HERE is a list of women's names: Stella, Amber, Shalom and, Bridget. Unless you're involved in the fashion industry, they probably don't ring bells. But hear names such as Helena, Cindy, Christy, Claudia, Naomi or Kate and you know exactly who's, under discussion. These are women so famous that they no longer need surnames, so much a part of contemporary popular culture that - like Madonna, Sly, Arnie or Brad - every, aspect of their lives has been exhaustively scrutinised.
However, unlike other folk who have achieved global fame in the past decade, none of the members of this exclusive group of women are pop singers or film actors, although many of them have dabbled. Instead they are models or more specifically, the Supermodels.
Nobody knows for certain where the Supermodel tag first emerged. For most of this century, some models working in the business have been better known than others, but it was usually the face that was familiar rather than the name. From the likes of Dovima and Suzy Parker through Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy, models have become steadily more than just human clothes hangers. Gradually, they've acquired public personas so that now there is a magazine called Top Model, the sole raison d'etre of which is to act as a conduit between the industry and its insatiable fans. After a while, it's hard to remember that the only reason any of this set achieved renown was thanks to great skin tone and longer than average limbs. Now they're part of a world that is famous for being famous.
That doesn't apply just to models, of course. The entire fashion industry has become common currency lately. Designers such as Versace and Gaultier share their lives with an avid public, and even hairdressers and make up artists have their own following. Television offers weekly reports such as The Clothes Show and Head to Toe (consistently one of RTE's highest rating programmes) so that even viewers with only a marginal interest in the vagaries of fashion are familiar with its operation and principal players.
So the emergence of the Supermodel is part of a larger phenomenon whereby the entire fashion industry has become fashionable. And yet all this has occurred precisely at a moment when imagination and creativity within the business are at a particularly low ebb. This isn't a good decade for fashion; heavily dependent upon recycling old ideas, designers seem incapable of escaping from nostalgia. It's as though Supermodels are a compensation for, distinctly un-super clothes.
"These girls emerged and became of interest to people precisely at the point when fashion became boring and repetitive," according to English fashion historian, Jane Mulvagh. The precise moment when they entered the public arena was January 1990 when five of the top models Christy Turlington, Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Tatjana Patitz and Linda Evangelista were celebrated on the cover of British Vogue. "At the time, I thought that a sad indictment of the fashion industry," comments Mulvagh.
Although all the models featured by Vogue had been working in the business for several years, they weren't widely known, certainly not to anyone who didn't attend the collections or regularly peruse the fashion press. They were, undoubtedly, among the best models but without any particular cachet.
WITHIN a very short space of time, however, they began to acquire their own mystique. Campbell, for example, was seen out with the likes of Mike Tyson and Robert de Niro even before she teamed up with U2's Adam Clayton; Turlington's name has been linked with actors Christian Slater (with whom she was photographed for the cover of Harper's Bazaar) and Jason Patric; Evangelista is now involved with actor Kyle MacLachlan while Helena Christensen was, until last year's contretemps with Paula Yates, the girlfriend of singer Michael Hutehence. Many of them started to pop up in Dublin on a regular basis, spending time with members of U2 - it's thanks" to Bono's wife Ali Hewson, who has become a good friend of Turlington and Campbell, that the models have agreed to come to Dublin this weekend and waive all fees.
As their fame grew, so did demand for their services and the price they could command. It began with Versace demanding (and paying) for their exclusivity - they'd model at his show alone during the Milan season but soon other designers followed suit. As a result, the money made by a handful of models increased to extraordinary, levels. Last year, Forbes magazine carried a list of the top models' earnings, headed by Cindy Crawford who made, an estimated £4.5 million in 1994.
Among the Supermodel set, the poorest earner is Naomi Campbell, who managed a mere £1.5 million, the reason being that unlike her peers she has never had a contract to become "the face" for a cosmetics house.
Inevitably there was a backlash, with money as its cause. In 1991, Linda Evangelista remarked in the course of an interview: "We have this expression, Christy and I: `We don't wake up for, less than $10,000 a day'." It was a casual line that received widespread publicity and led to the Supermodels being widely decried for their greed. Suddenly designers, instead of volunteering to pay whatever was demanded for their services, started to announce that they would no longer pay above the average rate, even if this meant dispensing with the Supermodels. Then there were stories about bad behaviour, backstage tantrums and petulance of a kind more usually associated with the rock stars with whom the models were now keeping company. This culminated in Campbell being dropped by her New York agency, which faxed a memo around the world announcing "no amount of money or prestige could further justify the abuse that has been imposed on our staff and clients". Ugly behaviour and beautiful faces began to seem synonymous.
To Weekend 2