Thing of Beauty (17 page)

It was also the kind of picture that, ironically enough, would do absolutely nothing for Staedler’s career. “At the time, nobody had any use for a picture like that,” he recalled.
“I also did another one of her, just at her apartment one night after we had gone out, just a snapshot with a little camera. She was just wearing a pair of gym shorts, no top, and holding this little Charlie Chaplin doll she had in her room. No makeup, totally natural. That was something that, in 1978, nobody had any use for. ‘It’s nice,’ an art director would say, ‘but what’s it for? It just looks like a snapshot.’ Today, you’d try really hard to make a picture look that natural. You’d be on a shoot with hair and makeup artists, everybody working at being that natural. I printed it up for myself, but I never showed it to anyone.”

The copies of Staedler’s picture came back from the lab just in time for a week with several important appointments. Gia went to the offices of
Cosmopolitan
on Fifty-seventh Street—in the Hearst Building, along with
Harper’s Bazaar—and
dropped off her book. And two days later she went to the offices of
Vogue
at 350 Madison Avenue, just above Forty-fourth.
Vogue
was on the thirteenth floor of the Condé Nast Publications building, which also housed the editorial, art, production and sales offices for four other American magazines—
Mademoiselle, Glamour, House & Garden
and
Bride’s
—and the U.S. offices of the British, French and Italian editions of
Vogue.

On American
Vogue’s
floor, where a tastefully decorated lobby led to a maze of extremely plain and relatively small offices and cubicles, Gia met with Sara Foley, who had the impressive-sounding title of assistant to the model editor and an equally impressive résumé. The position was Foley’s fifth within Condé Nast—she had already worked at every Condé Nast magazine but
House & Garden
—and her second job at
Vogue
, where she had started as second assistant to the editor-in-chief.

But that career’s worth of job changes had taken place in just six years since her college graduation—five if you subtracted the year she took off to live in Bermuda—and the twenty-eight-year-old veteran didn’t even have her own office, instead, Sara Foley, with perhaps the best bad job at the company’s most extravagant publication, was one of the reigning queens of the legions of Condé Nast gofer girls, whose parents always knew
someone
, whose clothes and hair
were always stylish, and whose overworked, underpaid tenures as “assistants” were a special kind of finishing school. They flowed into the building early in the morning and out after five like a tidal wave of conservative fashion statements: to a large degree, they were the “young people” fashion editors referred to when “discovering” new trends.

Sara Foley didn’t really choose
Vogue’s
models at all. As assistant to the model editor, she did some preliminary screening, and stayed in constant contact with the agencies to book the models chosen by the editors. But most of her job was executing the career-making-and-breaking decisions arrived at by the most powerful, most particular and most peculiar staff of fashion editors and art directors in the industry. If photographer Chris von Wangenheim convinced a
Vogue
fashion editor that the
most creative and modern way
to shoot a certain shoe was to create a table scene where the shoe was tagged—along with a gun, a bloody bra and prescription pill bottles—as evidence in a murder, Sara Foley had to arrange everything. She had to rent the gun, find the bra, buy the nail polish to simulate the blood, get the pill bottles from a pharmacist, get a table, get the evidence tags from a court, and then book Von Wangenheim, a studio and a stylist. She also had to tell the photographer when his picture was later killed, not so much because it was offensive, the editors said, but because the bra they bloodied had been manufactured by a touchy
Vogue
advertiser.

It was unclear what Gia’s appointment with Sara Foley really meant. It could have been that an editor at the magazine or a photographer associated with it had some interest in her. Or perhaps her booker had browbeaten Foley long enough that she agreed to take a look at Gia just to get off the phone.

Vogue
was still where every model dreamed about working, even though the magazine had changed dramatically in recent years and was considered, in some corners of the industry, a shell of its former self. But
Vogue
was exactly as ephemeral as the fashion world it covered and it was
perpetually
being accused of some new emptiness. In fact, it retained more of its turn-of-the-century roots than most
fashionistas
and readers realized, because most of them never really understood what
Vogue
was. They only knew what it appeared to be.

When Condé Nast, the St. Louis-born business manager of
Collier’s
, bought
Vogue
in 1909, it was a weakening sister to reigning
Harper’s Bazaar.
Nast transformed it into a powerhouse that delivered coverage of national and international style events to twentieth-century America’s first wave of nouveau riche. Together,
Vogue
and
Bazaar
would define what fashion magazines were: oversized, laden with artful fashion shots that redefined still photography, published for those who could afford to buy couture clothing or dreamed of buying it. Nast created the first international magazine chain by starting foreign editions of
Vogue
, and added an even higher-brow American publication,
Vanity Fair.
His company’s influence was increased by each publication’s power in its own country and
Vogue’s
collective international presence. The Condé Nast magazines also successfully established an alternative reality for the world of high society and high fashion.

Magazines were entirely self-invented creatures. Unlike newspapers, which purported to report on the world as it was, magazines created a world within their pages, with self-proclaimed rules truly understood only by those who made them. Nast proved that if magazines were very successful, the worlds they invented could actually come to be. Many of the garments shown in
Vogue
were created only at the request of the magazine’s editors. The first-ever “New York Collection,” showing couture clothes designed by Americans, was organized by
Vogue
itself in 1914. In fact, many of the events written about in
Vogue
, and later in
Vanity Fair
, were arranged just to be covered by the magazines.

In creating his
Vogue
world, Nast adhered to a Keatsian code of fashion ethics—if it looked beautiful, it was true—but added a hidden Keynesian twist: Many of the vaunted flights of fashion fancy were tied to the harsh reality of advertising revenues. The magazine gave extremely preferential treatment to advertisers.
Vogue’s
“editorial” pages
appeared
, to any trusting reader, to contain the unbiased fashion statements of the magazine’s glamorous staff of experts. But church and state were not so neatly divided. Few
garments created by non-advertisers were ever displayed, and the number of times an advertiser would be editorially “mentioned” was spelled out in the client’s ad contract. There was a “Must List” of advertisers whose wares had to appear in the magazine whether aesthetically deserving or not. These practices were neither illegal nor really immoral. They were simply standard operating procedure.

Nast died in 1942, and most of his magazines weathered World War II about as well as the entire beauty-industrial complex. They all hung on by a thread, and were rescued in 1947 when Christian Dior’s seminal “New Look” collection reestablished the French couture and signaled a return to women’s fashion, as usual. The New Look was the fashion industry’s remedy for a decade when the world had other things on its collective mind, and life had grown dangerously utilitarian and egalitarian. The natural order of fashion—the “clothing chain”—was in jeopardy. Women were working. U.S. government restrictions on garment design—banning hems over two inches, cuffs, ruffles or zippers (the latter of which caused the innovation of the wraparound skirt)—had contributed to a rise in more casual clothes and increasingly unisex designs. Americans, cut off from Europe by the war, had even begun to appreciate their own designers. The New Look helped save the civilized world from all that.

In 1959, newspaper magnate S. I. Newhouse bought a controlling interest in the Condé Nast company, but didn’t initially tinker with the
Vogue
formula. In fact, it was under the Newhouse family that
Vogue
lured one of the grand doyennes of glamour and fantasy in fashion magazines, Diana Vreeland, away from her post as the very successful fashion editor of
Harper’s Bazaar.
Vreeland brought along the reigning photographer of the moment, Richard Avedon, and delivered
Vogue
its first decisive victory in the decades-old battle between the two magazines.

By the late sixties,
Vogue
finally began to feel some of the pressures that could have just as easily come in the late forties—if returning soldier-husbands and postwar prosperity hadn’t forced women to give up their emergency careers and retreat to suburban kitchens. Condé Nast Publications found itself faced with the shrinking wealth of the American industrial aristocracy and the rise of middle-class and even “working
women’s” values. The most obvious signs of a changing women’s world were the explosion in more fashionable “ready-to-wear” clothes and the incredible success of
Cosmopolitan
(which was owned, like
Harper’s Bazaar
, by the competing Hearst newspaper chain).
Cosmo
had found its success under Helen Gurley Brown, author of the naughtily popular book
Sex and the Single Girl
, who had taken over as editor in 1965.

At the same time, printing and mailing costs were dramatically rising, and Condé Nast brass started talking about lowering
Vogue’s
perfectly plucked brow. Former
Vogue
art director Alexander Liberman, elevated to company-wide “editorial director,” was to oversee the changes, which were being fought fiercely by Diana Vreeland. Then came 1970, the year
Vogue
heartily embraced the midi-length skirt—ordering a nation to re-hem and haw, just as the women’s movement successfully empowered America’s fashion victims to reject the dictates of the beauty-industrial complex. Seventh Avenue suffered mightily and
Vogue’s
power in the marketplace was seriously questioned.

Vreeland was unceremoniously dumped. Her second-in-command, Grace Mirabella, was made editor. From that moment on,
Vogue
people would be identified by whose regime they had served under, and whose sensibility had been etched on their fashion tabula rasa. The magazine became gradually less exclusive as fashion became more—and the Vreelanders cringed at the term—
democratic.
The most dramatic alteration came in 1977, when
Vogue
was physically downscaled to newsstand size and offered for sale at supermarket checkout counters.

But even through all these changes,
Vogue
still stood for something in the fashion world. It was still the biggest, most extravagant and most powerful style publication in the most important market in the world. It still had its “Must Lists,” which continued to be worth buying a place on. If the magazine no longer lived up to its history, at least it
had
its history. Relative to its surroundings, it was still
Vogue.

Over the next few weeks, Gia continued the steady stream of hourly appointments and occasional tests. On Friday mornings there was usually a meeting at the agency, and on
other nights they held classes on runway or makeup techniques. Gia went to castings for the Young & Rubicam advertising agency and Paramount Pictures, stopped in to be seen by several people at Revlon, Bloomingdale’s,
Woman’s Day
and
Bride’s
, and showed her book at the studios of some of the top editorial photographers for the major American and European fashion magazines: Jimmy Moore, Anthony Barboza, John Stember, Andrea Blanche and Bob Stone. Each appointment was just a name and an address ticked off the night before by her booker. Gia scribbled down their names—or something close to their names—and checked off each appointment when she finished. If someone seemed especially pleasant or obnoxious, she might write “nice” or “creep” above their name. But most of the people were, at best, faceless photo credits.

In the evenings, Gia and Sharon would sometimes go out together—as friends. They didn’t find themselves gravitating toward the gay clubs in New York because it just didn’t seem necessary: the mainstream nightspots were so mixed that suddenly it was the all-gay places that seemed limiting. Besides new hangouts, they developed sources for their regular needs: groceries, for which there sometimes was so little money that they ate peanuts for dinner, and drugs, for which they could always scratch up a few dollars.

“When we first moved up there it was mostly coke,” recalled Sharon Beverly. “Both of us liked to drink, but we were doing coke. There was one guy, his name was Michael. He lived on Central Park South and he had this beautiful apartment, but he was a dirty, old hippie with really long hair. He always had a lot of drugs on him, and, of course, if anyone had a lot of drugs, Gia was there. She was there
a lot
with him.”

Toward the end of May, things started to happen. On May 17, Gia had a full day of go-sees and requests scheduled, including a ten
A.M
. with Manning, one of the few remaining fashion illustrators still working in an industry that was now mostly photographs. Posing for illustrators like Manning or Joe Eula was a classy throwback to the earlier days of modeling, when it wasn’t so much a business as it was women being paid to inspire artists: that clear distinction between mannequins and muses had long since grown fuzzy.
At the last minute, the day’s appointments were canceled. She had been booked for a newspaper ad shooting for Bloomingdale’s. The photographer would be Arthur Elgort.