adopting the look themselves, and in nineteen four Coco
Chanel's Total Look was modeled on young aristocrats. She looked
out to the people for her inspiration to the wealthy people. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Well,
and it was kind of a big deal because she
(22:02):
wasn't necessarily tapping say those twelve top models in New
York with the haughty eyebrows, but tapping actual real life aristocrats. Yeah.
And so in the late fifties, do you Or continues
to push the envelope by hiring dark, petite, an inexperienced
model Victoire to coincide with the rise of this new
(22:22):
class of clients for the ready to wear industry and
fashion modeling thus took on a new element of social class,
and a lot of his pre existing clients considered the
hiring of Victoire to be an insult her left bank look,
how dare he? I wonder how haughty her eyebrows were.
I don't know. She had really just like down to
earth eyebrows, and they're like, Nope, not gonna do Victoire.
(22:46):
But it was with this rise of ready to wear
and technological developments of fashion photography that really leads us
into today's modeling industry, because we have things like ready
to wear lying on standardized sizing, and so then you
get that idealized model look because the models had to
(23:07):
be thin enough to fit these specific standardized sample sizes.
And in the nineteen sixties too, when it comes to
fashion photography, you have its availability for the first time
due to technology in newsprint and magazines, bringing high fashion
looks to the masses. It's everywhere, fashionists everywhere, and these
(23:28):
and these high end models can be photographed and become
recognizable faces in all of the in town and country.
For instance, for the I must get those writing booths. Yes, um,
but yeah. So this is when we see like the
development of cult of personality around models. They become more
important for creating looks for their designers campaigns than ever before.
(23:51):
And this really sets the stage for or the catwalk
for high paid supermodels that we see starting around the eighties.
You've got g In Shrimpton. She was the first of
the quote unquote natural models required to market ready to wear,
and she talks about how like, yeah, you know, I
just looked pretty ordinary and that really soul. I of
course she's beautiful. My gosh, thinking of Jeane Shrimpton. Jeane
(24:13):
Shrimpton is anything but ordinary. I have a hair crush
on her, I know, day long. I know, well, but yeah,
she talks about how like I didn't have any sort
of essentially high fashion look. I had a more accessible
Middle America look, and that is what sold. And then
you have nineteen sixty six, Twiggy becomes the first youthful
superstar model. And during this era, though, meanwhile, in the
(24:36):
nineteen sixties, black models were used from time to time,
but they were usually featured as something special, as something exotic,
to borrow a term from a previous episode, and something
that we still see so often today, which we'll get
into more details in just a few minutes. Then in
the nineteen seventies, we have Eileen Ford, famous from Ford
(24:57):
Models scouting, Lauren Hutton's quote humane face and Lauren Hunton's
humane face, which I just love that description, Like what
is the humane face? All right? Lauren Hunton? Beautiful Lauren Hutton.
In nineteen seventy three, she becomes the highest paid model
in his story or her story, earning two d thousand
(25:18):
dollars for twenty days work. So it's a big deal.
I mean, modeling obviously is becoming more and more of
this high pay kind of thing for some people, for
some people, some people, Like three years later, in ninety six,
Margot Hemingway and she topped that previous record with a
one million dollar contract for new new perfumes, so you
(25:38):
could really smell like a million books. And then in
the late seventies and early eighties, we have the arrival
of the supermodel, and this is really reflecting globalization, economic
boom times, and just the general fun times of the era,
because you have this era of the model as a
(25:58):
celebrated commodity. If you want to sell something and you
have twenty dollars that you can spend in one day,
you hire a supermodel because her globalized beauty ideal is
guaranteed to get people's attention and show that you fledgling
brand are with it. That's right. And so in the
context of the time in the late seventies, that's when
(26:20):
we first get twice yearly fashion shows that are happening
in Milan, and this is where models start earning big bucks.
And this really changed fashion and modeling, make it making
it way more accessible through media. People are people are shooting,
photographers are shooting these twice yearly fashion shows. Oh but
can we also quickly mentioned that Milan in the late
(26:41):
seventies and early eighties and probably still today for models
was also just a hotbed of predatory behavior by fashion photographers,
by would be agents, by wealthy men with lots of cocaine.
And there was, I mean, there was a lot of
seed behavior y're going on then and now in terms
(27:02):
of models constantly being taken advantage of and presented with
again mountains of cocaine and other drugs and alcohol, and um,
getting into the industry that way and making a face.
And this is the same face that I was making
the entire time I was reading the article that talked
about the history of this whole not just fashion and
(27:23):
modeling in general, but specifically the high fashion modeling that
was happening around Fashion Weeks and specifically Milan. It's also
freaking creepy. There's a lot of cocaine. There's just a
lot of cocaine, that's right. Um. But if we talk
more about the supermodel specifically, the late eighties recession actually
fueled supermodels becoming these famous consumption objects, making them into
(27:48):
designer and brand status symbols. Basically, if you could afford
or appear to afford a face like Christy Turlington's or
Cindy Crawford's, Caroline Urban's, that's right. Me at five ft
two for your campaign, it would make you appear to
be hipper, hotter, more of an object of desire in
(28:09):
terms of your fashion and what you're selling well. And
at the same time, though, the fact that these specific
faces were known around the world for their sex appeal,
this is something termed visual neo colonialism that's taking place.
It's this globalization of these very specific kinds of beauty standards,
(28:30):
and really too, with the supermodel era, we have models
eroticized more than ever before, and along with that the
whole I mean, there was some truth to it, but
also some mythology of the supermodel making like who was
it who wasn't going to get out of bed for
less than Linda Evangelista? How much would you get out
of bed for for lots of duckets? You have to
(28:53):
have a you have to have like the Scrooge McDuck
swimming pool of gold coins for Evangelista to get out
of bed. And so it also interestingly flips this original
script of models, as these almost a step away from
prostitutes who could only marry into wealth and society too.
Supermodels as self empowered, hotly pursued sex symbols, but even
(29:21):
with the supermodels, even with this visual neo colonialism, which
if the colonialism doesn't tippy off, it's not necessarily a
good thing. Even with all of these factors, it doesn't
mean that for everybody else, everyone who is not an
elite supermodel, that working conditions got any better. Yeah, you're
basically your trade is the way that you look, the
(29:45):
way that your body appears. And for instance, the typical
measurements of models today are sort of out of reach
for a lot of the population. For women, the typical
measurements are being at least five foot nine with a
thirty four inch bust, a twenty four inch waist and
thirty four inch That's so funny. That's that is me
(30:06):
like through a perfect All right, we're kidd were quitting podcasting.
I'm going to be your agent already. The model it's
gonna be great. Um. For men, standard sizing is six
to six ft three with a thirty two inch waist
and a thirty nine to forty inch chest. All right,
So I mean so yeah, so you have to fit
this very specific body type. But you can't just have
(30:30):
the measurements. That won't cut it. You have to have
the personality, the reputation beyond the job performance, the look
that elusive look, a humane face perhaps like Lauren Hutton
and Michael Gross was the one who wrote about the
gross sorry uh stuff going on in the modeling industry,
like at fashion shows in his book Model, The Ugly
(30:51):
Business of Beautiful Women, and he talks about this whole
practice of agents trying to lure models to another agency
and it's disgusting because it's actually makes them sound like
just I mean, they're just live stock being sold back
and forth, which is what he says. He says that
they're sold for bounties and it is a thriving trade.
Oh yeah, there was a documentary I don't know if
(31:12):
it's still on Netflix, but it was called girl Model
Tracking these Eastern European Girls, I mean, because a lot
of times you're scouted when you're fourteen years old, and
it follows a couple of these Eastern European girls in
their quest for super model edom. And one of them,
(31:33):
for instance, is sent to a job in Japan, but
she the agency isn't just sending her there. She actually
comes back from the shoot in debt because the agency
was picking up the tab until she could pay them back,
it said, it's it's a scheezy business a lot of
the times. Yeah, and that's described as essentially these models
(31:53):
becoming like indentured servants to their agencies. And it's a
stuff that Sarah Zif, a form model herself, is trying
to target through the Model Alliance. She says that there's
not enough protection for these young girls who are being
asked to lose weight, to pose nude unexpectedly sometimes, and
to work all hours. Yeah, and this has to do
(32:14):
with flimsy child labor laws. I mean, they're kind of
all over the place. There's been a lot of focus
in particular on child labor laws in New York City
just because of fashion weeks there. Um, and there are
things in place in terms of according to New York law,
if you are a model under eighteen, you have to
have say, um time designated for school work and you
(32:37):
can only work X amount of hours. But during fashion week,
all of that goes out the window, and sometimes beyond
fashion week, because if you are so hotly pursuing this industry,
you're gonna do things that probably do violate these child
labor laws. Yeah, but then we also see how using
these underage models affects the industry, the look, and older
(33:00):
models and women in general, because the thing is, when
you're using a girl who's fourteen years old, she's pretty small,
she hasn't hit puberty yet, she doesn't have hips, boobs
a waste. And this is coming from the same Nation
article that talked about the model alliance. But basically, a
model used to weigh eight percent less than the average woman,
and now it's twenty three percent less. And this ends
(33:22):
up putting a lot of pressure on these young girls
not to grow up. They're being told, well, you've got
to lose weight, and it's like, how do I lose
weight when I'm just getting boobs? And it also puts
a lot of pressure on the older models to starve
themselves and try to attain this look of young girls. Yeah,
I mean you can't. It's almost it seems to have
a shorter lifespan a lot of times than that of
(33:43):
a professional athlete. And I want this statistic to ring
clear to any girl listening who's interested in model, who
wants to grow up to become a model, any parent
who has a daughter who really wants to grow up
to be a model. The average income for a model
these days is thirty two thou dollars with zero benefits,
(34:06):
and a lot of times what you get paid for
or what what you get paid on a shoot is clothes.
You just get to keep your clothes. You're like, you're
like one of the mannequins in the eighteen twenties of
the Parisian horse races, except you actually get to keep
the clothes at the end of the day. And a
lot of times, reflecting how freelance work in general has
influenced our overall economy, contract work is largely replaced full
(34:30):
time gigs post recession. So oh man, and I know
some of these girls who desperately want to be models
because they've been elevated to these positions of the you know,
ultimate beauty symbols, and it's I mean it's it's it's
a dead end. A lot of times it is a
(34:51):
dead end. I mean it's it's almost impossible. You'd have
better chances winning lottery than becoming a Heidi Clue who
not only was a successful mom adele, but parlayed that
career into TV shows, clothing lines, all sorts of amazing stuff,
married seal. There you go. You'd have to yeah, with
the chances of marrying seal. We want to know what
(35:12):
are those chances. But even even with regardless of the
low pay, you still have issues of consent When it
comes to modeling. Six percent of fashion models have been
asked to pose nude without prior notice, either contractually or informally.
In twenty of them felt pressure to comply in order
to keep their jobs. Hence fourteen year old brook Shields
(35:34):
posing naked in a bathtub and then having to go
through that entire legal fight with that fashion photographer to
try to get those photographs back, which I mean, and
that was before the Internet. I mean it would be
impossible now. And former model Patricia sale Beltran wrote about
this in a two thousand four paper about models feeling
(35:55):
alienated from their own look, their own image, their own body.
She says that being a successful model means obtaining the
official degree certificate in beauty, certifying normative compliance and social acceptability.
These girls and women are expected to project this incredible
self confidence that makes us as the norm e's want
(36:16):
to buy those clothes, want to aspire to look like
them and be like them. But they're being paid like
actresses to look that way, and so really when you
dig deeper, you find these girls who are literally in
figuratively starving for help, and they're relying on managers and agents.
They're insecure, desperately insecure about their physique and maintaining it,
(36:39):
and by that point they've wrecked their own health to
achieve it. And we also need to talk about diversity,
because modern modeling has promoted a nearly exclusive ideal of white, slim,
cis gender heterosexual beauty ideals. And this is important because
(37:00):
model culture does reflect our collective feelings towards things like class, nationality, race,
social mobility, gender, proficiency, power, wealth. I mean, it's an
aspirational look that we're going for, and the aspiration has
in many ways still is very limited. Yeah, And so
(37:22):
when you get women of color modeling, they're often portrayed
as an exotic or ethnic accessory, or they're a musician
or an athlete or a celebrity, or they're just viewed
as an object of pity. And even during the Supermodel Heyday,
Naomi Campbell was not getting as many contracts even still
as her white supermodel counterparts. And progress has been so
(37:45):
slow and remain problematic in terms of um women of
color in modeling context. So but quickly, just to show
how short of a timeline we're even working with for
black women and women of color to even have any
space in the modeling industry. It wasn't until the mid
(38:06):
nineties sixties that Danielle Luna becomes the first black supermodel.
And chances are you probably haven't even heard of her,
I mean her, She was unfamiliar to me at the time,
and the New York magazine article about her initially highlighted
that of like, hey, you probably don't know this, I
mean partially because possibly because she died of a drug
(38:26):
overdose at thirty three. Yeah, she became in nineteen sixty
six British vogues first black cover model, and this is
during a time when the magazine world really wasn't ready
for photographing beautiful black women. According to that article, and
a fellow model was quoted as saying, and this is important,
especially in light of the episode we did on the
(38:47):
exotistization of women of color. But she said that no
one looked like her. She was really like an extraordinary species. Yeah.
And Luna preferred to live in Europe with her husband
and their daughter, and she also didn't like to claim
she was black, she was far likelier to call herself
mulatta or mixed. Yeah, and eight years later, in nineteen
(39:10):
seventy four, Beverly Johnson, who is more of a household name,
became the first black model in the cover of American Vogue,
eight years though between Danielle and Beverly, and this had
to do with the fact that black models didn't become
more commonly seen until the seventies. This was partially fueled
(39:31):
by the Blackest Beautiful movement um but it was also
cute apparently by this nineteen seventy three event called the
Battle of Versailles, which was a fashion face off between
American and French designers, and Americans were praised for employing
eight black models. It's interesting looking back at the nineteen
sixty nine Life magazine feature which had Naomi Sims on
(39:54):
its cover with the headline black models take center Stage,
and it had a centerfold with many many black models
declaring black is busting out all over. But it doesn't
seem like that. Actually that ball kept rolling, Yeah yeah,
I mean even today. For example, it wasn't until that
(40:15):
a black model, Veronica Webb, landed a contract with a
major cosmetics company Revlon, and even today thinking about who
our cover girls are, a lot of times they are white.
I mean, you do have today more of the celebrity
faces Halle Berry, Lupute and Yango, Queen Latifa, who are
you know getting these cosmetic contracts, but it's still fewer
(40:39):
and farther between. And then if we look at high
fashion though and diversity on the catwalk today, because the
inspiration for this podcast came from New York Fashion Week,
the awareness of a need for diversity is there, but
the action is still lacking. Yeah. So Jezebel wrote about
this in terms of New York Fashion Week for Fall winter,
(41:02):
and they point out that more than seventy eight of
the models were white, although it is less common for
designers to use all white casts. But even that doesn't
really matter because they totally seem to be skating by
on some token system. Well, we have one Asian girl
and one black girl. That's fine, right, And this is
something echoed by model Chanel Iman. She says, a few
(41:24):
times I got excused by designers who told me we
already found one black girl, we don't need you anymore.
And it's echoed by fellow model Jordan Donne who said
I'm normally told I'm canceled because I'm colored. So being
canceled because of my boobs is a minor thing. Yeah,
I mean, and you think that, oh, well, what does
(41:45):
it matter. I mean, that's high end fashion representation. It
does matter because again today modeling culture and what we
consider beautiful and how these women are posed in advertisements
and in fashion features, it does reflect what we think
of as being worthy of aspiration and even of eroticizing.
(42:07):
It is a cycle. Designers pick up on what they
think is part of the zeitgeist, what they think is
hip and cool and the best representation for their clothes,
and then we look to those images and say, okay,
well what's pretty, what's beautiful? Do I want to be
a model? Do I look like them? And also to
thinking about how they're posed because even still, I mean,
we're focusing more on like catwalk fashion, but if you
(42:30):
look in fashion magazines, it is highly problematic that a
lot of times women of color are still portrayed in
in the way that Danielle Luna was described as an
exotic species. They are often still exotic size rather than
simply being models. So I mean it really seems like
(42:51):
if we're looking to the modeling industry to be our
bell weather of women's empowerment, we're probably going to be
waiting forever because the entire our industry has been built
on the outright literal objectification of women, literal literal mannequins. So,
and this goes from men too. We haven't talked about
(43:12):
male modeling except for Hector on the stage. You have
brilliant light. But I mean it was this was an
eye opener for me. I mean, it's it's easy to
see that that fashion has some probable metica house books
as a lay person, but when you dig into the
history it gets pretty intense. Well yeah, those problematic aspects
are built into the foundation of modeling as we see
(43:35):
it today. Yea. So I really want to hear from
listeners on this, especially if you are at all associated
with a fashion industry or just interested in fashion in general.
Sort of how do you reconcile all of these things
and is it getting better? Let us know mom Stuff
at house stuff works dot Com is our email address.
You can also tweet us at mom stuff podcasts or
messages on Facebook, and we've got a couple of messages
(43:57):
to share with you right now. I have a letter
here from Mindy responding to our Not Your Average Period
Panties episode with Julie Seigel. She writes, as an entrepreneur
myself just starting out, it was very inspiring. I loved
hearing about how Julie got started and how she grew.
(44:18):
I've come across many challenges myself, such as constantly being
being ignored by men at multiple small business development centers
until my male cousin, who also works for an SBDC,
would ask them to talk to my business partner in me.
So it was helpful to hear how she was able
to make her company work and focus not on being
a female entrepreneur but just an entrepreneur. My partner and
(44:41):
I have been trying to do the same. That said,
listening to Julie kept making me think of my sister.
She did not start her own business technically, but she
did start an amazing charity organization, all while maintaining a
full time job in taking care of her family. When
one of her friends was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she
wanted to find a way to help him and his family,
especially since they had young children at home. He eventually
(45:01):
lost his battle, but my sister took that loss and
turned it into something amazing. She started an organization called
Treasured Time, and their tagline is giving the Gift of Moments. Anyway,
I would love to hear about other ordinary women doing
extraordinary things. I'm so proud of my sister and look
up to her, and it would be amazing to hear
about other such women out there as well. So thank you, Mindy,
(45:21):
And if you have any suggestions of said ordinary women
doing extraordinary things you think we should talk to, let
us know. So I've got a let her hear from
our Gay best Friends episode, which we have been hearing
from a lot of listeners about, especially a lot of
bisexual listeners, including Mark who rights. I'm a buy guy
with a mostly male friend group when I'm not at college.
(45:44):
My high school was not an okay place to be out,
so I pretty much stock to a few guy friends
as a typical straight guy, which was okay for me
because I'm just lucky to be the mostly stereotypically straight
as far as personality and interest. After graduating, I came
out to them and they were all support WATI. Thank
you Internet culture. So I have eight super close relationships
with straight males. Honestly, though, anything involving my sexuality never
(46:08):
comes up. I've only brought it up a couple of times,
and it was pretty awkward, not because they were uncomfortable,
but because no one can relate and no one has
anything on which to comment, so the conversation kind of stops.
My favorite response so far, and one of the reasons
that my friends are awesome was dude, getting some is
getting some. This lack of relatability paradigm has been the
(46:29):
defining factor of my experience in college. Now. As for
a qualm that Mark had with our Gay best Friends podcasts,
he writes, I'm by and it really irked me that
you summed of the description of studies about non straight
males as gay males. No, it does not mean that
in the study probably explicitly used that term to avoid
excluding the wide range of males who are neither gay
(46:51):
nor straight. I definitely understand that being politically correct all
the time is more limiting than beneficial, but please just
be aware of non mainstream sexual all these being ignored
and forgotten is a real issue, and so get again
podcast listeners, we have a request for an episode on
bisexual erasure. So it looks like we're going to have
to do it now that we wouldn't want to anyway,
(47:13):
But we appreciate all of your suggestions letting us know
the things that we need to talk about and that
are on your mind, So keep the ideas and stories coming.
Mom stuff at how stuff works dot com is our
email address and for links to all of our social
media as well as all of our blogs, videos, and
podcast with this one. If you want to learn more
about the fascinating history of fashion modeling, head on over
(47:34):
to stuff Mom Never Told You dot Com were on
those and thousands of other topics because it how stuff
works dot com
Welcome to stuff mom never told you from how stup
Works not come hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Kristen and I'm Caroline and fresh on the heels of
New York Fashion Week. We are doing something I'm kind
of surprised we haven't done before on the podcast, which
is looking at fashion. Yeah, fashion and fashion modeling, so
(00:28):
many loaded issues to talk about. So it's so perfect
for sminty, it really is. And here is the thing
I was not expecting when I set out to research
a history of fashion modeling, just wanting to know how
this whole catwalk thing began when women started being paid
to be clothed hangers essentially, and it was surprisingly hard
(00:52):
to find. Of course, there are all sorts of galleries
and listicles on the Internet of the most famous or
hottest supermodels, but what about the era long before supermodels,
when women began modeling. You it took some digging. It
did take some digging, and actually pre era of women modeling,
(01:12):
it was all about men modeling, and before men modeling,
it was dull modeling. Yeah, all of the digging folks
absolutely worth it. And I first want to call out
the source for a lot of this this early early
history of fashion modeling, which is coming from fashion historian
Caroline Evans in her paper The Ontology of the Fashion Model,
(01:34):
which will have a link to on our website because
the full text is online and you can access it,
and I highly recommend you read it because it is fascinating.
So why don't we start off with looking at the
very word model Because models did not begin as models,
that's right, and so the very word model is derived
(01:56):
from the Latin modelas, but it didn't mean fashion model
or even mathematical model until the twenty century. The first
fashion models were actually called demoiselle de magazine. Yeah, and
so from the eighteen seventies to around nineteen nine they
were first called mannequins, which was derived from the Dutch
(02:18):
word referring to an articulated doll used by artists. And
this use of mannequins to describe these earliest fashion models
was coined by a journalist in eighteen seventy, but writers
used a masculine gender for the words, separating the idea
from the person, and it would have earlier to call
(02:39):
someone a mannequin would have earlier been considered how super
pejorative words suggesting somebody who's empty headed, fashionable, but contemptible,
and it's negative connotations were maintained when it was becoming
used for women who were modeling clothes definitely evoked scorn
(02:59):
in the eight seventies. Evans writes that it comes to
suggest the theme of femininity as a kind of mechanical performance. Yeah. That,
and that refers to another book that she wrote all
about this, called The Mechanical Smile, all about fashion modeling,
and she talks about how the first fashion shows were
thus called mannequin parades. Now sometimes they were referred to
(03:23):
as living models, but it wasn't until really the mid
twentieth century that models became models referred to as models.
And initially the model though referred to the canvas twall,
which was a first stage dress, rather than the person
wearing the dress. So, as you can see, there's all
(03:43):
sorts of objectification constantly going on. If you think about us,
it's almost synecticuly being you know, the person being referred
to for the dress, and the fact that if we
think of mannequins today, you know, well, aside from Kim
Control and the movie Mannequin, and just thinking that usually
inanimate objects. But that's what they were paid to be,
(04:05):
inanimate objects, right, So let's get let's get creepy, let's
stat all creepy. Yeah, we got to talk about the original,
the O G model, which is a doll. These were
the precursors, the predecessors to fashion models, and basically eighteenth
century French dressmakers sent dolls that looked like the person
(04:26):
basically dressed in fancy clothes around Europe, largely because surprise, surprise,
fashionable women themselves really couldn't travel freely, which reflects so
much of the stuff that we talked about in terms
of women and travel in our summer series on women
and Travel last summer. And some could sure houses though
(04:47):
for that reason would make these doll body doubles of
clients to replicate her proportions, in other words, making a
custom mannequin for a woman that they could then build
off of. Sometimes designers would make those house calls. But
if you didn't live, say in downtown Paris, if you
weren't closely accessible to a designer, then yeah, you would
(05:09):
get a doll in the male creepy delivery. Hello, Hello,
and hello Also to the men who were the first
live breathing human models in Paris. Yeah, because men were
free or to parade around public spaces, so naturally they
were the first walking closed advertisements. And it's really started
(05:33):
in the eighteen twenties and only lasted about twenty years.
When Parisian tailors would hire handsome dudes called mannequins. They
really put the man in mannequins to wear their fancy
clothes and then they would just go out to hip
spots in Paris. They would go to the races and
be like, hello, dandies, you like how I'm dressed. I
don't know why I'm not speaking with a French action,
(05:55):
and no one can understand me because I'm also speaking English. Well,
the mannequins were largely looked down upon as posers. Basically
they were wearing nice closure, but they had to give
them back at the end of the day, and they
were described as a man whose profession was to rent
out his body. He had to be elegant enough to
appeal to dandy's but poor enough to require a wage
(06:20):
every day. Yeah, and keep that whole renting your body
out thing in mind, because that's going to come up
a lot in the early perceptions and last team perceptions
really female models in particular. But there was one great
example that Evans mentions in the Ontology of the fashion Model,
which is from an vaudeville performance that features a mannequin
(06:45):
named Hector. And I'm talking again like a fashion model mannequin.
He was also an artist model, but the sky named
Hector who arrives on the stage singing, brilliant model, faithful
me raw, I sparkle with light and fire. I wander
everywhere setting the vocal the new looks in the catalog.
(07:08):
I love it so much. Little Hector to scout tap
dancing and his in his trousers than his velveteen trousers
light and fire. Um, I'm not going to be able
to recover from that all day. Basically, all right, Well,
if we if we moved past Hector the vaudevillian uh,
(07:29):
and we get into the eighteen fifties and sixties, we
see courier Charles Worth, who's credited with being the first
to use actual live breathing, living with blood in their
bodies female fashion models. And he kept it in the
family because his wife, Marie Rene, who was a sales clerk,
she became essentially the chief mannequin CMO Chief Mannequin Officer
(07:52):
and was quite possibly the West's very first fashion model.
And she was just pretty dedicated to her crap. This
woman worked twelve hour days in general, but also through
both of her pregnancies. Yeah. Yeah, it was not easy
to be a mannequin back then, and uh Evans talked
about how this was perhaps feminizing the advertising gimmick first
(08:16):
established by those tailors and their male mannequins um because
they also would send well dressed women out to the
races and other hot spots as well. And Charles Worth
though also instituted the idea of a pre designed collection
rather than dresses made for one woman, and so he
would use living mannequins to show customers the dresses. Yeah,
(08:41):
and so then we get into the eighteen seventies to eighties,
Instead of those designers paying house calls, essentially the aristocratic
women began visiting them. And that's when we see fashion
modeling becoming more widespread because you had those living models
lounging about showing off their weares. And so by the
eighteen eneas in it was common for wealthy women to
(09:02):
just spend their afternoons watching the mannequins at top couturiers
of the time, like Charles Worth. And so that's when
we have this link between modeling and the association with
high end dressmakers, wealthy clientele, the status symbol kind of thing,
although of course there was a vast socio economic gap
(09:23):
between the mannequin and the client. Yeah. And so by
the end of the nineteenth century, the profession had been
thoroughly feminized. Most models were women, although of course at
this point they still weren't called models. They were still
called mannequins because models were associated with the women at
this point who posed for artists, another type of woman
(09:45):
who basically showed off her body for money. Yeah. And
there was just one image that comes to mind that
I saw in the research, which was all these well dressed,
beautifully dressed mannequins who were walking in a in a
very you know, post kind of way, but walking about
in a back lawn somewhere of a lovely estate. And
(10:07):
then you have the wealthy women just sitting around watching them,
seeing how the seeing how the clothes moved. Because that
was another important facet to this was this new found
interest in actually seeing the clothes in motion. That was
probably the appeal of seeing it on a person who
could move around rather than you were personalized doll. So
(10:30):
creepy um. But the working conditions for models at the
time weren't exactly glamorous as you might imagine, because imagine
standing post for a portrait, but for hours, because you'd
essentially have to stand passively while the dressmaker would pull
and prod and poke at you, creating his dress on you,
(10:51):
and while wealthy aristocratic women would come in and pull
and poke and prod it you looking at the dress,
and all this would be happening while wearing an to
ankle black satin mayo or four oh underneath to preserve
modesty and also to protect the gown from getting dirty
and evans sites another source talking about how quote this
(11:14):
denial of the body is also a way of the mannequin,
long despised, living off her body like a prostitute. But
it's interesting to look at culture at large at the
time because in literature and psychology we also get a
lot of fear about doppelgangers, automatons, and the line between
(11:36):
animate and inanimate, live and dead. Yeah, there was a
lot of anxiety um surrounding even these mannequins, and Walter
Benjamin in particular had a fascination with fashion at the time.
You described fashionable women as mimicking the mannequin who enter
history as dead objects. Tell us all you really feel, Walter. Yeah,
(12:00):
And and fashion reporters and just I mean reporters in
general at the time reported these mannequins, these models as
being robotic and doll like well into the twentieth century,
and we see the same thing reflected on catwalks today.
I mean a lot of times, depending on the look
of the designer, models don't necessarily look all that human, right,
(12:23):
But if we go back to those points that we
hit earlier about you know, showing off your body from money,
things like that, these working class women who ended up
being these fashion models were right widely regarded as living objects.
So they were literally objectified, but they were also stigmatized
as being sexually promiscuous, whether you were modeling fashion or
(12:45):
modeling nude for an artist, because you're just you're this
passive body who is making a living wage or maybe
not a living wage by using your body. Yeah, I mean,
you're selling your body. And there was also I mean,
it was fairly common for these women too, I mean,
because they were they had to be attractive, you know,
(13:05):
they were slim and attractive. They were models, and it
was common even back then for them to end up
marrying wealthy men, and that was the way that they
entered society, which of course was looked down upon by
wealthy women who were like, you're nothing more than a mannequin.
Kim control, get out of here. Um. And then we
(13:28):
see in the early twentieth century the models who were
walking in the very first fashion shows having to master
a sliding, undulating walk in order to move in the
tight sheath like dresses that designers were making that also
emphasized their legs in new ways. It's this desire to
preview the clothing in motion. Yeah, because they not only
(13:50):
had to see how the clothes looked, but also had
to learn how to even wear the clothes to move
around in the of Um, there was something uh actually
this was a little bit before those sheath like dresses,
but in the late nineteenth century there was this sort
of a fashion fag called the Grecian Bend, which wrote
(14:14):
about for a blog post on Stuff I've Never Told
You dot com, which essentially was because of the combination
of corsets and bustles and high heels. The only way
to move around was to be bent over. You're literally
waited over by this, and so you have all of
these illustrations of high fashion women at the time tottering
around bent over as if they're looking for lost contacts
(14:36):
on the sidewalk. So we've always been slaves to fashion, yes, yes, absolutely,
except maybe in the loincloth days. Loinecloth seemed pretty low key.
I don't know, Christen, that's really oppressive, yeah, or just breezy,
it's real breezy. Um. But these high end customers were
resistant though, to the rise of ready to wear, as
(14:56):
they could still pay for custom clothing. So keep that
in mine too. As we see this sort of economic
stratification of fashion starting to emerge as modeling then arrives
in the twentieth century in America, and we're shipping sources
to to another influential paper fashioning models, image, text, and industry.
(15:19):
So then we see in the World War One era
more Parisian designers coming state side. You have in nineteen
o eight Lady Duff Gordon opening her first US house
in Manhattan called Lucille, and she's introducing Couturier modeling. She
brought six living mannequins with her to display her work
(15:40):
and gave them exotic sounding names, similar to you know
how women's names are exoticized in brothels or strip clubs. Yeah. Again,
there are so many parallels constantly to modeling and prostitution.
And no, we're not equating the two, but at the time,
I mean, it's just it's just there. Um So in
(16:02):
the nine twenties, though, Duff Gordon's Fashion house becomes the
first to have celebrity models when some of them become
hired for the zig Field folly. So you have Gamella
and other of their Madonna esque fashion models showing up
on these early catwalks in nineteen fifteen, in fact, there
(16:23):
was a transparent catwalk built for a zig Field show. Well,
so you have popular model and Zigfeld performer at Dolores,
which I love that that's like a model name because
I just pictured Dolores like this, a little old lady
with glasses. But anyway, Dolores became known essentially as the
Goddess of clothes. She modeled in Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and
(16:45):
Town and Country, a subscription for which My mother signed
me up unprompted, and I love to flip through it
and just laugh laugh at how I can't afford anything
in that magazine have a town in country subscription. Yeah,
do you want to know? I just love learning these
things about you. It's all Sally Man. She she signed
me up for that. She also signed me up for
(17:05):
the following magazine in eighteen, Vanity Fair, which I never
have time to get through. God help me, reported that
no other woman, speaking of Dolores, had been more widely
posed or photographed. Yeah, so we start to have the
first supermodels, sort of. I mean that that's about as
super as you could get. But in nineteen twenty three,
(17:25):
after we have Dolores and her kind showing up in
Zigfield shows getting a lot of attention, there's an out
of work actor named John Robert Powers who is thinking
about what to do with other underemployed or unemployed theater folk,
and his wife makes an excellent suggestion to join photographers
(17:49):
and create the first modeling agency in the United States.
And John Robert Powers really hits the jackpot with this
idea thanks to the trans position also happening at the
time in the advertising industry where you see a shift
beginning toward photography. Yeah, but you've also got a demand
(18:09):
going on from the ad industry for sanitized female sexuality
to sell goods. This is when we see the development
of this quest for the natural girl, looking clean and
like an upstanding citizen, somebody that you'd want to emulate
with the products. But she's still she's still attractive, and
this is still something that we think of in modeling today,
(18:30):
where it's looking for someone who has the look. What
is the look? At the time, it was sanitized female
sexuality because yeah, I mean female sexuality is terrifying. Well yeah,
and unless it's if it's unsanitized female sexuality right to sanitized,
I'm just thinking of like hand sanitizer all the burning.
(18:53):
But a year later, after John Rbert Power starts up
this first modeling agency in the US in ninety twenty four,
Jeanne Putau hires white American women to sell his clothes
so that customers could more easily identify with them and
in the process of doing this essentially being like models,
(19:14):
they're just like you. It elevates the status of modeling,
making it more of a socially accepted profession. So no
longer are they primarily perceived as prostitutes. There's a little
bit of respectability about it now, so more of something
that you'd want to aspire to. Suddenly, the aristocratic women
(19:34):
buying the fancy clothes want to be like the slim,
beautiful ladies wearing them, as opposed to looking down on
them for being like prostitutes. Well, and we also have
to keep in mind the rise of mass media and
photography at the time. We're seeing these photos of people
like never before as well. And this is also coinciding
with the rise of the earliest celebrity culture in Hollywood developing.
(19:55):
So a lot of forces combining to create this new
beauty culture. So during World War Two, it's interesting to
talk about the images that developed, the models that are used,
the image that designers want to present. Balenciaga, for instance,
showed his clothes on shorter, stockier women to reflect his
(20:17):
real life clientele, and during World War two this look
develops among models that pursues a more ordinary image, more cheerful,
to offset all of the gloom around the austerity during
the war. Yeah, so the war doesn't I mean, it
might take a little bit of attention away from modeling,
(20:37):
but it's still absolutely developing and growing. And so in
ninety seven, do yours Knew Look comes along though, and
it was highly controversial at the time because this is
when we really see fashion moving away from the practical,
and it was not great timing for it, because even
(20:58):
though the war might have been over, there was still
a lot of austerity ripple effects of austerity, particularly in
Europe at the time, and during one of the Oars
shows at this time, a model was physically attacked by
outraged and impoverished onlookers who were saying, how could you
even suggest that we would wear these clothes in a
(21:19):
time like this? But the new look nonetheless created a
whole new look for models. They were sophisticated, They had
haughty eyebrows and groomed hair. In Caroline, I have a
new eyebrow aspiration, and it is for haughty eyebrows. I
like that the eyebrows themselves are haughty. They got real tude.
(21:42):
But yeah, so the top models in New York ended
up adopting the look themselves, and in nineteen four Coco
Chanel's Total Look was modeled on young aristocrats. She looked
out to the people for her inspiration to the wealthy people. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. Well,
and it was kind of a big deal because she
(22:02):
wasn't necessarily tapping say those twelve top models in New
York with the haughty eyebrows, but tapping actual real life aristocrats. Yeah.
And so in the late fifties, do you Or continues
to push the envelope by hiring dark, petite, an inexperienced
model Victoire to coincide with the rise of this new
(22:22):
class of clients for the ready to wear industry and
fashion modeling thus took on a new element of social class,
and a lot of his pre existing clients considered the
hiring of Victoire to be an insult her left bank look,
how dare he? I wonder how haughty her eyebrows were.
I don't know. She had really just like down to
earth eyebrows, and they're like, Nope, not gonna do Victoire.
(22:46):
But it was with this rise of ready to wear
and technological developments of fashion photography that really leads us
into today's modeling industry, because we have things like ready
to wear lying on standardized sizing, and so then you
get that idealized model look because the models had to
(23:07):
be thin enough to fit these specific standardized sample sizes.
And in the nineteen sixties too, when it comes to
fashion photography, you have its availability for the first time
due to technology in newsprint and magazines, bringing high fashion
looks to the masses. It's everywhere, fashionists everywhere, and these
(23:28):
and these high end models can be photographed and become
recognizable faces in all of the in town and country.
For instance, for the I must get those writing booths. Yes, um,
but yeah. So this is when we see like the
development of cult of personality around models. They become more
important for creating looks for their designers campaigns than ever before.
(23:51):
And this really sets the stage for or the catwalk
for high paid supermodels that we see starting around the eighties.
You've got g In Shrimpton. She was the first of
the quote unquote natural models required to market ready to wear,
and she talks about how like, yeah, you know, I
just looked pretty ordinary and that really soul. I of
course she's beautiful. My gosh, thinking of Jeane Shrimpton. Jeane
(24:13):
Shrimpton is anything but ordinary. I have a hair crush
on her, I know, day long. I know, well, but yeah,
she talks about how like I didn't have any sort
of essentially high fashion look. I had a more accessible
Middle America look, and that is what sold. And then
you have nineteen sixty six, Twiggy becomes the first youthful
superstar model. And during this era, though, meanwhile, in the
(24:36):
nineteen sixties, black models were used from time to time,
but they were usually featured as something special, as something exotic,
to borrow a term from a previous episode, and something
that we still see so often today, which we'll get
into more details in just a few minutes. Then in
the nineteen seventies, we have Eileen Ford, famous from Ford
(24:57):
Models scouting, Lauren Hutton's quote humane face and Lauren Hunton's
humane face, which I just love that description, Like what
is the humane face? All right? Lauren Hunton? Beautiful Lauren Hutton.
In nineteen seventy three, she becomes the highest paid model
in his story or her story, earning two d thousand
(25:18):
dollars for twenty days work. So it's a big deal.
I mean, modeling obviously is becoming more and more of
this high pay kind of thing for some people, for
some people, some people, Like three years later, in ninety six,
Margot Hemingway and she topped that previous record with a
one million dollar contract for new new perfumes, so you
(25:38):
could really smell like a million books. And then in
the late seventies and early eighties, we have the arrival
of the supermodel, and this is really reflecting globalization, economic
boom times, and just the general fun times of the era,
because you have this era of the model as a
(25:58):
celebrated commodity. If you want to sell something and you
have twenty dollars that you can spend in one day,
you hire a supermodel because her globalized beauty ideal is
guaranteed to get people's attention and show that you fledgling
brand are with it. That's right. And so in the
context of the time in the late seventies, that's when
(26:20):
we first get twice yearly fashion shows that are happening
in Milan, and this is where models start earning big bucks.
And this really changed fashion and modeling, make it making
it way more accessible through media. People are people are shooting,
photographers are shooting these twice yearly fashion shows. Oh but
can we also quickly mentioned that Milan in the late
(26:41):
seventies and early eighties and probably still today for models
was also just a hotbed of predatory behavior by fashion photographers,
by would be agents, by wealthy men with lots of cocaine.
And there was, I mean, there was a lot of
seed behavior y're going on then and now in terms
(27:02):
of models constantly being taken advantage of and presented with
again mountains of cocaine and other drugs and alcohol, and um,
getting into the industry that way and making a face.
And this is the same face that I was making
the entire time I was reading the article that talked
about the history of this whole not just fashion and
(27:23):
modeling in general, but specifically the high fashion modeling that
was happening around Fashion Weeks and specifically Milan. It's also
freaking creepy. There's a lot of cocaine. There's just a
lot of cocaine, that's right. Um. But if we talk
more about the supermodel specifically, the late eighties recession actually
fueled supermodels becoming these famous consumption objects, making them into
(27:48):
designer and brand status symbols. Basically, if you could afford
or appear to afford a face like Christy Turlington's or
Cindy Crawford's, Caroline Urban's, that's right. Me at five ft
two for your campaign, it would make you appear to
be hipper, hotter, more of an object of desire in
(28:09):
terms of your fashion and what you're selling well. And
at the same time, though, the fact that these specific
faces were known around the world for their sex appeal,
this is something termed visual neo colonialism that's taking place.
It's this globalization of these very specific kinds of beauty standards,
(28:30):
and really too, with the supermodel era, we have models
eroticized more than ever before, and along with that the
whole I mean, there was some truth to it, but
also some mythology of the supermodel making like who was
it who wasn't going to get out of bed for
less than Linda Evangelista? How much would you get out
of bed for for lots of duckets? You have to
(28:53):
have a you have to have like the Scrooge McDuck
swimming pool of gold coins for Evangelista to get out
of bed. And so it also interestingly flips this original
script of models, as these almost a step away from
prostitutes who could only marry into wealth and society too.
Supermodels as self empowered, hotly pursued sex symbols, but even
(29:21):
with the supermodels, even with this visual neo colonialism, which
if the colonialism doesn't tippy off, it's not necessarily a
good thing. Even with all of these factors, it doesn't
mean that for everybody else, everyone who is not an
elite supermodel, that working conditions got any better. Yeah, you're
basically your trade is the way that you look, the
(29:45):
way that your body appears. And for instance, the typical
measurements of models today are sort of out of reach
for a lot of the population. For women, the typical
measurements are being at least five foot nine with a
thirty four inch bust, a twenty four inch waist and
thirty four inch That's so funny. That's that is me
(30:06):
like through a perfect All right, we're kidd were quitting podcasting.
I'm going to be your agent already. The model it's
gonna be great. Um. For men, standard sizing is six
to six ft three with a thirty two inch waist
and a thirty nine to forty inch chest. All right,
So I mean so yeah, so you have to fit
this very specific body type. But you can't just have
(30:30):
the measurements. That won't cut it. You have to have
the personality, the reputation beyond the job performance, the look
that elusive look, a humane face perhaps like Lauren Hutton
and Michael Gross was the one who wrote about the
gross sorry uh stuff going on in the modeling industry,
like at fashion shows in his book Model, The Ugly
(30:51):
Business of Beautiful Women, and he talks about this whole
practice of agents trying to lure models to another agency
and it's disgusting because it's actually makes them sound like
just I mean, they're just live stock being sold back
and forth, which is what he says. He says that
they're sold for bounties and it is a thriving trade.
Oh yeah, there was a documentary I don't know if
(31:12):
it's still on Netflix, but it was called girl Model
Tracking these Eastern European Girls, I mean, because a lot
of times you're scouted when you're fourteen years old, and
it follows a couple of these Eastern European girls in
their quest for super model edom. And one of them,
(31:33):
for instance, is sent to a job in Japan, but
she the agency isn't just sending her there. She actually
comes back from the shoot in debt because the agency
was picking up the tab until she could pay them back,
it said, it's it's a scheezy business a lot of
the times. Yeah, and that's described as essentially these models
(31:53):
becoming like indentured servants to their agencies. And it's a
stuff that Sarah Zif, a form model herself, is trying
to target through the Model Alliance. She says that there's
not enough protection for these young girls who are being
asked to lose weight, to pose nude unexpectedly sometimes, and
to work all hours. Yeah, and this has to do
(32:14):
with flimsy child labor laws. I mean, they're kind of
all over the place. There's been a lot of focus
in particular on child labor laws in New York City
just because of fashion weeks there. Um, and there are
things in place in terms of according to New York law,
if you are a model under eighteen, you have to
have say, um time designated for school work and you
(32:37):
can only work X amount of hours. But during fashion week,
all of that goes out the window, and sometimes beyond
fashion week, because if you are so hotly pursuing this industry,
you're gonna do things that probably do violate these child
labor laws. Yeah, but then we also see how using
these underage models affects the industry, the look, and older
(33:00):
models and women in general, because the thing is, when
you're using a girl who's fourteen years old, she's pretty small,
she hasn't hit puberty yet, she doesn't have hips, boobs
a waste. And this is coming from the same Nation
article that talked about the model alliance. But basically, a
model used to weigh eight percent less than the average woman,
and now it's twenty three percent less. And this ends
(33:22):
up putting a lot of pressure on these young girls
not to grow up. They're being told, well, you've got
to lose weight, and it's like, how do I lose
weight when I'm just getting boobs? And it also puts
a lot of pressure on the older models to starve
themselves and try to attain this look of young girls. Yeah,
I mean you can't. It's almost it seems to have
a shorter lifespan a lot of times than that of
(33:43):
a professional athlete. And I want this statistic to ring
clear to any girl listening who's interested in model, who
wants to grow up to become a model, any parent
who has a daughter who really wants to grow up
to be a model. The average income for a model
these days is thirty two thou dollars with zero benefits,
(34:06):
and a lot of times what you get paid for
or what what you get paid on a shoot is clothes.
You just get to keep your clothes. You're like, you're
like one of the mannequins in the eighteen twenties of
the Parisian horse races, except you actually get to keep
the clothes at the end of the day. And a
lot of times, reflecting how freelance work in general has
influenced our overall economy, contract work is largely replaced full
(34:30):
time gigs post recession. So oh man, and I know
some of these girls who desperately want to be models
because they've been elevated to these positions of the you know,
ultimate beauty symbols, and it's I mean it's it's it's
a dead end. A lot of times it is a
(34:51):
dead end. I mean it's it's almost impossible. You'd have
better chances winning lottery than becoming a Heidi Clue who
not only was a successful mom adele, but parlayed that
career into TV shows, clothing lines, all sorts of amazing stuff,
married seal. There you go. You'd have to yeah, with
the chances of marrying seal. We want to know what
(35:12):
are those chances. But even even with regardless of the
low pay, you still have issues of consent When it
comes to modeling. Six percent of fashion models have been
asked to pose nude without prior notice, either contractually or informally.
In twenty of them felt pressure to comply in order
to keep their jobs. Hence fourteen year old brook Shields
(35:34):
posing naked in a bathtub and then having to go
through that entire legal fight with that fashion photographer to
try to get those photographs back, which I mean, and
that was before the Internet. I mean it would be
impossible now. And former model Patricia sale Beltran wrote about
this in a two thousand four paper about models feeling
(35:55):
alienated from their own look, their own image, their own body.
She says that being a successful model means obtaining the
official degree certificate in beauty, certifying normative compliance and social acceptability.
These girls and women are expected to project this incredible
self confidence that makes us as the norm e's want
(36:16):
to buy those clothes, want to aspire to look like
them and be like them. But they're being paid like
actresses to look that way, and so really when you
dig deeper, you find these girls who are literally in
figuratively starving for help, and they're relying on managers and agents.
They're insecure, desperately insecure about their physique and maintaining it,
(36:39):
and by that point they've wrecked their own health to
achieve it. And we also need to talk about diversity,
because modern modeling has promoted a nearly exclusive ideal of white, slim,
cis gender heterosexual beauty ideals. And this is important because
(37:00):
model culture does reflect our collective feelings towards things like class, nationality, race,
social mobility, gender, proficiency, power, wealth. I mean, it's an
aspirational look that we're going for, and the aspiration has
in many ways still is very limited. Yeah, And so
(37:22):
when you get women of color modeling, they're often portrayed
as an exotic or ethnic accessory, or they're a musician
or an athlete or a celebrity, or they're just viewed
as an object of pity. And even during the Supermodel Heyday,
Naomi Campbell was not getting as many contracts even still
as her white supermodel counterparts. And progress has been so
(37:45):
slow and remain problematic in terms of um women of
color in modeling context. So but quickly, just to show
how short of a timeline we're even working with for
black women and women of color to even have any
space in the modeling industry. It wasn't until the mid
(38:06):
nineties sixties that Danielle Luna becomes the first black supermodel.
And chances are you probably haven't even heard of her,
I mean her, She was unfamiliar to me at the time,
and the New York magazine article about her initially highlighted
that of like, hey, you probably don't know this, I
mean partially because possibly because she died of a drug
(38:26):
overdose at thirty three. Yeah, she became in nineteen sixty
six British vogues first black cover model, and this is
during a time when the magazine world really wasn't ready
for photographing beautiful black women. According to that article, and
a fellow model was quoted as saying, and this is important,
especially in light of the episode we did on the
(38:47):
exotistization of women of color. But she said that no
one looked like her. She was really like an extraordinary species. Yeah.
And Luna preferred to live in Europe with her husband
and their daughter, and she also didn't like to claim
she was black, she was far likelier to call herself
mulatta or mixed. Yeah, and eight years later, in nineteen
(39:10):
seventy four, Beverly Johnson, who is more of a household name,
became the first black model in the cover of American Vogue,
eight years though between Danielle and Beverly, and this had
to do with the fact that black models didn't become
more commonly seen until the seventies. This was partially fueled
(39:31):
by the Blackest Beautiful movement um but it was also
cute apparently by this nineteen seventy three event called the
Battle of Versailles, which was a fashion face off between
American and French designers, and Americans were praised for employing
eight black models. It's interesting looking back at the nineteen
sixty nine Life magazine feature which had Naomi Sims on
(39:54):
its cover with the headline black models take center Stage,
and it had a centerfold with many many black models
declaring black is busting out all over. But it doesn't
seem like that. Actually that ball kept rolling, Yeah yeah,
I mean even today. For example, it wasn't until that
(40:15):
a black model, Veronica Webb, landed a contract with a
major cosmetics company Revlon, and even today thinking about who
our cover girls are, a lot of times they are white.
I mean, you do have today more of the celebrity
faces Halle Berry, Lupute and Yango, Queen Latifa, who are
you know getting these cosmetic contracts, but it's still fewer
(40:39):
and farther between. And then if we look at high
fashion though and diversity on the catwalk today, because the
inspiration for this podcast came from New York Fashion Week,
the awareness of a need for diversity is there, but
the action is still lacking. Yeah. So Jezebel wrote about
this in terms of New York Fashion Week for Fall winter,
(41:02):
and they point out that more than seventy eight of
the models were white, although it is less common for
designers to use all white casts. But even that doesn't
really matter because they totally seem to be skating by
on some token system. Well, we have one Asian girl
and one black girl. That's fine, right, And this is
something echoed by model Chanel Iman. She says, a few
(41:24):
times I got excused by designers who told me we
already found one black girl, we don't need you anymore.
And it's echoed by fellow model Jordan Donne who said
I'm normally told I'm canceled because I'm colored. So being
canceled because of my boobs is a minor thing. Yeah,
I mean, and you think that, oh, well, what does
(41:45):
it matter. I mean, that's high end fashion representation. It
does matter because again today modeling culture and what we
consider beautiful and how these women are posed in advertisements
and in fashion features, it does reflect what we think
of as being worthy of aspiration and even of eroticizing.
(42:07):
It is a cycle. Designers pick up on what they
think is part of the zeitgeist, what they think is
hip and cool and the best representation for their clothes,
and then we look to those images and say, okay,
well what's pretty, what's beautiful? Do I want to be
a model? Do I look like them? And also to
thinking about how they're posed because even still, I mean,
we're focusing more on like catwalk fashion, but if you
(42:30):
look in fashion magazines, it is highly problematic that a
lot of times women of color are still portrayed in
in the way that Danielle Luna was described as an
exotic species. They are often still exotic size rather than
simply being models. So I mean it really seems like
(42:51):
if we're looking to the modeling industry to be our
bell weather of women's empowerment, we're probably going to be
waiting forever because the entire our industry has been built
on the outright literal objectification of women, literal literal mannequins. So,
and this goes from men too. We haven't talked about
(43:12):
male modeling except for Hector on the stage. You have
brilliant light. But I mean it was this was an
eye opener for me. I mean, it's it's easy to
see that that fashion has some probable metica house books
as a lay person, but when you dig into the
history it gets pretty intense. Well yeah, those problematic aspects
are built into the foundation of modeling as we see
(43:35):
it today. Yea. So I really want to hear from
listeners on this, especially if you are at all associated
with a fashion industry or just interested in fashion in general.
Sort of how do you reconcile all of these things
and is it getting better? Let us know mom Stuff
at house stuff works dot Com is our email address.
You can also tweet us at mom stuff podcasts or
messages on Facebook, and we've got a couple of messages
(43:57):
to share with you right now. I have a letter
here from Mindy responding to our Not Your Average Period
Panties episode with Julie Seigel. She writes, as an entrepreneur
myself just starting out, it was very inspiring. I loved
hearing about how Julie got started and how she grew.
(44:18):
I've come across many challenges myself, such as constantly being
being ignored by men at multiple small business development centers
until my male cousin, who also works for an SBDC,
would ask them to talk to my business partner in me.
So it was helpful to hear how she was able
to make her company work and focus not on being
a female entrepreneur but just an entrepreneur. My partner and
(44:41):
I have been trying to do the same. That said,
listening to Julie kept making me think of my sister.
She did not start her own business technically, but she
did start an amazing charity organization, all while maintaining a
full time job in taking care of her family. When
one of her friends was diagnosed with terminal cancer, she
wanted to find a way to help him and his family,
especially since they had young children at home. He eventually
(45:01):
lost his battle, but my sister took that loss and
turned it into something amazing. She started an organization called
Treasured Time, and their tagline is giving the Gift of Moments. Anyway,
I would love to hear about other ordinary women doing
extraordinary things. I'm so proud of my sister and look
up to her, and it would be amazing to hear
about other such women out there as well. So thank you, Mindy,
(45:21):
And if you have any suggestions of said ordinary women
doing extraordinary things you think we should talk to, let
us know. So I've got a let her hear from
our Gay best Friends episode, which we have been hearing
from a lot of listeners about, especially a lot of
bisexual listeners, including Mark who rights. I'm a buy guy
with a mostly male friend group when I'm not at college.
(45:44):
My high school was not an okay place to be out,
so I pretty much stock to a few guy friends
as a typical straight guy, which was okay for me
because I'm just lucky to be the mostly stereotypically straight
as far as personality and interest. After graduating, I came
out to them and they were all support WATI. Thank
you Internet culture. So I have eight super close relationships
with straight males. Honestly, though, anything involving my sexuality never
(46:08):
comes up. I've only brought it up a couple of times,
and it was pretty awkward, not because they were uncomfortable,
but because no one can relate and no one has
anything on which to comment, so the conversation kind of stops.
My favorite response so far, and one of the reasons
that my friends are awesome was dude, getting some is
getting some. This lack of relatability paradigm has been the
(46:29):
defining factor of my experience in college. Now. As for
a qualm that Mark had with our Gay best Friends podcasts,
he writes, I'm by and it really irked me that
you summed of the description of studies about non straight
males as gay males. No, it does not mean that
in the study probably explicitly used that term to avoid
excluding the wide range of males who are neither gay
(46:51):
nor straight. I definitely understand that being politically correct all
the time is more limiting than beneficial, but please just
be aware of non mainstream sexual all these being ignored
and forgotten is a real issue, and so get again
podcast listeners, we have a request for an episode on
bisexual erasure. So it looks like we're going to have
to do it now that we wouldn't want to anyway,
(47:13):
But we appreciate all of your suggestions letting us know
the things that we need to talk about and that
are on your mind, So keep the ideas and stories coming.
Mom stuff at how stuff works dot com is our
email address and for links to all of our social
media as well as all of our blogs, videos, and
podcast with this one. If you want to learn more
about the fascinating history of fashion modeling, head on over
(47:34):
to stuff Mom Never Told You dot Com were on
those and thousands of other topics because it how stuff
works dot com
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Cardiac Cowboys
The heart was always off-limits to surgeons. Cutting into it spelled instant death for the patient. That is, until a ragtag group of doctors scattered across the Midwest and Texas decided to throw out the rule book. Working in makeshift laboratories and home garages, using medical devices made from scavenged machine parts and beer tubes, these men and women invented the field of open heart surgery. Odds are, someone you know is alive because of them. So why has history left them behind? Presented by Chris Pine, CARDIAC COWBOYS tells the gripping true story behind the birth of heart surgery, and the young, Greatest Generation doctors who made it happen. For years, they competed and feuded, racing to be the first, the best, and the most prolific. Some appeared on the cover of Time Magazine, operated on kings and advised presidents. Others ended up disgraced, penniless, and convicted of felonies. Together, they ignited a revolution in medicine, and changed the world.