Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford: You know their faces because they were models, but you know their names because they were supermodels.
Now, a new Apple TV+ docuseries about the fashionable foursome who took the modelling industry to new heights in the late 1980s and early ’90s is helping to shape their legacies.
Larissa Bills, who co-directed The Super Models with Roger Ross Williams, says the women remind her of her coming-of-age — a period when the worlds of fashion, celebrity and pop culture collided, creating the conditions for the supermodel era.
“What these women represented to me at the time that I was a young woman was they were powerful,” said Bills.
WATCH | The official trailer for The Super Models:
The four-part series covers a lot of ground — from modelling in their teen years, to the height of their celebrity, to their second coming as entrepreneurs, mothers and humanitarians. It also revisits their famous Vogue cover and the iconic music video for George Michael’s Freedom 90!, in which they starred alongside the late Tatjana Patitz.
The series has a lot to say, but it’s just as interesting for what it doesn’t say and instead shows: that part of the supermodel legacy is the ability to carefully craft a public image.
A curated lens
Being a project that depends on the audience’s nostalgia for its subjects, The Super Models is polished and restrained. Though its oral history of the industry’s uglier sides leaves something to be desired, it documents the highs and lows of the careers of these women.
Evangelista talks about regretting her famous remark that she “won’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day.”; Crawford gets semi-candid about her failed marriage to Hollywood actor Richard Gere; Turlington talks about choosing professional freedom over a restrictive contract.
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