The First Supermodels Suzy Parker and Dorian Leigh 
Wilhelmina 
Dolores Hawkins 
Cheryl Tiegs Here are Nineteen Models called "Supermodels" by Glamour in 1968 
  
Jean Shrimpton 
By DAVID BEHRENS Newsday April 20 1978 The Beautiful Model is everywhere. Her choice of shampoo foams across our TV screen. Her choice of perfume wafts across our magazine page. Her choice of lover gossips out of our newspaper columns. Her presence does not surprise us at all. After all, she has been selling for a long time — everything from diamonds to diapers, from fashions to foodstuffs. But today something new is happening. The Beautiful Model has discovered a new product: herself. For example, fashion model Cheryl Tiegs, zooming to celebrity status in one well-planned year, makes the cover of Time-magazine. Farrah Fawcelt-Majors, once a model for shampoo, becomes the hottest pin-up poster since Betty Grable. And in the eternal battle over women's skin, Margaux Hemingway and Lauren Hutton reach new heights, rising out of the plush trenches of multi million dollar cosmetic warfare. These are new role models: the model as personage, as celebrity, as superstar. Now we even know where she discoe'd last night and with whom. But it was not always this way. There were periods when beautiful women were simply glorious hut unknown. Their faces were recurring but nameless. The great models mirrored much of our social history. At times, they reflected woman as stylized sex object and dependent creature; in more recent times, they have characterized modernwomen's striving for freedom of movement and self-expression. They have reflected some of the worst and some of the best in ourselves — self-deceptions and dreams, petty biases and Ideals. Yes, of course, beauty is skin-deep, but why not look like Suzy Parker, the greatest model of them all? There is no Hall of Fame for the great models of the past and, perhaps, rightly so. Suzy Parker, who reigned for nearly two decades as the premiere American model and as a movie star in the late '50s and early 60s, suggested one reason: "In the old days, being recognized was the beginning of the end for most models." The designer, she said, wanted you to look at the dress, not at a familiar face." Now married to actor Bradford Dillman, she looks back on her modelling career with affection and amusement.Thanks to her association with photographer Richard Avedon, she was allowed to be "more than a coathanger," she recalls. But, she said, she never forgot that the job of a fashion model was to model fashions. "I didn't get to wear the Dior dresses. I wore the shlock dresses —those terrible little $10 dresses. The people who hired me were desperate.They just hoped I could make those dresses look like something. I had to sell them. That's why I earned that much money." That's a little like Babe Ruth saying all he did was hit home runs. It all began more than 100 years ago with a Parisian shopgirl* named Maria Vernet Worth, according to Charles Castlre author of Model Girl, a newly published history of the world of models. Mrs. Worth became the first professional mannequin in 1852 to help her husband, a dress salesman. (*It is this editor's opinion that Marie Vernet Worth was more than a "shopgirl". She was the wife and muse to Charless Worth, one of the first Parisian Couturiers whose creations were worn by royalty. L.M.) Today the top models become media stars, wheeling and dealing for up to $2,000 a day, winning exclusive contracts from firms such as Revlon, Faberge and Chanel, breaking into films, seemingly staying young forever. When Suzy Parker began her modelling career in 1948 as a tall, frecklefaced adolescent, the best models were paid $25 an hour. When she retired in 1965, her modelling fee had soared to$120 an hour, unheard of at that time. And her annual earnings were more than $100,000, also spectacular for the period. She was famous as a fashion model, even before she became a movie star, starring in Ten North Frederick,with Gary Cooper. But Ms. Parker's 17-year career was certainly the exception, accordingto Vogue's Susan Slavin. Vogue, for example, is likely to use a model for only four or five years, while her fce is still not too familiar, Ms. Slavin said. Like a butterfly or a ballerina, a model's brilliance is often fleeting.
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