Model- The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women - Michael Gross byBuoy

Model- The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women by Michael Gross

This is the abridged audiobook.

This book does exactly what the title says, it reveals the ugly side of the modeling business. However, it is an older book so you won't hear any recent names. There is another book out there, "Shut up and Smile" that covers more recent models. But the writing from that book is no comparison to this one. This book is by someone that knows how to write and the stories are very in-depth which can only make the book better. The pictures are also better in this book.


This book was less gossipy than I thought it would be. The first 2/3rds are great. The book serves as a wonderful primer for anyone going into the modeling industry or just interested in its origins.

The book starts out with the first official models, which were generally socialites. You get to read about how modeling agencies first formed and who the first models and clients were. The book follows along as agencies and models fall out and new ones come along. Close to the chapters around the 1980s/1990s you learn more about the all out "model wars" and the switching of models between agencies. Mixed in with all this history are bio chapters highlighting the stories of specific models along the years.

The book is very interesting and makes me miss seeing the models on the cover of magazines! The book is slightly dated now but the history provided is still accurate and informative.



As others have noted, this isn't so much a book about the current business of modeling as it is a history of the U.S. model industry up through the 90s, including interviews and other biographical sketches of many of the key players involved. It's very readable, sort of like an extended Vanity Fair feature story, and explains how modeling evolved from the use of socialites to show off or endorse fashion products, into a business controlled by agencies who promoted particular girls or "looks," eventually leading to the rise of the "supermodels". Fans of vintage fashion photography, like me, will enjoy learning more about the lives and careers of the lovely women featured in the classic shots. The proprietors of the most famous model agencies, such as Eileen Ford, Wilhelmina and John Casablancas, are also discussed. Liberal use of interview quotes and photos provide a nice documentary feel and keep the story from getting too dry.


While the book isn't super-gossipy, it's basically about the personalities that drove and shaped the modeling industry, and a little bit about the industry itself. It's not an accounting expose, nor does it cover every single important model and trend with an equal depth. For example, Gia Carangi, who broke down barriers with her dark, ethnic look, is not discussed very much in the book, perhaps because an entire book on Gia's life had come out around the same timeframe as the original publication of "Model". The author's approach to the modeling industry is critical in spots, but isn't heavily muckraking and probably won't reveal any big surprises to any readers who have the least bit of familiarity with modeling.




http://www.ew.com/article/19...gly-business-beautiful-women

Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women

Genre: Pop Culture, Nonfiction; Author: Michael Gross; Publisher: Warner Books

Power in life is not money. He who controls women is the most powerful.” This is designer Oleg Cassini talking, one of the hundreds of highly quotable voices in MODEL: THE UGLY BUSINESS OF BEAUTIFUL WOMEN, a book that is to high fashion roughly what Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was to the meatpacking industry. But there’s a surprise in this relentless evisceration of an industry normally swathed in more shadows and light than Cindy Crawford: The person who has wielded the most control over women in the modeling world is…another woman.

Eileen Ford, who began Ford Models with her husband Jerry in 1946, is the unlikely heroine – some might say villain – of Model. The book is not supposed to be about her. It intends to be the expose-of-record of the modeling business, from the early days of the John Robert Powers agency, when models earned about $25 a week, to today’s supermodels, who ”don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.” And it lives up to those intentions. Author Michael Gross, a senior writer at Esquire, did a stunning amount of research. He interviewed everyone from early bad-girl model Dorian Leigh Parker and A&P playboy-turned-weird recluse Huntington Hartford to Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington. His real talent, though, is getting powerful people to go on the record with astonishing candor.
This is not fine literature, but it’s one of the next best things: raw dish. Drugs, sex, evil Milanese playboys, and choice dirt on everyone from Christie Brinkley (modeling guru John Casablancas says he has never seen a more abrupt change in personality than after Brinkley became a celebrity) to Stephanie Seymour (who, by all reports, slept with Casablancas when she was 16) – it’s all here. At 498 pages, Model will tell you more than you probably ever wanted to know about what Gross calls a ”factory that feeds on young girls.”
But the real boss of this factory for years has been Eileen Ford, a tough cookie seemingly born to dominate a business built on cupcakes. She pops up throughout the book, bullying models and battling competitors in a career spanning the days of the Stork Club and the El Morocco to watering holes du jour like Cafe Tabac and the Buddha Bar. What one former rival called her ”hard skin” is legendary. ”You’re as big as a horse!” Ford once bellowed to a prospective model. The woman weighed 127 pounds at the time. ”Get that German out of here!” she said when Veruschka, who would become one of modeling’s superstars, first showed up at the Ford agency. Ford was equally steely when fending off competitors; of all the premier modeling agencies formed shortly after World War II, only Ford is still in business. Ford herself is generally credited with maintaining an isle of rectitude in an otherwise sordid industry, but she was more of a killer than all of the big boys who tangled with her. ”I will never sleep with both eyes closed as long as that woman is around,” says Casablancas.
In real life, Ford would hardly be a sympathetic character. But given the slimy agency owners and drug-drenched photographers and models who populate the rest of Model, she comes across as the conscience of the industry. Her sheer tenacity is almost comforting in a book filled with self-destructive hedonists and lost souls. ”I made it to the f – -ing top, and there was nothing there. Nobody was home,” whines onetime top model Tara Shannon, one of Model’s many casualties. Eileen Ford, now 72 and reluctantly handing over the reins of her agency to three copresidents, including her daughter Katie, never had such illusions. ”There must be golden years but I’m just too damn busy to find them,” she harrumphs at the end of the book. ”Paradise is when you’re dead.” A-





The definitive story of the international modeling business—and its evil twin, legalized flesh peddling—Model is a tale of beautiful women empowered and subjugated; of vast sums of money; of sex and drugs, obsession and tragic death; and of the most unholy combination in commerce: stunning young women and rich, lascivious men.
Investigative journalist Michael Gross takes us into the private studios and hidden villas where models play and are preyed upon, and tears down modeling’s carefully constructed façade of glamour to reveal the untold truths of an ugly trade








http://mgross.com/writing/books/model/

Book Details
• Paperback: 576 pages
• Publisher: It Books; Reprint edition (September 27, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0062067907
• ISBN-13: 978-0062067906





Biography
Michael Gross is one of America's most provocative non-fiction writers. A contributing editor of Departures, he's written for Vanity Fair, Esquire, GQ, Town & Country,the New York Times and New York, and authored twelve books--detective novels, biographies, exposes and social histories--among them, Rogues' Gallery, a history and expose of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Unreal Estate, uncovering the secrets of the estate district of Los Angeles, and the critically-acclaimed best-sellers Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, House of Outrageous Fortune, the story of 15 Central Park West and its residents, and 740 Park: The Story of the World's Richest Apartment Building. He's just finished his next book, Focus, a look at the sexy, scandalous world of fashion photographers. Atria Books will publish it next year.