The photographs appeared in December. Her school friends were blase. “I hung around with punk rock kids at home, wore black all the time, this totally antifashion thing,” she says. “What I was doing was totally ridiculous to my friends.” But it was incredibly exciting to her. “I was so naïve.” Christy moans. “I sent family Christmas cards to the editors I’d worked with. Like they were my new friends.”
It would be another year before Christy’s parents allowed her to move to New York on her own, but she was already a working model. She transferred to a professional school that would accommodate her frequent absences as she became a regular commuter between San Francisco and New York, always staying at Eileen Ford’s notoriously strict house-cum-model-dormitory. Ford insisted that Turlington stay until she turned eighteen. She still promoted herself as a paragon of virtue. “Who’s to teach these children values if we don’t?” she asked.
Christy sneaked out. “I was wired in that house,” she boasts. “I’d go out all the time, to Palladium, Area. I’d hide a T-shirt downstairs so that if Eileen woke up, I’d be able to say I couldn’t sleep and I’d gone downstairs to get a glass of milk. I knew every stair that creaked. I used to smoke and drink beer and champagne in my room.”
In December 1986 she quit school and moved into a loft in New York’s SoHo. It shared an entrance with one occupied by Eileen Ford’s daughter, Katie. “I had a suitcase of clothes, I got a little kitten, and Katie put a bed in my room,” Christy says. “That was all I had.” A few weeks later her parents arrived with sheets and a TV.
As Turlington was getting started as a model, the unprofessionals of Bitten Knudsen’s day were on their way out. “The girls are getting rich, so rich,” says fashion editor Polly Mellen, who recalls Kim Alexis casually saying that she was buying an $800,000 apartment. “Yeee gods!” says Mellen. “We’re getting into real stardom.”
In many ways Paulina Porizkova set the stage for Christy’s success. Paulina was born in 1965 in Prostejov, Czechoslovakia. Growing up, she never gave fashion a thought. “Are you kidding?” She laughs. “In Czechoslovakia?” But there was one fashion she wanted desperately: a Communist insignia. “I was dying to be a Pioneer,” she says. “Those are the ones wearing the little red scarves. You can’t become a Pioneer until fourth grade. I was in a pregroup. I was brainwashed. I was Red from my toes to my head.”
Her mother, a teenage secretary, and her father, a truck driver (who says Paulina was actually “kind of an anti-Communist, but a little punk, really”), split for Sweden on a motorbike during the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia, leaving Paulina with a grandmother. When the Czechs threatened to put the child up for adoption, her mother returned, disguised, to rescue her. But on her way to rescue Paulina, she was arrested for speeding, and her true identity was uncovered. Paulina’s mother spent the next six years in jail and under house arrest. Meanwhile in Sweden Paulina became a Cold War symbol. “Poor political little baby,” she says. “Pictures of me hugging my teddy bears saying, ‘I want to see my mummy and daddy.’”
Paulina Porizkova photographed by Marco Glaviano
Finally the Porizkovas were expelled from Czechoslovakia. “We were too famous to just bump off,” Paulina believes. “Our aunt and her husband took us to the border of Austria. There was this long, tall figure: my father, who I basically didn’t know. Unbelievable, you know?” Paulina’s voice quavers as her story continues. Her father no longer comes up. “I had an awful time because I was a famous political refugee,” she says. “I felt terribly sad and everybody told me how ugly I was and my mother was having a nervous breakdown.”
Together with a friend who dreamed of being a photographer, Paulina escaped into fantasy. “We copied Estée Lauder ads. We would put me in the foreground and a vase with some old flowers in it and shoot it with a Kodak Instamatic.” Her girlfriend sent their photos to a modeling school owner who took Paulina to Copenhagen to see John Casablancas. A month later, in 1980, she was an Elite model in Paris. “It was the biggest whack of freedom I ever got.” she says. She wore her TOO DRUNK TO FUCK T-shirt out dancing at night and got up every morning and worked. “When you’re fifteen, that’s not a problem,” she says.
Neither were the other perks that come to teenage models. “You’re going to have these old guys knocking down your door and offering you coke. I never … it just wasn’t my part of life.” Being a sex symbol was, though. “I didn’t care whether I was known as a face or a body or both,” she says. “I couldn’t care less as long as it gave me more work and more money. That was just fine with me.”
Janice Dickinson had broken the mold. Now Paulina became the first nonblond supermodel. She arrived on the scene just as Elle magazine—newly published in America—began regularly running spreads that featured a multiethnic cast. Advertisers like Benetton were starting to do the same. In 1986 Monique Pillard proposed to Paulina that she pose for a pinup calendar.
The Paulina calendar grew out of Pillard’s frustration with Sports Illustrated’s bathing suit issue. Editor Jule Campbell used a lot of Elite models, including Carol Alt, Kim Alexis, Christie Brinkley, and Paulina, but it wasn’t enough for Pillard. “I was always a little annoyed when Jule didn’t see potential and I did,” the agent says. In 1986 her close friend Marco Glaviano shot a Paulina calendar. It sold 250,000 copies. The next year the pair released a second Paulina calendar and the first Elite Superstars Swimsuit Calendar. Pillard also started booking her models for tasteful nude spreads in Playboy shot by trusted photographers like Glaviano and Herb Ritts. The pictures they produced were far more comprehensible than the images of Patou pouf skirts then prevalent in fashion magazines. “Monique understands what the public wants,” says John Casablancas. “And so she produced this kind of populist, sexy, nonfashiony image. And she just touched the right chord. She absolutely deserves credit.” Supermodels were here to stay.
The next year—1987—Christy’s career went into overdrive. Though she worked with top names like Herb Ritts, Patrick Demarchelier, and Irving Penn, the real source of her new power was her collaboration with the photographer of the moment: Steven Meisel. Meisel looks like a Jewish Cherokee, with thick, straight hair cascading to his shoulders past dark eyes that seem to have been kohled. He has worn only black since leaving high school: black boots, jeans, turtleneck, trench coat, and a do-rag bandanna under a black rabbit hat with flying fur earflaps.
Meisel and a pack of powerful fashion friends have tried to resurrect the cult of the fashion photographer of the sixties, with Steven, Naomi, Christy, and Linda playing updates of Bailey, Twiggy, the Shrimp, and Penelope Tree. Meisel has also been compared to the earlier avatar Avedon, whom he’s worshiped since grade school. At first Meisel’s work was slavishly imitative of and less intellectual than Avedon’s. But Meisel’s ambitions have always been different. And his vision is more in tune with this mass-media era than with Avedon’s temps perdu of an image aristocracy.
“I am a reflection of my times,” Meisel has said. More precisely he reflects the paucity of originality in a fashion culture that now slavishly celebrates the past. Meisel plunders and adapts from fashion’s memory, not from its collective unconscious. He copies everyone from Horst to Bourdin and poses his models as actresses and mannequins of earlier times. His postmodern samplings are all of a piece with the fin de siècle rag picking that has given humanity the AT&T Building and rap music.
Meisel’s unoriginality is an open industry secret. He’s considered a sort of rephotographer. “He does a very good job of systematically making a story out of other photographers’ styles,” says Bert Stern, who once threatened legal action over photographs of Madonna that Meisel copied from Stern’s famous 1962 “last sitting” with Marilyn Monroe. In France Jacques Bergaud, the owner of Pin-Up Studios, dismisses Meisel with the nickname Xerox.
Until he was about twenty-five, Meisel lived at home with his parents in Fresh Meadows, Queens—three blocks south of the Long Island Expressway. He was an indulg
ed child who went with his mother to watch her get her hair done by Kenneth, and he started reading her fashion magazines in the fourth grade. They were his “escape mechanism,” he’s said. He even cut school—with his mother’s permission—to read them the day they were published. “I was obsessed with the magazines, absolutely,” Meisel says. “I was totally insane with it.” Cheerfully he admits that his interest was “a little peculiar.”
In the sixth grade he began using the names of known photographers to pester model agencies for composites. He had friends pose as messengers to get them. He collected them like baseball cards and recalls them with uncanny accuracy. “I had to know who the girls were. What their genius was,” he remembers. He lurked outside Richard Avedon’s studio in hopes of seeing models arrive. He cut school and hung out at boutiques. When Twiggy came to New York, he called her agency, put on a phony accent, said he had to change a lunch date with her and asked where she was. “Like fools, they [told me],” he says, smirking. Arriving at Melvin Sokolsky’s studio, he talked his way past Ali MacGraw and watched as Bert Stern filmed Sokolsky shooting the skinny cockney.
At the High School of Art and Design, Stevan (as he spelled his name) studied fashion illustration and was a member of the Chorus and the Senior Council of the class of 1971. He went on to Parsons School of Art but never graduated. “It was boring,” he says. After brief stints sketching for Halston and writing about fashion for New York Rocker, Meisel was hired as an illustrator by Women’s Wear Daily. “I adored him,” says his boss, James Spina. Meisel lived at home, “just like the Beaver in a garden apartment,” Spina, a neighbor, recalls. Meisel would drive Spina home in a Buick Scamp his father bought him to keep him off the subway. They went to concerts together and would pore through Meisel’s collection of old fashion magazines under the gaze of posters of Veruschka and Mott the Hoople.
Meisel was friends with two designers, Anna Sui, who went to Parsons with him, and Stephen Sprouse, whom Meisel met at a drag bar, the 82 Club, in 1974. Soft-spoken Sprouse, thirty-one, first drew clothes as an Indiana nine-year-old, met Norell and Geoffrey Beene at twelve, apprenticed with Blass, and dropped out of design school to work for Halston.
New York’s clubland years had begun and were to shape fashion, photography, and modeling for the next two decades. “The scene was very flamboyant,” says Deborah Marquit, a Parsons classmate who also got a job at WWD. “Everyone came to work crazy from the night before. All they talked about was sex with men.” Gabriel Rotello, a musician and night life impresario, met Meisel and Company at the Ninth Circle, a Village gay bar. Rotello, who went on to share a summer house with Richard Sohl, Meisel’s best friend from grade school, followed the group’s exploits for a decade. At first Sohl was the star. He was the beautiful piano player in the Patti Smith Group. Smith would introduce him onstage as “Richard D.N.V. Sohl.” The initials stood for Death in Venice.
“The whole thing was gay,” Rotello says. “Richard would entertain us with stories of them coming into the city from Queens in junior high and going to gay bars. They both had real wild streaks, wanting to be where the action was. You’d hear peals of laughter; that was Richard. Steven was very reticent, obviously very talented, very enigmatic. I thought he manufactured his eccentricities as he might an illustration. For effect.”
Meisel and Sohl shared a conspiratorial streak. They would whisper in a private language and call each other names—Sissy Meisel and Tanta Ricky. “If you didn’t know the codes, you wouldn’t know what they were talking about,” Rotello says. “Together I found them a little scary.” Teri Toye was scarier. Meisel met her at a party at Rotello’s loft, jumping on his old sofa and breaking it. “Teri Toye was totally fabulously insane, screamingly funny, and out of control,” Rotello says. “Holly Golightly in drag.” Born in Hollywood on an early sixties New Year’s Eve (“No one ever believes me,” she grouses), Teri was adopted and spent a spoiled, sheltered youth in Des Moines, Iowa. Her pale, freckled face is still open as the plains, when it’s not closed behind shades. “I was never really a boy,” she insists, “except for the one obvious thing, and that’s the only thing I ever changed. I didn’t change my sex. My sex changed me.”
In 1979 Teri moved to New York to study fashion design. The first year she registered as a boy, the second as a girl. “I think they were a little confused,” she says. Soon she visited school only to model for illustration classes taught two nights a week by Meisel. The pair made quite a statement. Teri’s lank blond image complemented Meisel’s smoldering Cleopatra pose. They made a pretty Odd Squad.
“We would get together at Sprouse’s for four or five days,” Teri recalls, “design clothes, have them made, put them on, and take pictures of ourselves. Then we’d wear them out at night with our friends.” They became fixtures on the after-hours scene, often in club bathrooms. “We love bathrooms,” Teri laughs. They would go to the Mudd Club in their pajamas and bragged of flooding the bathroom, “riding” the toilets in a motorcycle fantasy. They began sporting long, lank Dynel wigs and all-black clothes and dressed their friends in Day-Glo neon to stand out from their own in crowd.
The times were wilder than Meisel. Though many people around him were drinking and drugging and having sex obliviously, says Rotello, “Meisel always seemed a little too dignified to be caught with his pants down.” He had the same boyfriend for years and studiously kept his private life private, while all about him were flaunting theirs. More recently, with his safe sex posters and an interview in the Advocate, Meisel opened up a bit. He said he’s always photographed “more effeminate-looking men, more masculine-looking women, and drag queens” in hopes of “teaching that there’s a wide variety of people…. There’s absolutely a queer sensibility to my work … but there’s also a sense of humor … a sarcasm and a fuck you attitude as well as a serious beauty.”
Meisel’s photographic career began inauspiciously. One night Spina took him to a party for Bette Midler. Meisel borrowed an old Exakta camera and took a picture of the singer that ran in WWD. He then took a class in photography. His parents bought him a camera.
Meisel met Valerie “Joe” Cates, an aspiring model from Park Avenue, in a vintage clothing store in 1979. He followed her, asked to photograph her, then asked the same of her sister, Phoebe, a top teenage model at Seventeen. “He was the first man we’d met with really long hair who was into dressing us up,” Phoebe recalls. “He was different and really playful. Our first grown-up friend.” Through the Cates sisters Meisel got work shooting test photographs of young models and an assignment from Seventeen. He also worked for the SoHo Weekly News. Fashion editor Annie Flanders gave him his first cover assignment and a story on plastic clothes. Joe and Phoebe Cates modeled.
Flanders knew that her friend Frances Grill, a photographer’s agent, was looking for new blood. Meisel went to see her. She was impressed. “He knew every single bit of information about every photographer, every model.” She sent a carousel of his slides to Kezia Keeble, an ambitious stylist who’d once worked for Diana Vreeland and was looking for a way into fashion’s pantheon. Keeble had just been hired to create covers for Condé Nast’s Self magazine. Meisel had never worked in a studio, and he didn’t want to leave his WWD job. “He was really insecure,” Grill says.
He had reason. An assistant—who was “promised tons of work by Kezia Keeble to show Steven how to do it”—would set the lights and the camera, says someone who watched them work. “Kezia didn’t know the front of the camera from the back. She wanted a photographer she could mold. He was her boy. He would tape Avedon spreads to the floor of the studio and say, ‘Light it this way,’ and, ‘Pose that way’ All he would do was push the button.” Christopher Baker, another assistant, says that all Meisel owned was one Nikon and one 105 mm lens. “He didn’t care. It was weird,” Baker says. “He was, like, chosen.”
Meisel shot half a dozen Self covers, helping turn the new magazine into a million-selling success. He was also working regularly for Mademoiselle
and its Italian equivalent, Lei, and, every once in a while, for Vogue. He fitted into his new milieu well. Models loved him; he’d have his makeup done before theirs. “He would speak to the models in sign language, put his hand a certain way, throw his neck, and expect her to imitate him,” says Andrea Robinson, who worked at Vogue. He wore kohl makeup and a little dirndl skirt over his pants.
John Duka—then Kezia Keeble’s summer housemate and soon to be her husband and partner in a PR firm—dubbed Meisel a new Avedon in his influential fashion column, “Notes on Fashion,” in The New York Times. Meisel quit his WWD job. The next step was to make a splash, and he did with a little help from his friends. In January 1983 Sprouse asked him to photograph some clothes he’d been making for a fashion show Keeble was doing. Though they were still sewing on the edge of the runway, the show was a success. “I knew I was looking at a gold mine,” Keeble declared. Bendel, Bloomingdale’s, and Bergdorf Goodman bought. Odd was in.
The first time Kezia Keeble ever saw Teri Toye, dressed in a demure Black Watch plaid jumper, turtleneck and stockings, ponytail, and flats (“indeed, an odd way for a transsexual to dress”), she knew she’d encountered someone extraordinary. Toye had become a model that fall, when Sprouse held his first fashion show. Frances Grill, who’d stopped repping and opened an idiosyncratic model agency called Click, soon signed Toye up. When the Fashion Group—an organization of women in fashion—asked Keeble and Duka to produce its spring 1984 showing of American fashion, Keeble recalled the group’s show of ten years before, starring socialite Baby Jane Holzer—Tom Wolfe’s Girl of the Year—and decided it was Teri Toye’s time. “Outrage makes Teri the person,” Keeble said, because “people love to buy what they hate. They resist, but resistance causes persistence. What’s most amusing is she’s becoming Girl of the Year just because I said so.”
Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women Page 49