From the catwalk to pop culture: Cindy Crawford revolutionized an entire industry with her rise to fashion icon status. Her career is about clichés, control and change.
Before Cindy Crawford became one of the most famous models on earth, she didn’t even know the profession even existed. Even as a young girl, she dreamed of becoming something really big (“nuclear physicist or the first female president”).
At the time, she didn’t imagine that her path would lead to the catwalk. Together with models like Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista, she became one of the first superstars to turn the industry on its head. Now the icon is 60 years old.
Cindy Crawford was born Cynthia Ann Crawford on February 20, 1966 near Chicago. She grew up as the daughter of an electrician and a bank employee. Her ideal childhood in the American Midwest is shattered when her brother develops leukemia and dies at just four years old. This makes her feel guilty, as she explains in a 1994 interview with Vanity Fair magazine. From then on she tried to be the perfect child.
Trademark birthmark gets “own talk show”
She succeeded: in 1984 she graduated from high school as the top of her class and received a scholarship to one of the top universities in the country. She wants to become a chemical engineer. She already gained her first modeling experience back then. In her penultimate year of school, a local photographer photographed her.
It was there, at her then boyfriend’s pool, that the picture was taken that she said in 2016 that changed everything. At 17, Crawford won the Look of the Year competition. She stopped studying shortly after starting and moved to New York in 1986.
The mole on her lip quickly became her unmistakable trademark – and at times attracted so much attention that Crawford joked in an interview that the mole was about to get “its own talk show.”
1990s: The rise of the supermodels
What follows is an unprecedented rise in the supermodel era of the 1990s. The hype surrounding models had never existed before. Models were little more than clothes racks and were supposed to remain unrecognized and anonymous so that fashion could take center stage. She once said that her father thought that modeling was just another term for prostitution.
A turning point is Peter Lindbergh’s Vogue cover from January 1990, together with Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz and Christy Turlington. The star photographer breaks with the tradition of smoothly retouched images and ushers in a new age of fashion photography. His portraits gave the supermodels a public face and personality. Another symbolic moment of the supermodel’s rise to the brand is the music video “Freedom! ’90” by George Michael, in which the five models are the main actresses. The women themselves become part of pop history.
Crawford prefers strategy games to social media
With her MTV show “House of Style,” Crawford also made a significant contribution to redefining fashion reporting: In it, she took viewers behind the scenes of the fashion world. Watching Naomi Campbell apply pimple cream? Something completely new back then. Fashion became pop culture and Cindy Crawford became an icon. Jobs like the Pepsi commercial made her a global star, her fitness video cassettes became a hit and the model became an entrepreneur.
As early as 1994, the well-known fashion critic Cathy Horyn described Crawford in “Vanity Fair”: “Cindy Crawford is more than just the supermodel of the 90s. She is an American icon who used her contracts with Revlon and MTV to expand her image as Cindy into a million-dollar empire.” Crawford makes himself a brand. “I’ve always approached things very strategically,” she said on the “Reclaiming with Monica Lewinsky” podcast a few months ago.
From supermodel to entrepreneur
This is why Crawford and the other supermodels are seen as the first fashion influencers. The New York Post, for example, called Crawford the pioneer of Tiktok. The pioneer is less likely to accept this today: “I prefer to play Mahjong,” she said in the podcast.
Today, Crawford lives in Malibu, is the co-founder of a skin care brand, has been married to Rande Gerber for almost 28 years and is the mother of a son and a daughter, both of whom are following in her professional footsteps. The documentary series “The Super Models” on Apple+, which was released in 2023, is also largely based on Crawford. In the podcast she says she wanted to tell her story herself. Crawford has always tried to control her career herself and has never let it completely dictate her career. In an interview with The New York Times, she once said, “I always say I modeled. It’s a verb for me, not an identity.”
dpa
