Read Online Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women by Michael Gross - Free Book Online

first model was Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the bohemian society matron. His photographs were mysterious, a bit stiff, but always extravagant.
    Meanwhile, in 1913 the publisher William Randolph Hearst bought a magazine called Bazar —the second a was added in 1929—and retooled it as an elite fashion magazine. In 1918 Hearst lured De Meyer from Vogue with a higher salary and a promise of work in Paris. The baron’s move began a fashion war between Bazaar and Vogue that has lasted the rest of the century. The next year Hearst’s newspapers announced—prematurely—the demise of Nast’s British Vogue . Chase complains in her autobiography, Always in Vogue , that Hearst poached her stars “with money often beyond their worth and beyond what Condé was willing to pay.”
    The fashion runway that supermodels now prowl likely came into being at a trade exhibition held in Chicago in 1914—the first recorded instance of a catwalk being built out into the audience to afford a good view of the clothes. Vogue organized its first fashion show in New York that year, too, and advertised publicly for models. “They beat our doors down,” Chase said. “The following year, mannequins started to become an important factor in the American fashion scene.” By 1924 French fashion designers had heard the call. Jean Patou decided to recruit in America and held the first model search, finding, among others, Dinarzade, aka Lillian Farley, and Edwina Prue, who was just seventeen. In 1931 Prue married Leo D’Erlanger, an English banker, who later saved Condé Nast from bankruptcy.
    Slowly, fashionable magazines began moving away from their first models, actors like Marion Davies, dancers like Isadora Duncan (who posed for Steichen at the Parthenon in a Grecian tunic), and celebrated women like Mrs. Whitney. When Vogue next had a fashion show, it imported two professionals, Hebe and Dolores, from the salon of the English designer Lady Duff Gordon, who worked as Lucile. Models in houses like Lucile and Poiret were already marketing themselves with single names, but that may have been because they were considered disreputable, one step above courtesans. Their clandestine affairs with rich aristocrats were the subjects of alternately horrified and fascinated whispers in polite society.
    Vera Ashby worked as head model in the Molyneux couture salon. She went by the exotic name Sumurum. “Modeling was considered very fast and loose in France,” she recalled. “We were not received in society. I used to have four or five boys after me at a time. The Comte-de-this and the Vicomte-de-that. Whatever mannequin or young woman was fashionable at the time, they always wanted her.” But designers still treated them in a second-class manner. “Do not speak to the girls,” Poiret would say. “They are not there.”
    That soon changed. A whole new fashion business had sprung up between the high-priced couturiers of Paris and mere manufacturers of clothing for Everyman and -woman. It made dresses magazines could “cover.” Powers was already positioned to provide models to wear the dresses. All that was missing was class, and the courtly gentlemen photographers of the era were there to provide it, even as they effected a silent coup d’état against the ruling elite of illustrators.
    Edward Steichen joined Vogue , replacing De Meyer as chief photographer and De Meyer’s florid style with something crisper. Steichen’s favorite model was Marion Morehouse, who later married the poet e. e. cummings. She “was no more interested in fashion than I was,” Steichen said. “But when she put on the clothes that were to be photographed, she transformed herself into a woman who really would wear … whatever the outfit was.” Condé Nast, still smarting perhaps from the loss of De Meyer, told Steichen, “Every woman De Meyer photographs looks like a model. You make every model look like a woman.”
    De Meyer’s career went into decline. Fired by