email from NEW YORK - Vogue Australia, November 1999

If the era of the supermodel is over, who's going to tell the new breed? By Robert Sullivan

By now, of course, everyone on the planet knows that supermodels are totally over. Though they're still showing up in a few movies, they no longer seem as frequently on the covers of magazines, they are not opening up restaurant chains, and they regularly get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day. The business of celebrity is being left to the celebrities and, for the moment, anyway, models are mostly just models.

    For me, what's happened to supermodels at the close of the millennium is akin to what happened to Superman when he went to Krypton, his home planet, where suddenly he was just another superhuman among superhumans and, in effect, a mere mortal again.
Yet, somehow, in spite of this planetary realignment, fashion marches on. Designers still make clothes, then dress people up in them and send them down the catwalk. And, when undertaking this ritual, the designers want the people wearing the clothes to look good, to look - well, to look like models.

    So the question arises: what does this realigned but still beautiful new world mean to the latest hot model just being born, to the young, beautiful woman who once could shoot for a place on top of the entire world but now may have to settle for a life of fame and fortune lived only within the world of fashion?

    To determine the answer, I spent some time during the autumn/winter '99/'00 New York fashion week with a young woman who, in her first moments on the fashion radar screen, was flashing like a Concorde coming in from Paris.

    Her name is Isabeli. She is 15 years old, from Brazil, and was discovered about 15 minutes before fashion week began - barely enough time for her to get permission to skip school and fly to New York and parade around in cool clothes.

    The first time I saw Isabeli was at the Tse show. She walked out beneath the lights wearing a blue felted wool top and a charcoal-coloured cashmere rolled-hem skirt that looked as good as she did, which is to say very good. I immediately recognized her for two reasons: (1) the guy with the goatee that I was sitting next to nudged me and shouted, "That's her!" over the really loud bossa nova tune, this guy being David Cunningham, director of development at IMG Models, the agency that represents Isabeli, and (2) the Brazilian woman who had been standing in the crowd looking nervous throughout the parade of white cashmere dresses suddenly had a smile on her face as big as the smile on the face of Tommy Hilfiger at the end of one of his shows. That was Isabeli's mother.

    At the end of the show, there was a big crowd standing around Isabeli as she smiled and kissed people and drank bottled water, simultaneously showing off her look. Her look, by the way, is considered wholesome, even pretty, both qualities that are in vogue on the catwalks at the moment. She looks American, with just a touch of foreign exoticism, or maybe it's the other way around. She also looks pretty steamy in her promotional photos, which I feel a little Humbert Humbert saying, given that she is 15, even if she does look a lot older, like maybe 19.

    That I had to discuss with Isabeli the fact that the universe of modelling had changed just seconds before she entered into it was weighing heavily on me at the Hugo Boss show, so I avoided the topic when I first met her. While she went off to be made-up, I chatted to Cunningham. Like several people in the model-agency business I spoke with, he was disappointed, to say the least, with all the stories of late about actresses replacing models on fashion-magazine covers. Covers, as anyone in the modelling business will tell you, are the way to lucrative cosmetics contracts. To models and their agencies, keeping models of magazine covers is akin to taking the home runs out of baseball. "It's a drag," Cunningham said.

    Still, Cunningham made it clear that there is hope. There is the notion that one day the celebrity of celebrities will fade, that particular new face will shine brightly enough to change the rules back, which is why Cunningham was so happy to have found Isabeli. He was looking through some photographs of young models when: "I just stopped at her card and I said, 'Oh my God. I have to meet her.'" he recalled. In a few days, he tracked her down to Sao Paulo and took some quick polaroids of her in front of a sandwich stand. He suggested to her Brazilian contacts that she visit New York. "They were like, 'When do you think she should come?' and I said, 'Right away,'" Cunningham recounted. "Now she's having the show season of a top model. I'm already getting calls from Milan."
After Isabeli had been made-up, we talked. She smiled and giggled a lot and said, "sim claro", which means "of course" in Portuguese. She speaks a little English - she knows the words to Walk This Way by Aerosmith. Her mother speaks a little less. Fortunately, Cunningham's friend, Larry, a Brazilian who lives in New York, was able to translate.

    I put off the Big Question a while longer. In the meantime, through Larry, Isabeli told me lots of things including: she is from Curitiba, south Brazil; her friends told her that she would forget them, but she hasn't; she loved the red Carolina Herrera gown she wore the day before; her mother is a psychologist that quit her job to take care of Isabeli on the road, and won't let her go to the after-show parties; she misses her dog, Dolly.

    Her mother was wearing jeans and a camel-hair blazer and looked almost as if she were waiting for a ballet class to finish. She said that Isabeli is considered something of an ugly duckling in Brazil, where slimness is not valued.

    Finally, feeling like a wet blanket, I took a big gulp and asked Isabeli if she knew that we were at the dawn of a new supermodel-less age, that magazines in the US choose their covers from a pool of Hollywood actresses, that it seems that models can only be considered as players, not stars. Isabeli and her mother considered the question.

    Isabeli said, "Sim claro!" Her mother said something to Larry and then he said, "They say that they know the profession is very short. They say they know what to expect." At that point all I could think about was that all the new models should have psychologist mothers who accompany them on the road.

    Backstage, when the Hugo Boss show began, Isabeli changed into her first outfit and waited patiently. A guy stood up on a chair and shouted, "Really, really, really smiley! Thank you!" Isabeli went out on cue and then came back and changed as fast as she could and waited and changed and waited again while people with headsets ran around screaming at one another.

    Things kept getting better for Isabeli as the week progressed. She was booked for the Ralph Lauren show which, according to Cunningham, is "huge!" Also, Versace people had called from Milan to say they were interested in her. Cunningham was overjoyed: "That's huge, huge, huge." At the Richard Tyler show, Isabeli looked so professional as she stood onstage in a black silk tulle gown that her own mother did not recognize her. (In a panic, Cunningham went backstage and checked and came out rolling his eyes and then pointed Isabeli out to her mother, who looked very relieved.) Within a few days, Isabeli was booked for Versace. A few weeks later, she was booked for the Valentino ad campaign to be photographed by Steven Miesel.

    The high point of her week was the Ralph Lauren show in SoHo. Lauren himself described his show as the pivotal in relation to the century. But it was also pivotal in regard to Isabeli. Merely by being in it, she had arrived. And it was pivotal for me, too, because as the show began and models appeared, and Yfke came out, followed by the gorgeous Carolyn and Esther and May, it occurred to me that modelling is still as glamourous as ever.  

    Just as I was thinking this, Isabeli finally appeared. She turned and walked toward the end of the catwalk platform, past the editors in black, past the buyers in their nice suits, past Samuel L. Jackson in his Nike beret. When she reached the end of the catwalk, and came to the bank of cameras, the giant wall of long, Cyclopean lenses and clicking shutters and sparkling flashes, Isabeli paused. And in that pause, in that fermata of fashion that is repeated thousands of times of hundreds of catwalks around the world, in fashion week after fashion week, and yet is as singular as it is repetitive, Isabeli truly looked super.

    Afterward I met her and her mother backstage. They couldn't find a taxi so we decided to take the subway - their first time. When we boarded the train, under the watch of a giant Calvin Klein billboard, featuring Kate Moss in underwear, everyone looked at Isabeli, though she was oblivious.

    Larry wasn't around to translate, so chitchat was difficult. I showed Isabeli's mother the picture of my three-year-old daughter that I carry in my wallet, and she smiled and said, "Very beautiful." When we got out of the subway, I asked Isabeli - with great effort - how it felt being near the top of the modelling business.

    She smiled. "I like, but not forever. After, I want to be....." She spoke in Portuguese to her mother, who helped her find the right words. Isabeli beamed. "I want to be an actress!"