Kristen McMenamy
I remember the frenzy that Kristen McMenamy created when she shaved off her eyebrows and became the fashion industry’s “it” girl for a season or two. It was insane. You couldn’t flip the pages of a fashion magazine without seeing photo after photo of the model. Editorials, campaigns, personal profiles — for a few months she was the hottest name in the business.
At her peak, however, Kristen was subject to some of the most ridiculously cruel criticism that the fashion business has ever dished out. Only a short time before this gorgeous Italian Vogue cover appeared in 1993, i-D magazine made Kristen the cover girl accompanied by a headline that read “Kristen McMenamy: Supermodel or super ugly?“
Fortunately, Kristen didn’t have to put up with that crap for very long. She was already in her mid-twenties when her career skyrocketed. Before she had a chance to come crashing back to earth, she was pregnant. At the height of her career, she took a year off. Suddenly, the “it” girl was the “out” girl, and models such as Shalom Harlow and Amber Valletta were waiting in the wings, ready for their moment in the spotlight. The fashion industry can have a terribly short attention span, and despite a strong comeback in 1997, Kristen was already yesterday’s news.
Or was she? For some reason Kristen has been able to make comeback after comeback, unlike any other model in the business. Perhaps the people who hire her feel nostalgic for the era that she defined. Since 2004, she’s been booking the sort of jobs that are normally reserved for modeling’s A-list. In fact, her forty-two-year-old mug is gracing both the cover and the pages of Italian Vogue again, seventeen years after Steven Meisel shot her first cover for the magazine. And the best part of the whole story is how gorgeous she looks after all these years.
I guess it goes to show that you can’t keep a good model down, especially a model who possesses the skills of Kristen McMenamy.
