The documentary about the legendary 1990s fashion models has a celebratory air, but there’s still some juicy haute couture dirt.
The Super Models
is a capable, careful sketching of what happens when you rise to the pinnacle of cultural desire. Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington were pioneers, the public faces of a new paradigm in fashion and celebrity, but these episodes sometimes edge around the difficulties that uncovered. Their iconic photos had no digital retouching, the quartet point out, but this narrative is a different matter.
Directors Roger Ross Williams and Larissa Bills are experienced documentarians, and they’ve delivered a satisfying mix of the archival and the anecdotal that matches up to the disparate personalities of the four subjects, who are all executive producers. There are feel good reunions and the stories behind acclaimed images, some thoughtful evaluation and many famous faces – the exception being contemporaries such as Claudia Schiffer and Helena Christensen, who apparently do not exist.
The most noticeable example is Evangelista, the gentlest and most vulnerable of the four in the contemporary interviews, revealing how her husband in the 1990s, French model agent Gerald Marie, physically abused her during their marriage. “He knew not to touch the face, the moneymaker,” she says, capturing an indelible image of how a marriage forged in fashion and commerce could become malignant.
The modern lens allows for some positive reinterpretation: they had agencies represent them, but they had to grasp their own agency. There’s little on the history of modelling, but some corporate insight. The celebratory air – they are survivors, CEOs, mothers, and apparently in Campbell’s case, a “stateswoman” – does mean that those looking for some juicy haute couture dirt aren’t going to be satisfied.