John Casablancas' models were fashion icons like Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford, who earned enormously high paychecks, but Casablancas and his agency also faced significant scandals throughout his life.
John Casablancas Estate/NetflixElite Model Management promised something different from the more “prim and proper” modeling agencies.
The supermodels of the 1980s and 1990s dominated the magazine stands, appearing on the covers of fashion publications and tabloids. And one man took credit for inventing the concept of the supermodel: John Casablancas, the founder of Elite Model Management.
His friends called him lucky, while his rivals declared him sleazy.
“It was an unexpected profession, accidental and wonderful,” Casablancas once said. “It was a profession that allowed me to hold in my arms a number of women of such incredible beauty that most men could not even dare to dream it.” But his career wasn’t all smooth sailing.
The Early Life Of John Casablancas
Born on Dec. 12, 1942 in New York to parents who had escaped the Spanish Civil War, John Casablancas would later cross the Atlantic himself to attend a boarding school in Switzerland. He soon traveled throughout Europe.
“I lost my virginity at the age of 15 on a summer night in 1958 in Cannes on the French Riviera,” Casablancas later remembered. “I was a very lucky boy. Most of my friends had terrible first experiences with hookers or ugly girls in awful places at the end of long drunken nights.”
That summer experience in Cannes clearly shaped him. As he put it: “At the end of the summer, I went back to school a changed man. I was destined to fall in love very passionately and very regularly.”
John Casablancas Estate/NetflixFrom his boarding school years, Casablancas found himself in trouble because of his many romantic relationships.
Back in Geneva, a controversial tryst with a maid cost Casablancas his recommendation letters for college. Undeterred, he eventually moved to Brazil and got a job as a marketing manager for Coca-Cola. His marketing background later helped Casablancas sell the concept of the supermodel.
After relocating to Paris and splitting up with his first wife, Marie-Christine, John Casablancas met his future second wife, a 19-year-old Danish model named Jeanette Christjansen, in 1967.
Christjansen soon encouraged Casablancas to start his own modeling agency. She promised to help her husband scour Scandinavia for top talent. By 1972, the agency would evolve into Elite Model Management.
Founding Elite Model Management
Elite Model Management, under the leadership of John Casablancas, offered something new. At the time, many other modeling agencies promised polished professionals. Eileen Ford, the founder of Ford Models, taught her girls proper manners and instituted strict curfews.
Casablancas took the opposite approach. His models would often become more like rock stars, making headlines for their wild lifestyles. And Casablancas would be the equally wild manager of the band.
“I knew I was an outsider, and as a strategy from day one, I chose to put in opposition the European free lifestyle, charm, and sensuality against the austere, puritanical, prim, and proper approach of Eileen Ford,” John Casablancas later explained in an interview.
John Casablancas Estate/NetflixCasablancas often surrounded himself with models, even when he wasn’t working.
While other modeling agencies defaulted to the blonde Scandinavian look, Casablancas also signed Iman, Beverly Johnson, and Naomi Campbell.
“The look, mostly dictated by Ford, was Wasp/Scandinavian (Grace Kelly, Candice Bergen),” Casablancas said. “Having Iman and Beverly Johnson together at Elite gave us a practical monopoly on the top budgets for Black models.” Clearly, diversity helped his agency stand out even more.
As Casablancas and Ford fiercely competed with each other, the showdown between them became known as the “Model Wars.”
Inside The Model Wars
In 1977, John Casablancas moved Elite Model Management to New York, paving the way for a showdown with Eileen Ford — New York was her turf, and another agency moving in was widely seen as an attack.
While Ford had tradition on her side, Casablancas had his own trump card that was perhaps even more powerful: the supermodel.
“We gave them huge amounts of money, and we gave them names and personalities,” Casablancas later said of his most famous models. “They became a dream for the larger public. They became supermodels.”
John Casablancas Estate/NetflixCasablancas wanted to turn models into rock stars.
Christie Brinkley saw her earnings triple after Casablancas signed her. His roster of supermodels soon grew to include big names like Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, and Linda Evangelista. Casablancas also helped launch the successful careers of Gisele Bündchen and Heidi Klum.
With Elite and Ford snatching up each other’s clients, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Model Wars heated up. Ford declared Casablancas “sleazy,” while he dismissed her as a prude. Lawsuits and tabloid headlines followed.
Meanwhile, the public paid more attention than ever to the fashion world. “There’s no doubt that the Model Wars were good for the whole of the U.S. fashion business, and for New York in particular,” said stylist Shelly Promisel. “The rates paid to models went sky high. Girls that cost $750 a day were charging $1,500 a few years after Elite arrived.”
Wikimedia CommonsPresident Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan with Christie Brinkley, Cheryl Tiegs, and Brooke Shields in 1983.
Casablancas enjoyed the fight. Years later, he concluded, “The mediocrity of the business and my competitors made me look like a genius.”
Meanwhile, money poured into the modeling industry. By the 1980s, Elite boasted over $100 million in booking fees per year. And in 1990, Evangelista breezily declared that she would not “wake up for less than $10,000 a day.”
The Scandals Of John Casablancas
Though John Casablancas achieved great professional success, his personal life was filled with controversy, especially when it came to his relationships.
He was known to have a type: teen models. In 1983, Casablancas had a very public “affair” with then-16-year-old model Stephanie Seymour, which ended his marriage to Christjansen for good. Controversially, Casablancas was 41 years old at the time. And in 1993, he married 17-year-old Aline Wermelinger, not long after she entered an Elite modeling competition in Rio de Janeiro.
Clearly, the rock star aura that Casablancas cultivated came with a dark side. A 1999 BBC documentary later accused Elite of pushing drugs on underage models. Some men working for Elite faced accusations of sexual assault and rape. Although Casablancas had already sold Elite in 1990, the fallout chased him, especially since he had continued to work with the agency.
John Casablancas Estate/NetflixCasablancas eventually insulted the supermodels he created, calling them “impossible.”
And eventually, Casablancas spoke out against his models, sometimes even wielding personal and hurtful insults. Heidi Klum was “a German sausage without talent,” while Gisele Bündchen was “a monster of selfishness.”
In 2000, Casablancas even declared that his biggest regret was “that I created the supermodel. They can be impossible, impossible.” He soon left New York City behind to live in Rio de Janeiro instead (though he eventually returned to America to live in Miami). Casablancas died in 2013 at the age of 70 in Rio de Janeiro, following a battle with cancer.
“Nothing I have done has changed the world,” Casablancas announced in a documentary released after his death, “but by God have I had fun doing it.”
Next, go inside the glamorous story of Twiggy, the iconic English model whose look defined the 1960s. Then, check out seven famous pinup models who made jaws drop across America and beyond.
