Drop dead, gorgeous

Models represent our times because they reflect our own shallowness. No wonder we hate them

THERE WAS a time before the mid-Eighties when the word "model" was used as a job description. Now it is used to describe a state of grace bestowed on a clutch of successful women who do not just do modelling, but are models. How this has come about, and why zeitgeist surfers such as a writer like Jay McInerny see the model as "the representative figure of our times", may be worth pondering.

The person least likely to enlighten us on this score has been given three hours of television time to do so. I am referring to the photographer David Bailey who knows all there is to know about models because he has married a few, photographed loads and slept with millions. Asking Bailey to examine the modelling industry is like asking the bloke down the pub to analyse the current state of the NHS because he happens to have a thing about women in nurses uniform.

Models Close-up was revealing mainly because of its extraordinary lack of interest in revealing anything that we did not already know. You may be surprised, for instance, to find out that models have to have a certain "something", that sleazy guys prey upon them, that they drink champagne all the time and fly around the world, but I cannot say that I was.

Bailey, who is a "geezer" and therefore obviously not a sleaze ball, was filmed with a slimy playboy whose main claim to fame was that he too had slept with lots of models. "Join the club" these revolting men wheezed at each other. Meanwhile "the models or girls or whatever you like to call them", as Bailey helpfully explained, were interviewed except one who didn't turn up - Linda Evangelista - who claimed she was having a panic attack. Perhaps Linda was going through some sort of existential crisis or she was having a bad hair day. Perhaps she just could not be bothered to get out of bed for Channel 4 and darling, can you blame her?

Those who could be bothered wheeled out the same old stories. How Kate Moss got discovered at the airport, how Cindy and Christy and Helena wised up to the financial predators all slicing off their 10 per cent. How naughty Naomi was a monster who split with her agency or how the important thing about her was her "blackness". The fashion world, we are told, can't really deal with blackness, which is a shame because fashion writers won't be able to inform us that blackness is the new whiteness.

If modelling is a superficial industry where nothing matters except what you look like, how come the myth is still perpetuated that looks are not everything, that you have to have an extra talent or ability to make it to the top?

For this is what the magazines tell us and women's magazines are full of stories of models who were once ugly ducklings, of unusual beauties who were not appreciated until one particular scout saw them on the street. All this feeds into the sad fantasy that any of us could be a model even if we are too short, too fat, too ugly. A lot of money is made out of these wannabes who pay to be humiliated. Still, I guess no man ever made it with the chat-up line "Has anyone ever told you that you could never be a model?"

Just as the Spice Girls' popularity was premised on their individual "personalities", so too the supermodels have become brand names. They do not just model anymore. They make exercise videos, write novels, get their bit parts in movies.

The pointless search to insist that they have some sort of depth is fascinating to behold. Here is Naomi with Nelson Mandela. The one world leader with a residue of integrity is happy these days to lend it to those who need to be taken a bit more seriously - models, Spice Girls, whatever. All those years in prison, not just to liberate people, but to provide the best PR on the planet for those whose image needs a little, shall we say, moral uplift.

I never understood the fuss about models until I went into a fashion show and there I was totally swept away. They are indeed fabulous aliens, not like the rest of us at all. They are trained to walk in the weirdest way possible by gay men, they are never given food, they cry a lot but claim to be having the best time and, yes, they are gorgeous beyond belief. They do live in a world where all that is solid melts into air. Look, here is Christy Turlington in a new glossy ad, lovelier than ever. The caption reads: "She is always and never the same." This is designed to sell Calvin's fragrance called Contradiction. Geddit? See, Christy changes and yet she is still Christy. I cannot wait for his new perfume, which will have a picture of Amber Valleta and the slogan "Women? Funny chaps aren't they?" Gibberish by Calvin Klein.

Yet what fascinates us about models is this very unreality. They sell the surface of themselves and we both reward and resent them for that. As Brett Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho, said, "I have very sinister and angry feelings about models, especially the kind of reactions they inspire in people, including myself". It is symptomatic that it takes a controversial novelist to expose the dark side of our fascination, for it is true that models do make a lot of people very angry.

We are angry that we do not look like them, that we cannot be them. We are angry that we cannot have them. We are angry that they are too thin and too stupid to be good role models for our girls. We are angry that they make so much money for doing so little. We are angry that they are part of a business which reduces everything to image. We are angry, when all is said and done, that life is so unfair, that some are born beautiful and some are not. Models undermine the idea that with enough hard work anyone can achieve their dream. Models remind us that whatever we might tell ourselves that it is not enough to be beautiful on the inside. Those most enthralled by models, though, are not the likes of Bailey and the superannuated roues he interviewed, but other women. Occasionally Cindy, Naomi and Claudia appear to make a boring car seem more glamorous, but on the whole their business comes from advertising clothes, make-up and perfume that is consumed by women.

Where can we read those all-important interviews with supermodels? Where can we find their top tips for packing light? Where can we find gossip about their fantastic love lives? In women's magazines. To reduce the role of a model, then, to sex objects is not to understand their appeal at all. If younger and younger girls are being consumed by the fashion industry then that is because those who sell make-up to middle-aged women know that it looks best on luminous skin. Indeed, it is women who make many of the key decisions in this industry about what is beautiful and what is not. The business of saturating us with impossible and unrealistic models is the fault of women as much as men.

Yet while in many fields women are pushing forward, we remain mesmerised by women whose success is entirely dependent on appearance, on being passively objectified, on the stimulation of desire. If the model is the representative of our times it is because she releases us from the responsibility of having to see beyond the image; she reflects our own shallowness back to us. No wonder we hate her.