John Casablancas, the modeling agent whose shrewd and
sometimes scandalous packaging of
beautiful women ushered in the era of supermodels, died on Saturday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 70.
beautiful women ushered in the era of supermodels, died on Saturday in Rio de Janeiro. He was 70.
The cause was cancer,
said Lorraine Caggiano, his executive assistant. Mr. Casablancas, who lived in
Miami, was being treated in Brazil.
Head-turningly handsome, Mr. Casablancas courted scandal in
his own life as well, accused of having sexual relations with teenage models
and pursuing a playboy’s life of excess. For 30 years, through the Elite Model
Management agency, which he founded in Paris in 1972, he shaped the careers of
models who became household names, among them Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell,
Carol Alt, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Andie MacDowell, Kim Alexis,
Paulina Porizkova, Iman, Heidi Klum and Gisele Bündchen.
By the end of its first decade, Elite had become a serious
and brash competitor to the well-established New York agencies, like Ford and
Wilhelmina, setting off a series of raids, defections and gossipy lawsuits that
forever changed the modeling industry and were voraciously covered in the
tabloids as the “Model Wars.”
Mr. Casablancas was at the center of it all, unabashedly
mixing business with his pleasure. Where Jerry and Eileen Ford, who founded
Ford Models in 1946, had brought an almost puritanical sense of ethics to the
modeling business, introducing modern accounting practices and standardized pay
and working hours, Mr. Casablancas planted the flag of a provocateur,
encouraging his young charges to enjoy a lifestyle of champagne and wild
parties, and sometimes more. He also made the most successful ones very rich.
“I had the understanding of a guy who loved beautiful women,
and above all who liked the sensuality of it all,” Mr. Casablancas said in a
2010 video interview with the blog Modelinia. “All of the other agents were
either women or gay guys. They had their own approach, which in certain instances
was probably superior to mine, but I had something I thought was unique. I
looked at my models as women.”
He was largely responsible for glamorizing the business and
turning models into idols, their egos expanding in direct proportion to their
earnings potential. In 1990, at the height of the supermodel moment, Ms.
Evangelista, then married to Gérald Marie, the president of Elite in Paris,
made a comment to Vogue that came to define the vainglorious world of modeling
that Mr. Casablancas had created: “We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a
day.”
Mr. Casablancas demanded top dollar for his models,
developing them as celebrities and media personalities, the stars of music
videos and presenters on MTV. In 1988, to make Ms. Crawford a recognizable face
beyond fashion, he encouraged her to pose for Playboy magazine. The ensuing
publicity led to a job as host of the MTV show “House of Style” and then to a
Pepsi commercial. In 1995 she topped the Forbes list of highest-paid models,
earning $6.5 million.
The success of Elite, with more than $100 million in annual
model bookings during the years it was run by Mr. Casablancas, represented a
turning point in modeling, for better and worse. As Wilhelmina Cooper, one of
his rivals, said of the typical top model in 1978, “She is now picking or
choosing who she wants to work for, instead of just taking what her agency
tells her to.”
Mr. Ford, who accused Elite of poaching models and sued the
company in the late 1970s, described Mr. Casablancas’s methods at the time as
“sleazy.”
Beyond his feuds with other agencies, Mr. Casablancas was
frequently criticized for having sexual relationships with young models. His
public affair with Stephanie Seymour in 1983, when he was 41 and she was 15,
ended his second marriage, to Jeanette Christjansen, a former model and the 1965
Miss Denmark.
Mr. Casablancas scoffed at the criticism, but his reputation
was severely tarnished in 1999 as a result of a BBC One undercover exposé that
showed Elite’s agents in Europe, including Mr. Marie, boasting of drug use and
sexual conquests with young models. Though he was not implicated in the
scandal, Mr. Casablancas resigned from the agency the next year.
John Casablancas was born on Dec. 12, 1942, in Manhattan,
the third of three children of Fernando and Antonia Casablancas, a Spanish couple
who, after fleeing the country’s civil war, grew wealthy from operating a
family textile-machinery business with factories around the world. At age 8 he
was sent to the Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland, along with many
children of the international jet set, and began a somewhat wayward life for
the next two decades.
After attending several European universities without
graduating, and taking jobs in finance, public relations and real estate, he
accepted a position offered by a family friend to become the marketing manager
of a Coca-Cola factory in Brazil. Still in his early 20s, he invited his French
girlfriend, Marie-Christine, to join him, and married her at her father’s
insistence.
When the couple returned to Paris a few years later, he took
a job with her brother in public relations for an architecture firm, but their
marriage was soon on the rocks. Mr. Casablancas was living in a tiny hotel in
1967 when he met Ms. Christjansen, who was 19 and on a modeling assignment for
the photographer Gunnar Larsen.
“I thought he was the best-looking man I’d ever laid eyes
on,” Ms. Christjansen told New York magazine in 1988.
After the affair began, Mr. Casablancas had a daughter,
Cecile, with his wife.
Ms. Christjansen’s unhappiness with her agency inspired him
to start a business, Elysée 3, representing photographers and models. After a
rough start, he created a new company with Alain Kittler, a classmate at Le
Rosey, to focus only on those they regarded as the best models. They named it
Elite.
Mr. Casablancas said he had seen an opportunity for models
with personality and sex appeal to command wider attention in magazines and on
runways.
“I introduced women with shape, short hair, brunettes, brown
eyes,” he said in the Modelinia interview. “Fashion is not about a Disney-like
type of catalogish model. Fashion is about really exciting girls that have
something to say, that express something.”
Shortly after opening a New York office in 1977, Elite was
sued for $10 million by Ford and Wilhelmina, but the cases were unsuccessful
and resulted only in more publicity for Mr. Casablancas. He married Ms.
Christjansen in 1978 and had a son, Julian, with her while the agency continued
to thrive.
Elite was the dominant name in global modeling well into the
1990s, until a series of problems, including the BBC One documentary and a
class-action lawsuit that accused several agencies of price fixing, led it to
seek bankruptcy protection in 2004.
Its assets were most recently acquired by Pacific Global
Management Group in 2011.
In 2000, Mr. Casablancas announced that he was selling his
Manhattan home and moving to Rio de Janeiro, where he had married Aline
Wermelinger in 1993. His marriage to Ms. Christjansen had ended in the late
1970s after their son’s birth. Ms. Wermelinger was then 17, having met Mr.
Casablancas the previous year when she participated in Elite’s Look of the Year
contest. She and their three children — John Jr., Fernando Augusto and Nina —
survive him, as do his children with his previous wives. Cecile Casablancas is
a jewelry designer, and Julian Casablancas is the lead singer of the rock band
the Strokes. He is also survived by a brother, Fernando.
After leaving Elite, Mr. Casablancas created a modeling
school, a model-scouting organization called Star System, and what he called a
“cybermodel agency,” Illusion 2K, which briefly promoted a computer-animated
model named Webbie Tookay. Her greatest attribute, Mr. Casablancas said, was that
she would never complain.
“One of my biggest regrets is that I created the
supermodel,” he told the London newspaper The Telegraph in 2000. “They can be
impossible. Elite single-handedly brought modeling rates to a peak no one could
have imagined, but the girls never thanked me for it. I’ve had enough.”
Agency Report
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