How American Models Took Over the Fashion World - Slate Magazine
Since the Kennedys first descended on Hyannis Port, fresh-faced, long-limbed, sun-kissed models have been used to sell rugby shirts, shorts embroidered with anchors, and plaid everything. But the fashion industry wasn’t always so enamored with looking American, whether narrowly defined as WASP-y or broadly characterized as un-European. The birth of the American fashion model is chronicled in two recent books, Robert Lacey’s Model Woman: Eileen Ford and the Business of Beauty and Robin Givhan’s The Battle of Versailles: The Night American Fashion Stumbled Into the Spotlight and... Model Woman is a biography of Ford, who founded the influential Ford Model Agency (now Ford Models ) in 1946. The Battle of Versailles re-creates the landmark fashion show held at the Palace of Versailles in 1973, when a visiting contingent of... But both deliver powerful messages about how we Americans see ourselves, or wish we could see ourselves. Lacey and Givhan take us back to a time when models were still called mannequins, their agents were viewed as little more than pimps, and modeling was considered “a glamorous job, but not a road to immense wealth,” in Givhan’s words. Source: www.slate.com
