Model Citizens, page 2

Anyone who wants a lesson in the mastery of modeling's deceptively simple arts can find abundant examples in three new books. "Lisa Fonssagrives: A Portrait" (Vendome Press), edited by fashion photographer David Seidner, is an exquisite and loving tribute to the woman whose work from the '30s to the '50s, especially with her husband and collaborator Irving Penn, virtually defined haute couture elegance in those years. "Naomi" (Universe), by Naomi Campbell, a compilation of the model's work, replete with testimonials and even Campbell's fish-and-chips recipe, is a sort of fan's scrapbook. "10 Women" (te Neues), by the photographer Peter Lindbergh, showcases Lindbergh's particular style of lived-in elegance in portfolios of 10 top contemporary models. The unembarrassed pleasure these books take in their subjects is a relief from the cattiness, jealousy, condescension, and plain sexism of what's been written about models in the past few years — things which, were they written about any other group of women, would start a firestorm of criticism. Is the anti-fashion, anti-model poot of Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf anything more than a chance to resurrect the old canard that beauty and brains are mutually exclusive? Is labeling the bewitching Kate Moss anorexic (a lie that should be immediately apparent to anyone with two working eyes and half a working brain) anything but an acceptable form of the denigration of body type that feminists decry? (I can remember my mother telling me as I was growing up that the people who said to her, "You're too skinny," couldn't have been more hurtful if they told her she was too fat.) Beauty and the ability to project it is a gift too many people want to turn into proof of moral and intellectual shallowness. Models work in a place where feminism and social criticism intersect with our abiding Puritan fear and distrust of beauty, pleasure and success. The most common complaint about models is that "people don't look like that." True. And most of us can't shoot a basketball like Michael Jordan, play piano like Thelonious Monk, or sing like Cecelia Bartoli. Deal with it. Despite all the prudery and hostility directed at them, models have become a fixture of popular culture, to the point where their personalities have superseded the clothes they're supposed to be selling. Clothes now serve models the way standards once served popular singers. A Calvin Klein dress on Christy Turlington or a Tom Ford suit on Kate Moss are vehicles for expression the way Billie Holliday's version of "I'll Be Seeing You" or Sinatra's "That Old Devil Moon" were. That's the opposite of how Lisa Fonssagrives, arguably the first supermodel, worked. "Lisa Fonssagrives" includes an essay by the British photography historian Martin Harrison that quotes Irving Penn (who was married to Fonssagrives until her death in 1991) as saying that the personality of the subject is of no importance in a fashion shoot. As a model, Fonssagrives didn't reveal herself as much as she collaborated with the photographer to realize a stylized caricature of sophistication. After retiring from modeling in the late `50s, Fonssagrives devoted herself to sculpture. She maintained that her work as a model was a form of sculpture as well. Look at the natural contours of Fonssagrives' face and body — the upturned nose, the slant of her long neck, the sleek upward curve of her jawline, those endless arms capped by hands cocked as though her joints had been replaced by ball bearings, her eyes and lips emphasized by bold arches of lipstick and liner — and you see the spare, stylized jots of a line drawing. In photo after photo, everything about Fonssagrives seems to be ascending. In almost every photo here, there's something not quite real about Fonssagrives. The pictures are an expression of the era Harrison talks of, when fashion was seen as something for the idle rich, and haute couture had yet to give way to clothes for working women. They show both the glory of that era and why it had to end. If Lisa Fonssagrives was the epitome of unattainable elegance, Naomi Campbell is casual funkiness triumphant. Leafing through "Naomi" is like picking up a fat fan mag devoted to one star in all her yumminess. It is also an unintentional demonstration of current fashion's — and fashion photography's — stealth raids on the past. Over the course of this book, Campbell goes from '30s gangster in pin-stripe suit, to '40s satin doll in slip and pageboy, to '50s jet-setter in Dalmatian-print dress (and matching Dalmatians), to Gauguin native in sarong and exotic flowers, to pin-up cutie in nature's glory. What unites the photos is Campbell's generous impudence, an unshakable confidence that always lets us in on the joke. There may be more of a sense of dress-up, more overt playfulness in Campbell than in any other current model. But the book in this trio that makes the best case for models as performers who use photography as their medium of expression is Peter Lindbergh's "10 Women." There's a spontaneity to Lindbergh's work (or perhaps the illusion of spontaneity) that, I think, helps us to see style as something that exists in the course of everyday life. Lindbergh loves natural settings (the desert and seasides), and familiar ones (city streets), and he loves natural looks. Lindbergh's close-ups are likely to feature mussed hair, likely to bring out shadows and lines, the textures of his models' skin, the downy hair on arms and foreheads. Fashion is rigorously subordinated to personality here. A white cotton shirt in a Lindbergh photo isn't the crisp image of perfection it is in other fashion photos; it shows the wrinkles that come after a few hours' wear. Even when he shoots haute couture, he undercuts it. He plunks Linda Evangelista, dressed in an evening gown and tulle headdress, down in the sand next to a big dog who looks as if he's about to give her a sloppy kiss. Lindbergh never imposes personas on the models. His method is to clear a space in which they can project. He is admiring rather than protective, and the result is a series of portraits that, even in his subjects' most pensive moments, radiate strength. Kristin McMenamy, dressed only in pleated trousers, or in long gloves and high heels, comes off as the child of Chaplin and Sally Bowles. Lindbergh pays Kate Moss the supreme compliment of seeing her as woman, not waif, and the resulting portraits give her a touching gravity without violating her youthful spirit. His most stunning collaboration is with the ravishing Tatjana Patitz who, with her penetrating gaze and ever-present cigarette, conveys a weary hauteur that's both hard-boiled and elegant. She's a creature out of Dostoevsky and Raymond Chandler, simultaneously. To me, the supreme expression of style has always been a woman walking along a city street on a sweltering summer day who manages to look cool and composed. I suppose I love looking at models for much the same reason: because they represent to me a possibility of getting through the hassle of everyday life with some semblance of grace, even wit. Style, for me, has always been less about exclusivity and exclusion from life than a sort of alert comfort, what Isaac Mizrahi calls "understanding yourself for whatever the hell you think you are at the moment." Jane Jacobs' great 1961 polemic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" was an impassioned argument for the necessity of making our cities amenable to life in its mundaneness as well as its pleasures. "The sum of ... casual public contact ... is a feeling for the public identity of people," Jacobs wrote. Looking at a photo of Kate Moss strolling down a city street, or of a rumpled Amber Valetta slumped over a lunch-counter cup of coffee, is a reminder of how a public identity can radiate faith in the ability to thrive in our surroundings. It is style as a sort of good citizenship, a secular expression of what it can mean, in the words of an old spiritual, to brighten the corner where you live. Charles Taylor is a regular contributor to Salon.