For an industry that has elevated the ‘air kiss’ and other displays of fake emotion into an art form, the world of fashion has been strangely quiet following the death of John Casablancas, the legendary so-called ‘father of the supermodel’.
The founder of Elite, the world’s most successful modelling agency, died from cancer on July 20.
He was a titan of his trade, who transformed the modelling game into a billion-dollar business, and bestrode fashion for more than four decades, bringing global fame and fortune to the fast-living catwalk models he discovered.
He launched the careers of Claudia Schiffer, Heidi Klum, Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford and Naomi Campbell to name but a few. Yet Casablancas’s death at the age of 70 has so far been greeted by a chorus of silence from this gilded circle.
Not a word of gratitude or regret has emanated from Campbell or Klum, Schiffer or Crawford, or Christie Brinkley, Andie MacDowell, Gisele, and Iman — all his former clients. Nothing even from Linda Evangelista, who he plucked from obscurity and raised to a pinnacle of success that allowed her inform Vogue that: ‘We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 (Dh36,731) a day.’
The models’ failure to pay tribute to the man who made them speaks volumes about the false, fickle and entirely cynical nature of the modern fashion industry.
It also shines a light on the topsy-turvy legacy of this shrewd, devastatingly handsome — and sometimes hugely controversial - American playboy.
For much of his life, Casablancas was a living, breathing symbol of the brash excesses of his champagne and drug-fuelled trade. Not only did he create the phenomenon of the supermodel, he lived its rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle: partying hard through the Eighties and Nineties, and embarking on sordid relationships with several teenage beauties under his care.
So legendary was his libido that Michael Gross, author of The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women — a 1995 expose of the catwalk world — created an entire section in the index for his extra-marital affairs. “John ripped the hypocrisy off the modelling business,” Gross recalled. “He said, ‘What we’re selling is sex, so let’s sell sex.’ It definitely stemmed from his personality, which was a man who loved women - lots of women.”
Yet having created the monster that was supermodel culture, Casablancas subsequently turned against it, resigning from Elite Models in 2000, when it was turning over $100 million a year. Weeks later, he used a farewell interview to launch an astonishing tirade against big-name former clients.
Campbell was ‘odious’, he declared to the French magazine VSD, adding that ‘you cannot imagine the pleasure I had in sacking her’ in the mid-Nineties (because of her foul-language, tantrums, and absurd demands).
Klum, he added, was ‘basically a talentless German sausage’. Gisele Bundchen was ‘a monster of selfishness’. Most of the other catwalk stars were ‘spoilt, unbearable troublemakers’. He added that ‘apart from Evangelista, no supermodel has ever thanked me for getting her to the top’.
“I’m leaving a business I detest,” he concluded. “I’m leaving stars who are unprepared for success and surrounded by idiots and leeches.”
The comments predictably caused an uproar — at a time when the industry was under huge scrutiny over its attitude towards anorexia, recreational drugs, and the sexual exploitation of young models. Little wonder, perhaps, that from then on, Casablancas was a black sheep of the fashion world. Even in death, 13 years later, he has not been forgiven. He had, after all, broken the code of ‘omerta’ that governs this most obsequious of industries.
Yet with the benefit of hindsight, Casablancas was always doomed to follow a volatile path.
Born in New York in 1942, the son of wealthy refugees from the Spanish Civil War, he enjoyed a privileged upbringing, being educated at Le Rosey, a Swiss boarding school whose former students include Dodi Fayed. After a brief, unsuccessful attempt to study for a degree in economics in Geneva, Casablancas married a Brazilian air hostess, Marie Christine, in the mid-Sixties. The couple lived in Rio, then Paris, living largely off his trust fund.
In a hotel lobby in the French capital, Casablancas met Jeanette Christiansen, a former Miss Denmark. She was immediately installed as his mistress. ‘I thought he was the best-looking man I’d ever laid eyes on,’ she later said.
Though Casablancas had a daughter, Cecile, with his wife soon afterwards, the marriage was all but over by 1970. After taking up with Christiansen, he had the idea of opening a model agency. “She had a lot of friends in the fashion business,” he recalled, “and one of them said: ‘Hey, why don’t you become an agent?’”
His firm, launched in 1970, was called Elysee 3 (after his Paris phone number). In 1972, it was rebranded as Elite. At the time, the modelling industry was famously staid, and dominated by old-school agents such as Eileen Ford, who had young clients live at her home, insisted they went to bed at 8pm, and refused to allow them out without chaperones. Casablancas upset this cosy world with a business model that was simple but devastatingly effective. He offered his charges complete freedom and a greater cut of the money. Soon, top models were defecting to him in droves. ‘Ford was a prude and I was not,’ he later said. ‘It was a David and Goliath situation, and we came up winning. We did it by making the models celebrities. We gave them huge amounts of money, and we gave them names and personalities. We let them give interviews. Suddenly they became supermodels.’
By 1977, he was ready to leave Europe and set up shop in New York. The return to the city of his birth sparked what came to be known as ‘the model wars’, with top agencies conducting a vicious battle for a portion of the industry’s growing financial pie. Ford and another major firm, Wilhemina, sued Elite for USD10 million, claiming it had violated verbal agreements to never infringe on their turf. They also accused the firm of poaching clients. The high-profile lawsuits failed.
By the early Eighties, Casablancas had become a major New York celebrity, dominating its party scene with the world’s most beautiful women, and partying in such legendary nightspots as Studio 54. And his sex life was gossip-column fodder. Despite marrying Jeanette in 1978, and fathering her son, Julian - who is now lead singer of The Strokes - Casablancas pursued a string of public affairs.
The most famous, in 1983, was with Stephanie Seymour. a 16 year old model. He was 41. Jeanette promptly left him.
From then on, rivals called him ‘sleazy.’ He responded: “I might not always have behaved well, but I am not a child molester. I’ve dated very young women but that is almost inevitable in this profession. These just happen to be the people I work with. You might not like it, but it’s not a crime against humanity.”
In 1992, Casablancas married for the third and final time, to Aime Wermelinger, a contestant in a beauty pageant he was judging. He was 50, she was 17. They went on to have three children.
By then, Elite and its stars were a global phenomenon, thanks to Casablancas. In 1988, for example, he’d persuaded Crawford to pose for Playboy. The shoot turned her into an international celebrity - in 1995, she earned $6.5 million.
Yet as the agency prospered, so did the questions about its business practices. In 2000, the BBC documentary MacIntyre Undercover broadcast secretly obtained footage of Elite executives discussing drug use, making racist remarks and boasting about sleeping with teenage models.
Gerald Marie, the firm’s European president (and a friend of Casablancas) resigned after being filmed offering a reporter posing as a model money for sex.
Although Casablancas was not personally caught up in the scandal, his playboy reputation did little for the firm’s PR image, and shareholders were reported to want him out. He duly resigned a few weeks later, and sold his remaining stake in the firm. Then he gave that outspoken interview to the French VSD magazine. It was the end of an era.
Casablancas briefly returned to Elite, in 2005, but he found himself being pursued around New York by men acting for the lawyers of a model who claimed he’d once forced her to have an abortion.
Within four months, he’d left the city. He spent the rest of his days in Rio and Miami, where he kept an office. Even in his late 60s, Casablancas never stopped working - creating a modelling school and model-scouting organisation called Star System. Perhaps understandably, given the enemies he’d made, the fashion industry didn’t welcome him back.
His final business venture was to launch a ‘cybermodel agency’, Illusion 2K, which created a computer-generated supermodel called Webbie Tookay. Her greatest attribute, Casablancas declared, was that - unlike her flesh-and-bone counterparts — she would never complain.
After his life in a soulless industry, how apt that he should believe she was the perfect supermodel.
