Images of Interview Magazine’s Model Issue fronts have stormed the internet over the weekend, prompting us to wonder who else could be better qualified to appear on its seven covers than rulers of the model queendom, Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington, Amber Valetta, Stephanie Seymour and Daria Werbowy? 

Because, while there’s no shortage of new models at the top of their game – Karlie Kloss, Jourdan Dunn and Lindsay Wixson, to name but a few – the appeal of the group often called the ‘original’ supers, is enduring. In the interview accompanying her cover shoot, Linda Evangelista tells the magazine that when she first started out, agents told her that ‘a good career was three years’, which only goes to show what power these women wield in fashion almost 30 years after some of them were first snapped – and how their time in the sun changed the way the industry, and consumers, reacted to models. 

 

Phenomenal cheekbones and eyes bigger and brighter than the fullest of moons aside, why do the faces we’ve loved for a long time still hold more allure than the wild-eyebrowed new ones they opened the door for? 

Recent reports that Karlie Kloss was being turned down for jobs because she was ‘too famous’ might have something to do with it. Sure, Cara Delevingne makes a cool cover, such is her proficiency for facial acrobatics – but when you know as much about her last spat with pop-pal Rita Ora as you do about her ability to look nice in clothes, is her position at the top somewhat thwarted? You might be less likely to see Lindsey and the girls who are better associated with the catwalk than celebrity splashed across the tabloids, but you have to admit that their omnipresence on social media, revealing mundane details such as a love for puzzles, lessens the idea of their other-worldly, unobtainable glamour, something that Amber Valetta certainly managed to retain, describing how her half-sister in Oklahoma 'saw me as someone she had a hard time relating to. We're super-close now, but I probably came home from Europe with weird opinions and attitudes and weird clothing'.

Indeed, Amber may remember the 'serious shenanigans' she and her fellow models got up to, but they weren't live-published for everyone to see. Notably, fashion was a simpler and less populist industry at the dawn of the super hey-day, with Naomi commenting, 'I was fortunate enough to have the wonderful designers and amazing photographers around me, and editors that I knew, and if I wanted to ask a question, I asked them. So that gap has broadened a bit'.

Admittedly Kate Moss is not exactly absent from less glossy titles, but thanks to her oft-quoted mantra ‘never complain, never explain’, if the best the Daily Mail can do is print pictures of her walking down the street, (something you could see with your own eyes if you knocked around Hampstead long enough), her position is probably safe. 

If ever the term ‘less is more’ could be more relevant, the continued prevalence of the models we only ever see as super, is it.