Forever Barbie_ The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll - Lord [108]
IF PROFESSIONAL MODELS WERE FORCE-FED SUPERSTAR, fashion magazines might look very different. In a 1993 People cover story, top models Kim Alexis, Beverly Johnson, and Carol Alt discussed the prevalence of eating disorders among models and how they had starved themselves to stay thin. Not to be outdone by her sister, Christine Alt, now a five-foot-ten-and-a-half-inch, 155-pound, "large-size" model, revealed that she had pared herself down to 110 pounds and developed an ulcer. "When Karen Carpenter died of anorexia," Christine said, "I remember seeing her picture in People and thinking, 'God, how lucky she was because she died thin.'"
JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH, "PAPER DOLLS FOR A POST-COLUMBIAN WORLD WITH ENSEMBLES CONTRIBUTED BY U.S. GOVERNMENT," 1991
COURTESY STEINBAUM KRAUSS GALLERY, prevalence of eating disorders among
M.Y.C.
Christine's remarks make one wonder about the Alt family. Sibling rivalry takes many forms, but sisters don't usually compete to see who can lose the most weight without dying. As near as I could tell, the problem with these models was that they only saw themselves as objects. True, by defin-ition, a model commodifies her body, but that commodification doesn't have to erase the person inside.
Still gorgeous at fifty, Lauren Hutton is proof that models can retain a sense of themselves as subjects—which, for older models, may make the difference between working or fading away. In an industry where "live dolls" used to be discarded when they showed signs of age, Hutton has made the transition from beautiful "girl" to beautiful "woman." She seems more visible as a model now than she was twenty-five years ago.
"When I first started modeling, I mostly worked for bad stylists in bad catalogue houses trying to get a break," Hutton told me. "And it was amazing. People would treat you like this sort of anonymous doll. They would touch you and be talking to each other—and I wasn't used to people touching me. I have dimples in my earlobes and I had a stylist try to smack a pair of pierced earrings through my dimples. She had her head turned talking. And I just went straight into the air because there were no holes there.
"The reason you become a successful model is because you learn how to make people see you as a person," she continued. "Not anonymous. You find a way of making contact. Of course, once I became famous, people were terrified of touching me in any way. But that's a whole other category."
Throughout her career, Hutton has defied the doll-like uniformity traditionally associated with models. On the advice of Vogue arbitrix Diana Vreeland, she refused to "correct" the now legendary gap between her front teeth. And in 1988, when she became the centerpiece of a Barneys New York ad campaign, she shattered the rule that live dolls don't age. "I thought it would be cool to show that someone who had been around awhile could be atrractive," Glenn O'Brien, creative director of Barneys, told me. "In a way, Hutton looks better now. Her character has kind of jelled. She isn't just a mannequin."
Significantly, Hutton has refused offers from toy companies to make a doll in her image. The first request came at the beginning of her career; the second in the late eighties, about the time Matchbox Toys issued its "Real Model Collection" with likenesses of Christie Brinkley, Cheryl Tiegs, and Beverly ("I ate nothing. I mean nothing") Johnson. "I had this instant repulsion at the idea," Hutton said. "And it was a weird feeling because I was flattered and repulsed at the same time."
In part, this had to do with her childhood distaste for baby dolls. "They looked larval," she told me. "What I really liked to do was to take their heads off and try to figure out how their eyes opened and shut. I never found out, because once you have the head off, you can't ever get the eyeballs back in. But with each doll, I convinced