This essay originally published in the Sunday, March 2, 2025 edition of the Fortune Archives newsletter.
In 1979, Fortune writer Gwen Kinkead exposed the harsh realities of the modeling world’s economics in her cover story “The Price of Beauty Is Getting Beyond Compare,” a startlingly matter-of-fact description of an industry where agencies monetize beautiful young women—and downgrade their value as they age.
“Girls come and go,” Kinkead quotes a fashion photographer saying. “This business eats them up and spits them out.”
Though the term “supermodel” was not yet in common usage, the fees models were commanding were unprecedented at that time, driven both by demand and by the modeling agencies’ cutthroat price-negotiating tactics.
Kinkead describes how the top-earning models of 1979 were treated as “workhorses” whose profit potential could be maximized by locking them into exclusive contracts. “Even without major contracts, a top model is an extremely valuable commodity from the agent’s point of view,” Kinkead explains—since a 10-year career could gross as much as $3 million (about $13 million in today’s dollars), which the agency would take a significant cut of. “So the secret of the business of model management is not so much merchandising the girls…but finding them in the first place and then keeping them from defecting to competing agencies.”
But the actual average career length for models was just six years. As Kinkead notes, the operating motto behind Ford Models—the agency famous for “classy, well-bred, all-American blondes”—was that “a girl’s face is her fortune and that its brief bloom should be lavishly compensated.”
Today’s modeling industry likes to tout its embrace of a diverse range of skin tones, body types, and ages. And the economic model of modeling has evolved: Beauty influencers can get rich promoting products on social media without necessarily signing an agency contract; supermodels such as Cindy Crawford, Tyra Banks, and Heidi Klum can find second acts as entrepreneurs and TV personalities. (Back in 1979, Kinkead writes, it was considered a small miracle to find models “who can talk like ‘real people,’ TV-land’s jargon to differentiate actresses from so-called ‘pretty people,’ who don’t talk on camera.”) And the rise of AI looms over the entire profession.
But as Demi Moore powerfully depicted in The Substance, in a performance that may win her the best actress Oscar tonight, the notion that a woman’s beauty—and by extension her worth—has an expiration date is as insidiously pervasive as ever.
