One Wednesday in February, in the middle of what is surely the coldest New York Fashion Week on record, I am sitting in a corner booth having lunch at Balthazar, the bistro in SoHo that crawls with fashion people during the collections. I'm meeting a model named Doutzen. It is pronounced Doubt-zin, not Doot-zen. Practice it a few times. Concentrate. This will only take a second: Doubt-zin…Doubt-zin…Doubt-zin. She is from Holland, and her last name is Kroes, but that's not important right now. What is important, however, is that you learn to say her first name correctly because in about ten minutes she will be everywhere—L'Oréal television ads, billboards, the pages of Vogue—and you are going to want to be able to say her name as if you have known it all along.

She arrives at the restaurant on time, in a great pile of beige and brown knit: a tangle of scarves, a giant floppy hat, a Louis Vuitton tunic sweater. "I love this weather," she says, and I think she is about to launch into a soliloquy about how the cold brings to mind bittersweet memories of her homeland. Not a chance. "It's perfect because it gives all these fashion people something to talk about," she says with just the right amount of sarcasm and affection. "What else would they say to each other?" She laughs and then mimics the endless weather talk: "It's so cold!…Stay warm!"

I first encounter Doutzen two days earlier, just as I am beginning what I come to think of as my week of model speed-dating: schlepping around from one agency to another to meet the ten girls who are on the cover of this magazine—at long last! models!—trying to divine their potential, see if they have what it takes to capture our attention and put an end to this god-awful supermodel drought once and for all. On day one, I find myself in the sleek, bright conference room at the agency DNA. Beyond the glass walls, gorgeous young people slouch about, while not-so-gorgeous agents and schedulers man banks of phones, all of them barking over one another and the New Wave sound track blaring over the speakers. I interview Agyness Deyn—the rangy 21-year-old from Manchester, England, with the peroxide crop who's been causing a stir in the fashion world—and Raquel Zimmermann, the stern-looking veteran from southern Brazil who, at 24, is the oldest of the bunch and has been modeling already for seven years.

Both women are engaging, intelligent, genuinely enthusiastic about their success, and not at all vacant or too young or too skinny. Then, in walks Doutzen. Inside of five minutes I have a hopeless crush.

Putting aside for now the fact of her exquisite beauty—she reminds me of a softer, prettier Angelina Jolie—what strikes me most about Doutzen is how effortlessly she turns our interview into a conversation. She lets me know that she has read the last piece I had written for Vogue and quotes from it. Clever girl! She talks about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born Dutch feminist and politician who has been exiled, which she finds deeply troubling. And she makes me laugh. Here, I think, is the whole package. Not just beauty, brains, and ambition, but a little attitude and a healthy sense of irony. We talk for a half an hour, during which her abbreviated life story begins to unspool. She was born in a rural town in northern Holland. Her parents met cute when they were both competing in a speed-skating match (today, he's a shrink and she's a teacher). Doutzen, who has a younger sister, had a "really good childhood being outside," building tree houses, riding horses, and speed skating. "That's where I get these from," she says, grabbing her thighs. "Compared with all the other girls, I have big thighs. But I am very happy with my body, and if they don't like me, too bad. I represent the woman."

"The woman" just turned 22 and wears a crystal around her neck to "protect me from mean guys." She is "ashamed" to admit that, unlike nearly every successful model, she was not discovered; she sent pictures of herself to an agency in Amsterdam when she was eighteen because she "needed money." Within a few months, she had moved to New York and was booked by Steven Meisel to do a shoot for Italian Vogue.

After our first meeting, I called her agent and asked if I could see her again. We made a date to meet at Balthazar the next day. I sat alone at the bar sipping a glass of Chardonnay. As a half hour turned into 45 minutes, I noticed my mood improving. Perfect! I thought. She stood me up. Already mastering the tricks of the supermodel trade! We rescheduled for the next day, and now here we are. "I am so sorry," she says, and doesn't offer an excuse. "I am never late. I'm always the first girl to be in hair and makeup." Doutzen speaks English so well, with the sweet lilt of the Dutch accent, that it's easy to forget it's not her first language. I ask her about her L'Oréal contract. "You're worth it," she says, and laughs. Then, more seriously, "It's a big thing. They want me to go to Cannes, for example. I am already being treated like a supermodel. People look at me and recognize me, but they don't know who I am. But it's good for my name to have that contract. Now I'm more Doutzen instead of a…model. I don't like to say that I'm a model. I work in fashion."

Just then Annelise Peterson, the socialite and former Calvin Klein PR swami, appears in front of us. She looks at me and points at Doutzen. "I love this girl!" she says. They catch up for a moment. "At Calvin, I was all about promoting Doutzen," says Peterson. "I wanted her to be the Calvin girl. She is so poised, so comfortable in her own skin. And she's not a waif, she's not some freakish nymph. She's a woman in every aspect. How she carries herself, the way she communicates, the way she looks. She's going to be a huge star. I just want to be able to say: I discovered her first!"

On the Monday following Fashion Week, I stop by a vast studio on a pier in Chelsea. All ten girls are present and in various stages of hair and makeup, getting ready to shoot the cover with Steven Meisel. He is photographing them in two groups of five, so while Lily Donaldson, Hilary Rhoda, Caroline Trentini, Sasha Pivovarova, and Doutzen take their places in front of the camera in the studio next door, I hang out on the leather couches with the other five. They have figured out—and are joking about—the fact that they are going to be on the inside flap of the cover. "I can't believe I'm on the cover at all," says Agyness, in her thick Mancunian accent. She is hanging out with Raquel, smoking cigarettes and reading everyone's horoscopes aloud. Coco Rocha, the eighteen-year-old darling of the fashion world, has her face in a book: a sequel to Pride and Prejudice. Jessica Stam, who is 21 and has an ethereal blonde aloofness, is glued to her BlackBerry. Chanel Iman, here with her mother, is perched on the arm of a sofa, clutching a copy of Vibe in which she is interviewed by her idol and namesake Iman. She is only sixteen and looks terrified. Unlike the other nine, she is on her first Meisel shoot.

Chanel, whose mother is half Korean and father is African-American, grew up in Culver City, Los Angeles. She attended Fairfax High School until her career took off (very recently). Today she is homeschooled. When I ask her what it's like to be on this shoot, she slips into beauty-contestant mode. "It has been a great experience for me, one that I will never forget." Then, she cuts herself off with a laugh and levels with me. "You know what? It's really overwhelming."

The chatter among the girls runs a predictable course for a while: the free clothes they get during Fashion Week; the difficulty of packing all that swag as they head off to London, Milan, and Paris; jet lag; and watching sad movies in hotel rooms all over the world (The Notebook achieves consensus as the most guaranteed tearjerker). But then the conversation takes a different turn. Agyness makes a joke about starting a models' union and then says, "Supermodels could be really diva-ish, but we can't." "That's because we have to work so hard," says Raquel, who has taken on a sort of big-sister role to the group. "I think the girls now are really professional."

"We don't have any of the stereotypical model traits," says Agyness, whose boyfriend is in a punk band and who regularly deejays in clubs. "We don't all go out and get absolutely wrecked all the time. We go home and go to bed."

"It's big business," says Raquel. "There's much more of everything: more shows, more designers, more models, too. So the ones who are more disciplined work more." She's right: As fashion has become ever-bigger business, the tolerance for larger-than-life characters—and behavior—has almost entirely disappeared.

"It's kind of nice, though," says Agyness, "because all of us girls are totally different. In between the supermodel period and now, we kind of went through a phase where all the models looked the same."

Suddenly Coco, who has been only half-listening, looks up from her book. "There was the time when every girl had her own walk," she says. "Like, everyone knows the Naomi Campbell walk. But for a long time you couldn't have a walk. Even now backstage, they're like, 'No, no, no. Calm. Slow. No emotion.' "

"But there are certain shows," says Jessica, "like Zac Posen and Versace, where everybody's backstage looking at the monitors, cheering on the girls."

"Zac Posen," says Raquel, "is like, 'Be yourself!' "

"I love those motivational speeches," says Agyness. "They stand up on a chair just before the show. Donna Karan always does a good one."

Everyone laughs.

"You're a strong woman!" says Raquel. "You've traveled everywhere!"

Says Jessica: "You're going to save the world!"

Moments later, everyone breaks for lunch, and the other five girls appear, having finished their shoot. Lily Donaldson, whom I met a few days earlier at her agency, IMG, strikes me as the smartest and most sophisticated of the bunch—and she knows it. The day I met her, she was wearing skinny jeans, YSL boots, a gray T-shirt, and a tight little Proenza Schouler jacket. Lily grew up in London, the child of a photographer. All four grandparents went to the same art school. She herself had intended to continue the family tradition, but her plans changed one rainy day when she and a friend were shopping in Camden Town. A scout spotted her huddling under an awning and handed her a card. Perhaps because Lily spent her life around artists, she seems to understand that by modeling, she is collaborating to make great pictures. She admires Linda Evangelista, who was known to be the best collaborator of all. "She's incredible," says Lily. "She still looks amazing. That's a serious supermodel right there."

One gets the sense Lily could have done anything with her life. The fact that she has chosen to be a model tells you a lot about the profession today. As Nian Fish, the creative director of KCD, the media-relations company, tells me, "It doesn't matter what level of education or economic status you are, everybody wants to be a model. I cannot tell you how many phone calls I get about 'Oh, my niece is fifteen, and she wants to be a model. She goes to Brearley!' Being a model has become the thing every young girl wants to be. When I was young, it was ballerinas and nurses."

When Lily thinks of her profession, she sees it as a sort of utopian melting pot. "We have all come from different parts of the planet and every walk of life, and we come together in this mad ball of energy."

As the girls are breaking for lunch, some of them light cigarettes, others check their BlackBerrys, and before long they're all sitting around in white terry-cloth bathrobes, with plates of food balanced in their laps. I watch them from across the room, talking and laughing, and I realize that they are a fabulously motley crew.

When fashion took a turn toward the minimal around 2000, so did the models. A lot of designers had come to feel that supermodels were distracting from what they felt should be the real star of the show: the clothes. Before long, the models all started to look alike. The biggest catalyst for the cloning phenomenon was Miuccia Prada. In what many people in fashion saw as a corrective, she hired a full-time casting director, Russell Marsh, to scout for girls who all had a very similar look—that blank Prada look—in places like Belarus and Latvia. Gemma Ward was discovered this way, as was Sasha, who is now almost singularly identified with Prada's print campaigns. The unintended effect, however, was that everyone jumped on the Prada model bandwagon and many fashion shows began to look like automatons marching to funeral dirges.

Not surprisingly, people in fashion eventually grew tired of what casting director James Scully calls "the innocuous girls." He goes on, "The average age of the girls I've met in the last two years has been sixteen. It's very hard to work with a girl that young, who has no life experience, no carriage or command of her body. When you're dealing with sixteen-year-olds, you almost feel when you see them that they only have a few seasons in them, and you kind of don't invest the emotional time. With someone like Agyness, who's 21, even though she's not a traditional beauty, she just has so much personality."

Agyness's agent, Louie Chaban at DNA, agrees. "What I find great about Agyness is that she has so many other interests: music, art, design. She has this incredible personal style that's so different from all the rest. She has a lot of the qualities that contributed to why Kate Moss is so successful. It's about her life. It's a cool factor." In the pre-supermodel days of fashion, in the sixties and seventies, "every girl did their own hair and makeup," says Chaban, "so what made Penelope Tree, Penelope Tree was Penelope Tree. They were their own creations. That doesn't exist anymore. You ask a girl to do her own hair and makeup, she's lost. Which is the reason that Agyness is so special: She can do that."

Along with having bigger personalities, one of the things that all of these girls have in common is that they have all graduated from the Steven Meisel Finishing School for Future Supermodels. As Chaban says, "He's single-handedly the number-one career-maker in our industry. There are certain models who are not great in front of the camera, and more often than not people will say, 'Well, she doesn't have that Steven training.' "

Meisel is very impatient with all this talk about girls being too young and having no personalities. "You interviewed them all," he says, his voice rising. "Do you think they are personality-less?" I mention to him that I asked all ten if they have any self-awareness about what the Great Steven Meisel sees in them, and the only one who had an answer was Hilary: "I kind of have that older look," she said tentatively. "Like Brooke Shields. Maybe that's why?" Meisel laughed at this. "To tell you the truth, I kind of don't know either." He paused for a long time, and I could feel him squirming. "I don't know. Without sounding pompous…it's just an innate thing. It's like some stupid talent I have." Another pause. "Like Coco! I hadn't even met her! I just saw this little Polaroid of her and thought, This face is for me."

When I ask him why he thinks models have dropped off the popular-culture radar screen, he says, "The only reason they've gone away is because fashion magazines put celebrities on the cover. And the reason is because America loves Star magazine and the Enquirer, and Britney shaves her head and that's news. It's just the world right now. Everyone's interested in all this reality garbage. That's all it is. It will pass." He pauses for a moment. "I hope."

As for the supermodel phenomenon of the eighties and early nineties, he says, "It was a time of over the top–ness; it was our society at that moment. And this is just our time. I think that, if anything, modeling is even larger now. The number of agencies around the world has tripled. Every season there are hundreds of new girls. For some reason, the girls are taller and prettier than they ever were. Not all of them are successful. And then, not all of them maintain a longevity. That depends really on the girl and her personality. It's more than what she looks like. And in the end, the cream always comes to the top."

Fashion editors love to talk about moments. And at the fall collections in Paris a couple of months ago, there was what we shall call the Coco Moment. I had met Coco one day at her agency, Elite, where I was ushered into a conference room that looked as if it had been catered for 20. And there, slouched in a chair at a long table, was an unusual-looking eighteen-year-old wearing a man's white button-down, stovepipe jeans, and Converse high-tops. Coco grew up in a town called Richmond, outside Vancouver. Her whole family works in the airline business: Mom is a flight attendant; Dad works the ticketing counter. Coco was discovered one day while performing at a Celtic-dance competition, something she had been doing for eleven years, traveling throughout Canada, occasionally to Switzerland. "A man named Charles Stuart came up to me and asked if I had ever thought of modeling," she says. "So, a fourteen-year-old being asked that by an older man? I was like, 'Uh…no.' He would come up to me at every dance competition and ask, 'Have you thought about it?' So finally I just said, 'Yes. Fine. Sure.' Just to get him to stop."

She signed with his agency in Vancouver and then eventually made her way to Elite in New York and was almost immediately booked to work with Meisel, on a shoot for Italian Vogue in Los Angeles. "They had to teach me from the ground up," she says. "I was not raised thinking about Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Dior. My mom was more concerned with getting food on the table. Meeting Steven Meisel? No clue who he was. Anna Wintour? Never heard of her. Now I know. Now it's my life. Now I love it. I will stay in fashion for as long as I'm allowed. Because right now? At this point? With how it's going? I. So. Love. It."

Coco has been known to entertain the other models on photo shoots, who often goad her into dancing for them. Word got out that she could "Riverdance," and Jean Paul Gaultier, whose fall collection was inspired by the Scottish Highlands, sent Coco down the runway to open his show in a red jacket, tartan kilt, and a big plume of feathers in her hair, doing a rousing, stomping jig. And there you have it: the Coco Moment. It was the biggest sign yet that fashion has begun to admit that maybe it misses supermodels. There had been a few other stirrings over the last year. More than one person cited the moment when they first saw Hilary Rhoda on the runway at Balenciaga over a year ago. Hilary, who played every sport imaginable all throughout her Washington, D.C., childhood—tennis, field hockey, soccer, swim team—is a throwback. She cites Jackie O (Jackie O!) as her favorite style icon. She's the kind of model who couldn't get arrested five years ago. And it is easy to understand why she was snapped up and given a lucrative contract in January to be the new face of Estée Lauder: She is the embodiment of the all-American girl.

Now living on the Upper East Side with her manager/mother and dogs, Hilary originally wanted to be in show business. "Remember that TV show All That?" she asks me. "It was kind of like Saturday Night Live for kids? I would always be like, 'Mom, have you called All That yet? I want to be on that show!' I graduated from high school and then moved to New York and concentrated on modeling, and I'm really glad it worked out. It's such a gamble."

There have been other clues that the age of anonymity is coming to an end: Gap and Versace ads are now featuring the names of the models right on the page. Agyness's best friend, the designer Henry Holland, recently rolled out a line of T-shirts with naughty rhymey slogans splashed across the front in big block letters featuring the names of both the supermodels and the hopefuls: I'LL SHOW YOU WHO'S BOSS KATE MOSS, says one. MY FLIES ARE UNDONE FOR LILY DONALDSON, goes another.

"There is definitely a hunger for a supermodel," says Nian Fish. "The last model who became a household name was Gisele. Gemma Ward is a big model, but I don't call her a supermodel, because the average person has never heard of her. When I talk to editors and designers and stylists and photographers, they are just dying for a supermodel moment again." Perhaps they'll get one in Caroline Trentini, whom fashion editors can't get enough of. I meet Caroline one day at her agency, Marilyn, and as I walk into a conference room, she is sitting at the table looking and seeming much younger than nineteen. She is the very essence of fresh-faced: long blonde hair, freckles, big green eyes. Like Raquel, she is from southern Brazil. Also like Raquel, she has genes that are more German than Brazilian. Caroline was discovered when she was sixteen; she was walking down the street with her mom and one of her two older sisters when a man stopped them to ask if she wanted to go to São Paulo to meet with some agencies. Today she lives in New York. "Moving from São Paulo to here wasn't that big of a deal," she says. "But from my little town in Brazil to São Paulo? That was scary."

Fashion is, obviously, one part art, one part commerce, though there are plenty of people out there who see it merely as clothes for sale. But the one thing that everyone understands about fashion is that it is entertainment. It is show business. And you can't have show business without stars. Fashion needs supermodels. To reject that idea may very well be the best example I've ever encountered of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. If the disappearance of the supermodel is bad for fashion, then imagine what it has done to modeling. Models go through months, sometimes years of what Steven Meisel describes as "standing around in your underwear three, four, five times a day with a bunch of people sitting in a circle talking about you as if you're not even in the room." If that doesn't have a payoff, if there isn't the possibility that you will one day reclaim your name, make a fortune, and have the whole world know you, then the entire enterprise swerves dangerously close to exploitation.

And if longevity is what photographers, models, and their agents crave, then why is there all of this constant turnover? I suspect it is simple insecurity. A manic chasing after the new. Steven Meisel offers a great counterargument: "You meet a girl when she's fifteen years old, and she might be extraordinarily beautiful, so she's easy to photograph in one sense. But to meet a girl at fifteen and then to meet her again at eighteen, 22, 24. She's lived even more. So what she brings to the camera at 24 is even better than just how beautiful she is. Now she brings this woman and her experiences and…life! I love to work with a model for a long time."

At the end of the day, no matter what everyone else wants, it all comes down to the girls themselves. They have to grow up fast, travel all over the world by themselves, and figure out how to keep a big career going when they are often barely out of high school. Jessica Stam is the one girl I interviewed who seems to have a nuanced understanding of exactly what has happened to her. I met her one Saturday morning at a very crowded Starbucks in the East Village. There could have been 1,000 people in the shop, and I still would have been able to pick her out instantly. She was leaning against a wall, iPod earplugs in, wearing vintage Oleg Cassini sunglasses, a black hooded parka, superskinny jeans, and beat-up old Keds. We left the Starbucks and went to a less crowded diner, sat in a booth, and ordered tea.

Stam, as everyone calls her, is 21. She grew up on Lake Huron, a couple of hours from Toronto. Her father is a farmer, her mother a "homemaker." She is the only girl in a family of six brothers, one of whom works on an oil rig and four of whom are still in high school. When she was fifteen, she went to an amusement park with her family, and on the way home they stopped to get hot chocolate. As they were walking out the door, a woman approached her and handed her a card. Her mother called the next day. You can't help but wonder what would have become of Jessica Stam had that woman not noticed her. "I was tutoring a girl in math and science and concentrating on my own schoolwork, and I was playing a lot of sports," she says of that moment in her life. "I grew up in a beach town. I guess that next summer I would have started a job as a lifeguard at a summer camp about five minutes from my house."

Instead of that life, she wound up a year later in New York, and then was off to Paris to work with Mario Testino, then Steven Meisel, after which "everything escalated." She stares at me with her spooky-gray-blue cat eyes and says, "I love fashion. That's what keeps me interested in my job. I get to see inside these different fashion houses and where the inspiration comes from and the tear sheets on the wall, where they work things out. It's amazing. Especially during couture. You get to work with these incredibly talented designers who are making the clothes right on your body. I take it very seriously. I didn't know what I was getting into at all. Now I understand that I have to take care of myself. Make sure I have a great manager, a business manager, a financial adviser—a team to help me stay smart about it. I know that the industry is always changing, but I see this as a great career opportunity. I love modeling, and I just want to be the best at it and go for as long as I can." She takes a sip of her tea. "I do think it's possible to do it for a long time."

It was exactly then, as Stam was spinning out what was essentially an old-fashioned rags-to-riches tale, that I came to realize who else misses out when there are no supermodels. And that is us. If we never get to know the stories behind the faces that we see in the ad campaigns—which are such a big part of everyday life—then we don't get to share in the realization of the dream. The young girl who gets discovered at the soda counter, comes to the Big City, and becomes a glamorous icon. It's as old as…well, OK. It's as old as Hollywood, perhaps. But still! We need those stories! Imagine how dull life would be without them.

One thing is certain about these ten girls: They are all very ambitious. No one is sitting around passively waiting for her agent to call her on her $600 phone. They want it bad. One day at IMG I am interviewing Sasha. She is 22. Grew up in Moscow. One gets that sense that, more than others', her life has been utterly transformed by modeling. She is so nervous about being interviewed—partly, I think, because her English is not so good—that she has printed out a list of questions that I sent her agent so that she could be prepared.

She wrote her answers out on the paper, and now she is reading them aloud to me, her hands trembling. I have to fight the urge to hug her. But all of the nerves disappear in an instant when I throw her a question that isn't on the printout. Do you want to be a supermodel? I ask. She looks at me with that face that stares out from those Prada ads and says in her thick accent, "In Rrrrussia, vee have proverb: Only bad soldiers don't vant to be general."

"Hit Girls," photographed by Steven Meisel, has been edited for Style.com; the complete story appears in the May 2007 issue of Vogue.

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december 21, 2008

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