Like so many mere mortals in the 1990s, my friends and I were on a (one-sided) first-name basis with supermodels Christy, Cindy, Linda, and Naomi. We’d likely never been within 500 miles of these women, the velvet rope of their champagne-and-Concorde lifestyles closed off to a bunch of kids in suburban Texas. Still, their names, faces, and bodies became almost as familiar to us as our own. Like most of the planet at that time, we were transfixed by their impossible beauty.
When I heard about the AppleTV+ docuseries , now streaming, I found myself yearning to find out more about these women, to hear about their lives—then and now. It used to be about simply marveling at their physical perfection–bone structures and legs and lips that made us question our own short legs or undetectable cheekbones. In 2023, as the women move through their 50s, it’s about looking past the perfection they were expected to embody in their youth and glimpsing something deeper, something relatable.
In the third episode of the series, there’s a clip of feminist pop culture critic Camille Paglia calling fashion magazines “artwork for the masses.” That’s often how these women were presented to us, as works of art. Their beauty outshone anything that may have been going on in their lives. Any pain or insecurity of theirs was airbrushed away, erased by the opulence of a Versace gown or the structure of an Azzedine Alaïa dress. Insecurities existed, as each woman confesses throughout the episodes, but supermodels weren’t paid to act like regular people with challenges or fears. They were paid to leave the rest of us—awkward teens and non-superhuman adults alike—in awe.
In the 1990s, magazines and movies ruled our world. TikTok didn’t exist and Instagram wasn’t a thing, and we got our pop culture–and our perceptions of beauty–from MTV and George Michael’s “Freedom: ’90!” video (directed by David Fincher!), in which Cindy, Naomi, Linda, and Christy danced around lip syncing and looking like noir goddesses dressed in bedsheets. Now models like Adwoa Aboah and Emily Ratajkowski have podcasts and platforms, but then it was all about the look. I’d heard a little about these women over the last few decades—Christy Turlington had her Every Mother Counts nonprofit, and she seemed to run a lot of marathons; Cindy Crawford’s daughter Kaia was modeling; Naomi Campbell had been called “difficult” and gotten arrested; and most recently, Linda Evangelista spoke out about the CoolSculpting cosmetic procedure that left her body permanently deformed.
Because I first encountered these women in that pre-podcast era when beautiful models weren’t really asked to speak unless they were shilling for Chanel, my perceptions of what these women’s personalities were actually like had been shaped entirely by what the media fed us. As The Washington Post’s Robin Givhan says in the first episode of the series, “There was a mythology to models. They were expected to hide their humanity.”
In each of the four episodes of The Super Models, those perceptions are confronted head on. The women aren’t there to sell clothes, although they still have the power to make me covet the casual navy blue shirt Christy Turlington wears. They’re there specifically to talk about their humanity, which was so often beside the point. I had no idea that Cindy Crawford worked in cornfields and lost a brother to leukemia when she was a child. Or that Naomi Campbell was raised by a single teen mom, and that she appeared in a Bob Marley video as a kid. At first it’s almost jarring to watch these women get to tell their own stories, with no editors or agents around to shape the narrative. It’s also a huge relief to see Naomi Campbell having a hot flash on camera, saying things like, “Why don’t men get menopause?” Yes, her long, long legs still defy all logic, but she’s human after all. She’s sweating because of hormones!
Cindy Crawford Revealed That Her Signature Long Hair Is Actually a Trauma Response
She’s coping by growing, literally.
With a confessional docuseries like this, there’s always the possibility that the women are still being presented in the best possible light. Would they have agreed to do it otherwise? But there’s also an honesty that comes through, a sense that they really just want to tell their own stories. It’s touching when Naomi talks about her grief over the deaths of her “Papa” Alaïa, or of Gianni Versace, and about the addictions she’s battled. It’s also worlds away from the “diva” behavior we’ve been told about in countless articles over the years. Of course, all four women have likely had diva moments. I mean, if I had been a 24-year-old supermodel flying in private jets and hearing strangers scream about how utterly stunning I was, I probably would have had some haughty outbursts too. Here, though, you get four women talking about being mothers, about aging, and about the abuse and misogyny they endured in a culture that was not yet capable of creating a hashtag that could take down those abusers.
One of the most surprising things, though—besides a cringey old clip of Oprah telling Cindy Crawford to stand up and twirl to show off her body—is what’s revealed about the bonds between these women. Why did I assume they didn’t like each other, or that they were competitive and not close? Was it my own unconscious bias about beautiful women and cattiness? Where did that even come from? Watching The Super Models, you find out that Naomi and Christy were roommates in New York as teen models (news to me), and they still appear to be just as close. They all seem to love each other the way I love my college friends—the people you grow up with, the ones who were there for it all, who know you to your core. “They’re my sisters,” Campbell says of the other three. It’s not at all what I expected to hear, but that’s on me.
Interspersed throughout the one-on-one interviews and archival footage in the series, you get glimpses of Christy, Cindy, Linda, and Naomi barefaced, their hair in clips or rollers as they get glammed up for their first joint photo shoot in years. They still look like goddesses, but more like goddesses who’ve dealt with toddler tantrums and crow’s feet, illness, heartbreak, and loss. It’s still fascinating to just bask in their beauty, but it’s now equally fascinating to hear them open up about their power and their vulnerability. Instead of being represented by a sexy sound bite backstage at a Tom Ford show, or via a cute quip on MTV, these four women who I thought I knew get to talk, at length, and topple some of the false perceptions or sensational stories that have followed them over the years. Here they are, grappling with real life. Granted, their real lives involve stunning mansions in Kenya and Malibu, but still.
Evangelista has endured an abusive husband, lung disease, cancer, and physical disfigurement. Watching The Super Models, decades after her infamous line about not getting out of bed for less than $10,000 a day, I got the sense that she seems to understand that as much as we all love to catch glimpses of glamour, or of so-called perfection, those moments, those images, won’t be the ones that carry us forward.
“Youth is not sustainable,” Evangelista says near the end of the series. “Beauty is. There’s a difference.”
Dina Gachman is a Pulitzer Center grantee and a regular contributor to The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and Vox. Her book So Sorry for Your Loss was published by Union Square & Co. in April 2023.
