Even if you didn’t follow fashion, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington were pop culture fixtures and household names throughout the 1990s. No other group of runway and print models since has captured the public’s imagination in quite the same way. Through new interviews and archival footage, the four-part docuseries “The Super Models” on Apple TV+ looks back at their careers.
Evangelista’s participation in the series is notable. For years, she remained out of the spotlight after a fat-freezing procedure went wrong, in addition to a breast cancer diagnosis. But here she is. I didn’t anticipate how lovely it would be to see her again.
But “The Super Models” is not especially probing, which tends to be the case whenever celebrity subjects are also executive producers. They are interviewed separately and only briefly do we see them interact in the present. They aren’t asked to be particularly vulnerable or introspective, although Evangelista does go the deepest. The series is less about who these women are beyond the surface, and more a meditation on a certain kind of fame that predates social media and the concept of influencers. It’s fascinating to contemplate what that once looked like and how it worked, compared with today, when so many models are the offspring of famous parents (Crawford’s children included).
“There’s so much mythology that surrounds models,” says the fashion critic Robin Givhan. “And the job of that mythology is to kind of hide their humanity.” Footage unearthed by directors Roger Ross Williams and Larissa Bills bears that out. There was a lot of resentment around their success. An old clip of Polly Mellen, the creative director of Allure magazine, is a nasty rant about what it took to book these models: “They demand the Concord. They demand their car and driver. Some of them demand their chef. Some of them demand their suite…
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