Advertising was only a few decades old. Commercial photography was a bit younger than that. At the turn of the century a Chicago photographer named Beatrice Tonneson may have been the first to use live female models in an advertisement. Powers was in on the ground floor with a better mousetrap—a classic American success story. Illustrators like James Montgomery Flagg, J. C. Leyendecker, and Howard Chandler Christy still ruled the commercial roost and would stay key Powers clients into the 1940s. Even they had started using cameras to shoot pictures of models and draw from them, instead of from life. It took only a second to snap a picture. Previously they’d had to pay a model to sit and pose for hours. But this was their last hurrah. Magazines were starting to use photography regularly, and advertisers were following suit. The bookings started pouring in, and Powers took 10 percent of each one.
The 1929 stock market crash and the Depression that followed changed everything. Only for Powers did things change for the better. He began attracting debutantes whose families were suddenly short on cash. “I was in high school in 1929,” says Betty McLauchlen Dorso, eighty-two, who became one of Powers’s top models. “I wanted to be a gym teacher, a coach. But it was during the Depression, and my father, like every male in the country, lost his job.” When McLauchlen was laid off from his designer’s post with Cadillac, he bought his daughter a cloche and fur-collared coat and took her to be photographed by a friend who’d shot advertisements for the luxury cars. The photographer posed her on a revolving platform and sent her picture to Powers, who called the dark-haired, sophisticated beauty in for an interview.
“There was only the one agency,” Dorso recalls. “I went in on a Saturday and I registered and he sent me off into the night. I didn’t know anything about the business. You had to pound the pavement in those days,” and stop at the agency each day to check in. “I finally found a job at Henri Bendel, modeling on the floor. It was then a wealthy women’s boutique. I was paid thirty-two dollars and seventy-five cents a week, and five dollars extra for decorating the windows.” She had worked there several years, supporting her whole family by showing clothes to customers, when a Vogue editor spotted her and asked if she would pose for a young woman photographer named Toni Frissell, who’d started working for the magazine after assisting the British photographer Cecil Beaton. Dorso began working for Frissell regularly. “Then I actually started functioning with Powers,” Dorso says. “I really wanted to be a gym teacher, but I happened to have the looks that got me this lucrative life.”
An important psychological divide had been crossed when Powers moved to his Park Avenue address. No longer would models—at least his models—be considered on a par with show girls. Those raffish sorts were booked out of the west side of Manhattan, the theater district, the Tenderloin. Fashion models came from higher-priced districts. In part because of the geographical divide, Seventh Avenue showroom models who worked the garment district as well as commercial models and runway mannequins would sit below photographic models in the model pecking order for another fifty years.
With a showman’s flair, Powers even invented a symbol to differentiate his models from all the others. When a Powers girl broke the handle of the satchel in which she lugged around the tools of her trade—her pumps, her waist cinch, her war paints and brushes—Powers replaced the bag with a strong round cardboard hatbox from John Cavanagh, where he bought his headgear. The boxes sold for fifty cents apiece and became the badge of honor of the Powers model.
As the business expanded, Powers moved into larger quarters, installed direct telephone lines to Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and the major catalog studios, and even hired a promotion man. “I was an unemployed actor, kicking around Broadway just like Johnny was,” recalls Bob Fertig, eighty-two. “One of the guys in the crowd said he’d been to a place called Powers, and they wanted to put him to work delivering pictures. I said I could use a few bucks. There were a lot of beautiful broads around him.”
Powers was looking for a label that would differentiate his beauties from the earlier Gibson Girls (the last century’s ideal) and the Ziegfeld Girls of the stage. “We avoided using the word ‘model,’” Fertig recalls. “Women with no means of visible support called themselves models. People thought of them as empty-headed floozies.”
Finally Powers decided to call them “Long-Stemmed American Beauties,” a phrase coined by illustrator Arthur William Brown. “What I seek above all else is a natural wholesomeness,” Powers said. “I do not want types, nor do I want sophistication. I want girls or women who will look like what the advertisers want them to look like, and it is not an easy thing to find. Pretty girls, yes, but not models.”
Though he continued booking men (including the young Fredric March, Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, and Brian Donlevy), he would ever after be known for his Powers Girls. Over the years the agency’s list included top models like Anita Colby, Helen Bennett, Kay Hernan, and Muriel Maxwell. Better known today are the models turned actresses: Jennifer Jones, Gene Tierney, Barbara Stanwyck, Lucille Ball, Joan Caulfield, Jean Arthur, Ava Gardner, Lauren Bacall, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, Joan Blondell, and Paulette Goddard.
Powers Girls who didn’t go Hollywood often stayed in the public eye as the wives of the millionaires who pursued them as avidly as they had the show girls of earlier generations. From the first, model agents have maintained a sideline in informal matchmaking. Bachelors were said to shop the Powers catalog for dates, just as rock stars later browsed the books from Ford and Elite. Woolworth Donahue, Marshall Hemingway, Winthrop Gardiner, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Jack Chrysler, Earl E. T. Smith, Rutherford Stuyvesant Pierrepont, Jr., Count Rodolfo Crespi of Rome, Stanley Rumbough, Jr., and Dan Topping all married Powers Girls. “Sometimes it seems to me that instead of a modeling agency, what I’m running is a matrimonial agency for millionaires,” Powers boasted.
By 1935 Powers and a handful of other New York agents were running stables that contained a total of about two hundred working models, most of them women. Most of them earned about $25 per week. Some commanded $75. And a few, perhaps ten, who had signed exclusive deals with advertisers, took home as much as $100 a week.
Powers made his reputation with high-fashion models, but his business was actually much broader. “One girl would specialize in hats,” says Bob Fertig. “Another did junior modeling and could adapt for cosmetics. Powers did pulp magazine pictures, too. He’d say, ‘If there’s a buck in it, I’ll do it.’ Wherever you had a pretty girl, a dog, and a baby, you had the potential for a publicity picture.” Powers drew the line only at nudes and ads for underwear, depilatories, deodorants, and bathing suits, calling them “objectionables” and demanding extra pay for models who agreed to do them.
It was only a matter of time before competition sprang up. As early as 1929 Walter Thornton announced the opening of a new model agency. Claiming he’d been an orphan, a delivery truck driver, a bricklayer, a shipping clerk, a sculpture student, and an underage enlistee in the Army before beginning to model professionally, Thornton promoted himself as the perfect male type. He’d had fifteen hundred plaster casts of his head made for illustrators to use while he posed for photographers. As an agent he styled himself a “Merchant of Venus.”
Fashion modeling had actually existed for more than three hundred years when John Robert Powers “invented” it. Women wore important clothes in paintings by artists like Van Eyck, Rembrandt, Goya, Sargent, and Whistler. The first recorded instances of models’ selling fashion involved wooden dolls dressed in miniature versions of couture—or hand-sewn—clothes that were sent in the seventeenth century to wealthy dress buyers in the capitals of Europe. By the mid-eighteenth century the first fashion magazines had appeared, showing the work of royal seamstresses like Rose Bertin, a favorite at the court of Versailles. Le Costume Français and Journal des Dames et des Modes contained early fashion plates. The first known fashion photographs as such were probably taken in Paris around 1840 in Charles Reutlinger’s Maison Reutlinger studios o
n Boulevard Montmartre. In England David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson photographed Lady Mary Ruthven in the fashions of 1845.
The first true model came along soon thereafter. Marie Vernet started out as a salesgirl in a Paris clothes shop, Gagelin et Opigez. In 1852 she married a salesman named Charles Worth and became his house model when he opened Worth, the first “designer” couture salon, in 1858. When she approached the Austrian ambassador’s wife, Pauline de Metternich, and sold her two crinolines, her husband’s fortunes were assured. He went on to dress Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III. Inspired by his wife, Worth pioneered the use of live models in selling his haute couture designs.
The first photographic model of any accomplishment was the Countess of Castiglione, a Tuscan noblewoman at the court of Napoleon III. In 1856 a book of 288 photographs of her by Adolphe Braun displayed her renowned style and wardrobe. She even demurely raised her skirts to show off her shoes.
Technology made photographic modeling something more than a dilettante’s avocation. The halftone process that allows photographs to be printed on the same page as type was patented in 1881 and refined throughout the proceeding decade. In 1892 La Mode Practique was the first to use halftones to show fashion. A few years later John Robert Powers was born in the farm town of Easton, Pennsylvania, the son of an engineer. As he grew up, worked as a newspaperboy, attended local schools, and caught the acting bug, other key figures were coming onstage as well—all over the map. Adolphe de Meyer was born in Paris in 1868 (as Adolphe Meyer Watson). Edward Steichen was born eleven years later in Luxembourg. Louise Dahl-Wolfe was born in San Francisco in 1895. Baron George Hoyningen-Huene was born in Leningrad in 1900. The four were pioneers of fashion photography.
At first their subjects were actresses and aristocrats whose names were known to at least some of the public and who were sometimes given the clothes they wore as compensation for posing. Steichen, for example, shot a portrait of the wife of a swell named Condé Nast in 1907. Two years later Nast, an ambitious young man from Peoria, bought Vogue magazine. Two years after that Steichen took what he later modestly claimed were “the first serious fashion photographs ever taken.”
Paul Poiret, a Parisian haute couturier, had used his wife, Denise, as his muse and model and had hired others to stage fashion shows on a barge on the Seine. In 1911 Arts et Décoration commissioned thirteen Steichen photographs of Poiret dresses for an article on “The Art of the Dress.” His models were not great beauties. But Poiret became a patron of fashion photographers and models, and the visual quality of his cabine—his private group of models—improved with time.
Ten years later, when Man Ray, the American surrealist, arrived in Paris during the summer fashion shows there, he met Poiret and photographed some of his Orientalist designs. In Man Ray’s autobiography, Self Portrait, he remembers his first meeting with Poiret’s models: “They were beautiful girls … moving about nonchalantly in their scanty chemises, stockings and high-heeled shoes…. I tried to look as if I did not see anything. The girls were cool, almost forbidding. All except one black-haired, wide-eyed girl…. She, too, was from New York, studying singing and making her way by modeling.” She agreed to pose for him and said she hoped the photos would be published in a fashion magazine. In fact, they became monuments in the history of photography: Man Ray’s first “Rayographs.” He stumbled upon the process when his darkroom door was accidentally opened while he was making contact prints of the American model.
Baron de Meyer, an admirer of Whistler, Sargent, and Europe’s great court painters, had started working for Vogue in New York in 1913, earning $100 a week as the world’s first full-time fashion photographer. He’d dropped his original last name when, despite his homosexuality, he married a woman reputed to be the illegitimate daughter of Britain’s Edward VII. “There was always a slight air of mystery about him,” said Vogue’s then editor, Edna Woolman Chase, who remembered him as “Von” Meyer. His 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 Bazaar’s new editor, Carmel Snow, in 1932, De Meyer went to Vogue and begged for his job back. “He seemed wasted somehow and his gray hair, which had given him an elegant air, was dyed bright blue,” Chase recalled. Unfortunately for the baron, he “was now known as a Bazaar personality. Also his work was sadly passé.” Steichen had just taken the first color fashion photograph and the first photographic Vogue cover! Forgotte
n, Baron Adolphe de Meyer “wandered into the night-dark of opium and cocaine,” according to a Condé Nast history of fashion photography, and ended a broken man. He died in Los Angeles in 1949.
Fashion is a vicious business. Long before De Meyer died, another baron had come on the fashion scene, ready to replace him, and this time his social position was unquestionable. George Hoyningen-Huene moved to Paris in 1923 to work at his sister’s fashion house as a sketch artist. Born in 1900 in St. Petersburg, he was the grandson of an envoy to a past czar of Russia and the son of the chief equerry to the last czar. Hoyningen-Huene’s mother was a product of Grosse Point, Michigan. The family fled prerevolutionary Russia for London in 1916. After World War I Hoyningen-Huene went to Paris. In 1925 he was working as a background designer for the new French edition of Vogue when he collaborated with Man Ray on a photo spread. After seeing it, Main Bocher, who was French Vogue’s editor before he became the designer Mainbocher, decided that the baron could take fashion photographs. A modernist like Steichen and a homosexual, like many of his other contemporaries Hoyningen-Huene was far more interested in the photograph than in the girl who posed for it and considered his models “nothing more than clothes-horses.” He was more polite than Cecil Beaton, who joined Vogue in 1926. He called models “silly cows.”
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 5