The Super Models: the Apple TV+ docuseries reminds us what true sisterhood was

C‘they were once the super models, those celestial beings capable of making people talk about themselves not so much for the clothes they wore but for the charisma they exerted with their gaze and their strides on the catwalks, and they are still there. Because yesterday’s super models continue to shine today with a powerful and indissoluble aura because, unlike the collections they have advertised over the decades, they, yes, have never gone out of fashion. They entered our homes through newspapers and television and became, depending on the case, models of life and objects of desire, so familiar that even today their first names are enough to identify them: Linda, Cindy, Naomi, Christy. The Super Models, the wonderful Apple TV+ docuseries created by Imagine Documentaries and One Story Up tries to tell us about them for the first time through their voices, revealing a world much more complicated than what it always seemed on the surface, with those smooth faces and those movements so sensual as to make us believe that nothing in their lives had ever gone wrong.

Aside from the fact that they were the first to demonstrate that the star system was not just a matter of cinemaeffectively paving the way for the army of influencers that would make their way in the 2010s, these extraordinary women, long criticized for practicing and professing a canon of beauty unattainable for ordinary women, they dictated fashions – from Linda Evangelista’s bob to the mole near the curl of Cindy Crawford’s left lip – it has been demonstrated that unity is always able to make a difference. Watching The Super Modelsdirected by Oscar winner Roger Ross Williams and Larissa Bills, we discover, in fact, a sense of sisterhood that in today’s selfish world, the one in which the success of others almost never causes joy but only envy and frustration, it seems more like a utopian idea that works very well with words but very badly in practice.

From the 1980s onwards, when photographers like Steven Meisel and stylists like Gianni Versace and Dolce and Gabbana they understood that the models were not just lobotomized mannequins carrying clothes but professionals capable of making clothes shine and enhance thanks to their personality and charisma, the super models never stopped, finding their strength precisely in friendship with others. In years in which talking about money for a woman was considered vulgar – something that, if we think about it, unfortunately still applies today – and in which black models rarely paraded during the summer season and only in bright clothes, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington they threatened not only to tear up the contracts if Naomi Campbell had not been immediately contacted to work with them, but also to give up the job if the compensation had not been the same as the others and adequate for their performance. The super models, beyond to redefine power roles of a more closed and rigid industry than the Papal State, have, in fact, struggled to have a voice, as well as a breathtaking body. They made their way with beauty, but they survived the test of time for more than forty years only thanks to battles who silently fought to be taken seriously.

The music video of Freedom! ’90 by George Michael, the first to cast super models as protagonists – a certain person directed it David Fincherwhich you may know – tells exactly this: a power and an allure that for the first time have managed to extend beyond the catwalks to transform these women into contemporary divas who as girls only had the dream of escaping from the difficult lives they led province to return to their lives as winners. Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell, each according to their own times and temperament, succeeded without even realizing it, remaining on the crest of the wave for all these decades – will today’s models be able to do the same same in the future, arousing the same enthusiasm that reached us when we saw Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Carla Bruni, Claudia Schiffer and Helena Christensen make a surprise appearance at the 2017 Versace fashion show on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of Gianni’s death? – And paving the way for all the others after them.