Some had come to New York with parents or chaperones in tow others were alone. While Elite’s official brochure stated that contestants were aged between 14 and 24, all of those the Guardian has spoken to, competing in both years, were aged between 14 and 19. “This wasn’t being judged or part of the competition – it was for their entertainment.” “I knew in my gut it wasn’t right,” she recalls. She says an organiser told her that if she refused, she would be excluded from the competition. Photograph: Nina Berman/NOORĪnother contestant, who was 15 at the time, also remembers being asked to walk for Trump, Casablancas and other men on the boat in September 1992. I didn’t dance – I blew a kiss at them, spun around and walked away.”Ĭontestants wait to board the Spirit of New York yacht, September 1991. And she said, ‘No, you look great, take off your blazer and go and do it.’ So I walked down the stairs. “I said to her, ‘I don’t see why me going down the stairs and dancing in front of those two has anything to do with me becoming a model. “A woman at the agency was pushing me,” she recalls. Lee, an introverted teenager who loved to draw but hated school, was in New York for the first time. She recalls how the contestants were encouraged to parade downstairs, one by one, and dance for Trump, Casablancas and others. One of the girls on the boat was Shawna Lee, then a 14-year-old from a small town outside Toronto. On a similarly golden evening in early September that year, another group of contestants boarded the Spirit of New York, chartered for another Elite cruise. In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again. In 1991, he was a headline sponsor, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. Trump was closely involved in Casablancas’s competition.
At stake was a life-changing prize: a $150,000 contract with the world’s then leading modelling agency, Elite Model Management, run by John Casablancas. They had travelled from around the world to compete in Elite’s Look of the Year competition, an annual event that had been running since 1983 and was already credited with launching the careers of Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen and Stephanie Seymour. In theatres June 29.The party aboard the Spirit of New York was one of several events that Donald Trump, then 45, attended with a group of 58 aspiring young models that September. Casablancas, The Man Who Loved Women, a documentary by Hubert Woroniecki. From Paris to New York, Hubert Woroniecki's documentary follows Casablancas from the beginning to the end of his glory days, never without a cigarette in his hand, unfailingly drenched in Elsève, and always with his arms around some lithe young girl with endless legs and an athletic body.
#JOHN CASABLANCAS STEPHANIE SEYMOUR MOVIE#
Taking his cue from the movie studios of Hollywood, the businessman invented girls like Iman, a Somalian princess who was supposedly discovered in a bush as a young child. Before it was rocked by scandal in the 1990s, the agency ruled over the fashion world, pioneering a new prototype of model whose elaborate back-stories crafted by Casablancas himself consistently secured the girls instantaneous success.
Smooth-talking and sophisticated, with a mustache that would make Tom Selleck proud, John Casablancas was a born playboy with an brilliant knack for business that resulted in the founding of legendary model management company Elite. Unbeknownst to many of us today, lead-singer of indie rock band The Strokes Julian Casablancas had an extremely famous father. With an enlightening biopic set to hit screens today, we found out more about the fashion mogul. But who was the man behind it? With his playboy lifestyle and keen eye for beauty, John Casablancas set a trend for model spotting that resulted in the birth of a generation of global superstars. Everyone's heard of Elite Model Management.
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