The first house model was a couturier’s wife in 1853
Charles Frederick Worth asked Marie Vernet Worth to wear his designs for clients, inventing the house model. Before that, fourteenth-century Europe showed fashion on dolls. By the late 1940s, Barbara Goalen, Bettina Graziani, and Lisa Fonssagrives commanded star pay; Fonssagrives alone appeared on over two hundred Vogue covers.
A model’s job is to lend a body—not opinions—to someone else’s product or artistic imagination. Fine art, fashion, glamour, fitness, and body-part promo sit beside magazine, film, and TV work; much of it is part-time. Artists’ models, often hired professionals shared among classes or sketch groups, supply figures for drawing, painting, sculpture, and photography. Commercial illustration uses them too, though aesthetics usually lose to the brief.
Worth’s Paris practice made mannequin the British term for live house models by the 1880s. Photo modelling rose with fashion photography, but anonymity and low wages lasted until those late-1940s supermodels. Jinx Falkenburg earned twenty-five dollars an hour in the 1940s; Dorothea Church was among the first Black models recognized in Paris. Eileen and Gerard Ford founded Ford Models in New York in 1946. London’s 1960s scene made Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy household names—Twiggy, Face of ’66 at sixteen, stood 5′6″ with a boyish crop and earned about eighty pounds an hour when average weekly wages were fifteen.
Industry plumbing followed: London agents formed an association in 1967; Wilhelmina Models opened that year; Elite began in Paris in 1975. Beverly Johnson became the first Black woman on a U.S. Vogue cover in 1974. Margaux Hemingway’s 1975 million-dollar Babe perfume deal and Time cover pushed name recognition further. By 1990 Linda Evangelista told Vogue she would not wake for under ten thousand dollars a day, and in 1991 Christy Turlington’s Maybelline pact paid eight hundred thousand for twelve days a year—peak supermodel economics after decades of turning bodies into brands.
Source: Model (person)
