Supermodel Superstar

Of course fashion is fun and a little tamasha is enjoyed by all. But I’m mourning the demise of the most wonderful thing in the fashion business: the supermodel. Not too many fashion weeks ago,models made news. The still-lovely Mehr Jessia was the penultimate model; her aloofness was much imitated. Anna Bredmeyer rocked the runway like a pole dancer in a sari. The Madhu Sapre-Milind Soman romance was far sexier then than the Saif-Kareena romance now. And Malaika Arora — all of five feet and two inches — filled our heads with naughty thoughts. Jessie Randhawa is a leopardess; Diandra Soares breaks every preconceived notion of beauty and forms a new one; Sheetal Mallar is liquid chocolate on stage and Bhawna Sharma teases the photographers with her almost-illegal pout.

But none of these beauties finds themselves being celebrated by either the industry or the fashion press. Now a model must hang herself off a fan (or partake of the reality-TV pie) to be interesting to editors.

In 1991,Linda Evangelista told Vogue magazine,“We (Christy Turlington and her) don’t wake up for less than ten thousand dollars a day”. It became the most oft-quoted statement in fashion,signifying the ultra decadent lives of models and fashion designers.

But this was not always so. Just two years before Linda said this,runway models were paid up to 1000 dollars a show and treated like cattle. It was Gianni Versace and his celeb-mad sister Donatella who invented the supermodel phenomenon by bringing campaign models like Linda,Christy and Naomi Campbell to the runway. He began paying them up to 50,000 dollars per show,flew them in Concordes,put them up in big suites in five-star hotels and gave them bagfuls of free clothes. (His competitor Giorgio Armani was annoyed by this; he once fired Iman from his show because she took the attention away from his clothes).

While we gawk at our superstars in real-life,our models need to be treated a little ‘super’ too. After all,we may like to see Katrina Kaif in the flesh but she won’t make me want to buy the lehenga the way Indrani Dasgupta can. (namratanow@gmail.com)