Category Archives: Models

Linda Evangelista praises women accusing her ex-husband of rape

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Exclusive: supermodel speaks out after four more women accuse Gérald Marie of sexual misconduct

The supermodel Linda Evangelista has praised the “courage and strength” shown by a growing number of women accusing her ex-husband, the model agency boss Gérald Marie, of sexual misconduct and rape.

Speaking exclusively to the Guardian’s Weekend magazine, Evangelista said she believed the women’s accounts of their experiences with Marie, who for over three decades was among the most powerful figures in the fashion industry.

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Munroe Bergdorf receives landmark book deal for trans manifesto

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Model and activist signs six-figure contract to publish Transitional, ‘a manifesto for how I see society changing for the better, bringing us all closer’

The first book by Munroe Bergdorf, a manifesto on gender by the black transgender activist and model, has been bought for a six-figure sum after a bidding war between 11 publishers.

Bergdorf’s Transitional will be published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Exploring six different facets of human experience – adolescence, sexuality, gender, relationships, identity and race – the book will draw on Bergdorf’s own experiences, including growing up in a mixed-race family, going to an all-boys school and starting her transition at the age of 24. In it, she will argue that transition is an experience every person faces in every phase in life, “and that only by recognising this can we understand times of change”.

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Twiggy: ‘I don’t think high fashion will ever move completely away from slimness’

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As a model, she was the face of the 60s, and went on to have a busy acting career. She discusses her new podcast, and life in swinging London

So enduring is that image of Twiggy – side-swept hair, heavy eyes, delicate neck – that it’s strange to think she was a model for only four years.

But Twiggy is an expert at reinvention (or “branching out” as her joke goes). The schoolgirl known as Lesley Hornby became Twiggy, the face of the 1960s, recognised then and now by a single name. At 21, she became the all-singing, all-dancing star of Ken Russell’s 1971 film The Boy Friend, which won her two Golden Globes. She has performed on Broadway, recorded albums and been a TV presenter. In her 60s, she turned fashion designer, with several collections for Marks & Spencer. Last year, she was given a damehood.

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Teen models, powerful men and private dinners: when Trump hosted Look of the Year

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In the early 90s, Donald Trump judged the world’s biggest modelling competition - since hit by allegations of abuse. This is how the people who were there remember it.

Special investigation by Lucy Osborne, Harry Davies and Stephanie Kirchgaessner

On 1 September 1991, a large private yacht cruised towards the Statue of Liberty. It was a clear, breezy evening, and from the upper deck of the Spirit of New York, a golden sunset could be seen glinting off the Manhattan skyline. Downstairs, a party was in flow. Scores of teenage girls in evening dresses and miniskirts, some as young as 14, danced under disco lights. It could have been a high school prom, were it not for the crowd of older men surrounding them.

As the evening wore on, some of the men – many old enough to be the girls’ fathers, or even grandfathers – joined them on the dancefloor, pressing themselves against the girls. One balding man in a suit wrapped his arms around two young models, leering into a film camera that was documenting the evening: “Can you get some beautiful women around me, please?”

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‘I did the first nude in Vogue’: Marisa Berenson on being a blazing star of the 70s and beyond

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She was photographed by Warhol, and Dalí wanted to paint her; the first films she made were Death in Venice and Cabaret. So why did she walk away?

Most people, says Marisa Berenson, “tend to live in my past. Which is fine.” She smiles, well aware of the fascination. “But I tend to live in the present and in the future.” A 2001 profile of the model/actor in the New York Times described her as a “Zelig of the zeitgeist … popping up in the right place at the right time”. And there is certainly something magical about her life and the people who have passed through it. As a child (she is now 72) she was taught to dance by Gene Kelly. Greta Garbo came to her parents’ parties; Salvador Dalí – a friend of her grandmother, the designer Elsa Schiaparelli – wanted to paint her. The legendary Vogue editor Diana Vreeland pushed her to become a model – Yves Saint Laurent would describe her as “the face of the 70s” – and she was photographed by giants such as David Bailey, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon. Andy Warhol photographed her wedding.

She discovered meditation in India alongside George Harrison and Ringo Starr, was at Bianca Jagger’s Studio 54 birthday party – the fabled night of the white horse – and attended Truman Capote’s famed Black and White ball. Although she continues to work in film, she hasn’t made a huge number of movies – but the biggest, early in her career, were Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret and Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.

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Thysia Huisman describes alleged rape by Jean-Luc Brunel

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Ex-model is one of three women accusing the model scout and friend of Jeffrey Epstein

Thysia Huisman had just turned 18 when, late one evening in September 1991, she arrived before the door of an imposing apartment building on avenue Hoche in central Paris carrying a small backpack and three photographs from her portfolio.

A young would-be model from Leiden in the Netherlands, she was impressed, but also alarmed. “It was very grand,” she says. “A vast, grand apartment, right by the Arc de Triomphe. Fancy furniture, paintings on the walls. But it was his home.”

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The Trump Conspiracy

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Donald Trump speaks during a press conference at Prestwick airport on November 14, 2014 in Prestwick, Scotland. The story of the US election was portrayed this way: millions of angry and disaffected working class white Americans rose up against the elite to put Donald Trump in the White House.