Return of the Supers

Remember the supermodels, that superior breed of glamazon who famously said they "wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day"? (Well, Linda Evangelista wouldn’t, anyway.) Just when you thought you were safe, those Eighties divas we all knew by their first names – Linda, Christy, Naomi, Cindy, Claudia – are back, and looking better than ever.

Linda, who is 39 and proud of it, staged her catwalk comeback in Milan two years ago, where she put models half her age in their place by looking spectacular in gowns by Versace. Cindy was on the cover of British Vogue last January. Christy looks luminous in the Bottega Veneta campaign, Kristen McMenamy has resurrected pallid cool hawking Marc Jacobs, while Yasmin le Bon belies her status as a mother of three modeling for Ann Taylor. Meanwhile, Claudia, also married with child, and Nineties super Nadja Auermann have both scored ad campaigns of their own.

Back in the Eighties, when models swinging from nightclub trapezes was considered normal and the trinity of Linda, Christy and Naomi were actually encouraged in their brattiness, a supermodel like Kate Moss might not have lost all her lucrative contracts for being caught on camera doing drugs. I’m not saying that was a smart move (let’s just hope Kate hasn’t blown all her savings on cool clothes and vices, and left some money in the bank for daughter Lily). I’m just saying that back in the day, that sort of wild behavior was actually tolerated.

Anyway, these returning supers all look a little older, a little wiser, a little hollower in the cheekbones, but nevertheless fabulous. Again, I remember Linda saying, before she dropped off the radar in the Nineties, that the emotional and physical costs of maintenance were so high she could barely handle them.

If the cost was high back then, imagine what it is now that these ladies are pushing 40. They must be so high-maintenance that they’re keeping fashionista dermatologists like Lisa Airan in whole closetsful of Manolos. With all the injecting, tightening and pulling involved in the quest to look young, why do they bother? Why not just marry some oil tycoon and quietly go into retirement? (Or hook up with yesterday’s rock stars, as Heidi Klum did with Seal.)

Maybe they couldn’t parlay their fame into a second career, like Amber Valletta did with acting. (So, Shalom, are you considered a thespian yet?) Perhaps they’re not all savvy businesswomen, like Iman with her I-Iman beauty products, or Christy with her Nuala yogawear line for Puma and Sundari Ayurvedic cosmetic range.

Let’s face it. When your job skills are limited to looking beautiful, the marketplace isn’t always beating a path to your door.

As someone in the relative age range of these supers, I’d love to think that the fashion biz has finally become accepting of aging. After all, 40 is the new 30, right?

The poster girl for the second act has definitely got to be Demi Moore, who is now the face of Versace. Not only does she still have a killer bod, she married a guy 15 years younger, who’s closer in age to her eldest daughter, Rumer, than herself.

Other celebs enjoying similar fashion adulation are Madonna (still rocking at 47), Nicole Kidman (Chanel No. 5’s icon), and Brooke Shields, the image of label Jones NY and a budding book author. If that’s not a happy ending for older women, I don’t know what is.

Then there’s the popularity of the Desperate Housewives. Except for Eva Longoria, none of these women are spring chickens anymore. Hey, most of us remember Marcia Cross from Melrose Place and Nicollette Sheridan from even further back, in Knots Landing. For a melanin-challenged blonde, Nicollette looks pretty good for her age (42), but if you want an inkling of how she would really look without all the maintenance, check out the newly released DVD The Outsiders: The Complete Novel. In the extra disc, where you see the movie’s stars being interviewed 20 years later, you’ll see Nicollette’s boyfriend in the Eighties, former heartthrob Leif Garrett – a guy her exact age –un-Botoxed, un-surgerized, and unshaven. Nowadays, Mr. Runaround Sue looks like Grizzly Adams. I swear, if they hadn’t put "Leif Garrett" underneath the face of this guy in a bulky jacket and knit cap (to hide the thinning hair, perhaps?), I would have thought he was some random homeless person who had wandered in from the street.

In this celebrity-crazed era where movie goddesses like Uma Thurman, Scarlett Johansson and Gwyneth Paltrow are taking all the juicy contracts away from models, the return of the supers is also a way of reclaiming their turf. Linda, Christy and Naomi were the celebrities of their time. Now they’re back in their more mature glory, and holding their own against the J. Los of today. Heck, Linda has even gotten involved in charity as one of the faces of MAC’s Viva Glam AIDS campaign.

It’s also refreshing to see a super like Linda, with real presence and loads of experience behind her, back on the catwalk. As Edina says in one of my favorite Brit-coms, Absolutely Fabulous, nowadays "they just throw fetuses out on the runway." The supers weren’t just young, nameless hangers that clothes looked good on. They actually carried the clothes and gave it attitude. Part of the reason I think Azzedine Alaia is so revered today is because the supers loved him so much. By looking amazing in his clothes, they forever immortalized it.

But the bottom line behind the return of the supers – isn’t it always? – is money. Women between 30 and 50 are the ones with real purchasing power today. Every year, they spend over $6 billion on fashion and over $1.5 billion on cosmetics. They don’t want to see some 15-year-old modeling clothes or a bag she obviously can’t afford. They want to see a woman their age, like Linda, looking believably gorgeous toting Fendi or made up in NARS. They want to believe that getting older doesn’t mean getting squarer.

"I used to look at magazines and I couldn’t afford those clothes and I couldn’t look like those women," says Linda of her pre-modeling days. "And you know what I found out when I became a model? I still couldn’t look like those women, because I’m retouched and I’ve had four hours of make-up and two hours of hair and I’m pinned and airbrushed and I’m holding a position that my body could never hold in real life and look natural. So even I could never look like myself."

That may be the case, but who knows, if the supers continue their Restylane regimens and play their cards right, their modeling careers might have the longevity of Carmen dell’Orefice’s, the golden-girl mannequin who still looks drop-dead elegant at the ripe old age of... 73.