Michael Gross, Author of 'Model'

0:02Welcome to the Business of Modeling, the podcast where we explore the fascinating world of the modelling industry. I'm Tessa Dewing, Managing Director of Sandra Reynolds, a commercial model agency celebrating its 50th year of business. We're in New York today and my guest is Michael Gross, journalist, author and the man behind Model, The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, the book that lifted the curtain on the rise of the modelling industry and the people who shaped it. I've never told the story of how or why I started this podcast. It actually all began with Michael's book. I've always hated being on camera.

0:44I've always been much happier working on my business behind the scenes. But as the world of marketing has changed, I realised that if I wanted my team to appear on camera, I actually had to lead by example. So last Christmas, I was shopping in Cambridge with my daughters-in-law, Chrissie and Jess, and my new baby grandson, Max. We'd wandered into an art gallery and while Jess and Chrissie were looking at the paintings, I got chatting with the gallery owner about modelling. He was fascinated by the industry and asked if I'd ever read Model by Michael Gross. I hadn't, so while we were having lunch a short while later, I ordered it and when it arrived, I couldn't put it down.

1:25Despite having worked in this industry for over 30 years, I was discovering fascinating stories and truths that I'd Never Known, that book became the inspiration for this podcast. It was a chance to make a series exploring the depth, history and humanity of an industry that so many see only from the outside. I decided to launch as part of our agency's 50th anniversary and it gave me the nudge to finally take a more visible role. When I planned to record in New York, I decided to contact Michael, never really expecting to hear back.

2:03But he called me. We chatted on the phone and he agreed to this interview. Michael is such a rich storyteller. And today's conversation is a fascinating journey through the history of the modelling world and the people who shaped it. We started the interview by talking about his younger years. I grew up on Long Island. I was born in Manhattan, grew up on Long Island. My father was a sports columnist for the New York Post. So I joke that I grew up in Yankee Stadium, Shea Stadium, Madison Square Garden, and the polo grounds. As a child, I had fairly unique access to the sports world. As soon as I went away to college, I basically never paid attention to sports again, but rather rapidly became involved in writing about rock and roll music, which was then the sound of youth.

2:58So beginning in college, I wrote about rock and roll. I went all around the world. I wrote for a zillion magazines, including the NME. One of the interesting things was that rock stars dated models. And so as a young heterosexual male, I couldn't help but notice these women around the rock stars. And I spent 10 years writing about rock and roll. But in that time, my best friend and I both became fascinated with the modeling industry. He was the editor of Circus Magazine and I was the editor of Rock Magazine. And when we both decided we'd had quite enough of rock music, we decided to write a series of mystery novels.

3:48It was 1978, thereabouts. Studio 54 had just happened. Rock music was dead. Disco was all over the place. And fashion designers and models were becoming the new cultural rock stars. And so when my best friend and I decided, we were friends from college, we decided that we wanted to write a series of mystery novels. and the lead character, we decided, would be a fashion model who would be forced into becoming a detective because of the awful ways that men treat women. That was the concept. We had both gone to Vassar College, which was a women's college, and so we had a sort of nascent feminist point of view.

4:34And so we created a model named Temple Kent, who lived in downtown Manhattan in in the apartment that I lived in at that time. And she fought back against wicked men who did wicked things to beautiful women. My friend, whose name is Stephen Demarest, was an English major, and I was a history major in college. So I was put in charge of the research, and he got last word on the writing. I began researching and writing about the world of modeling, which inevitably led you into fashion. And I started writing about fashion just after we wrote the third mystery novel and decided to part ways. And I began writing for a little tiny trade newspaper called Photo District News that was the photographer's trade paper in New York.

5:22And the first article that I wrote for them was about Calvin Klein jeans ads and the models who appeared in them. And from there, I discovered that 99 % of the people who wrote about fashion wrote about garments and fabrics. And I didn't really care about the dress. I wanted to know who made the dress, who bought the dress, where the dress went, how the dress was sold. And that created opportunity for me because no one else was doing that at the time. And so I rapidly started writing for national magazines. And within a year, I was hired as the number two writer on the New York Times Fashion Beat.

6:01And I had a column at the Times and I started going to the fashion shows in Paris, Milan, in London and New York. And that episode lasted about two and a half years when I was poached by New York Magazine. And that was actually my dream had always been to write for New York Magazine. When you were growing up, was it being a writer and a journalist? Was that just a given? Well, my father was a journalist. I was used to the fact that he disappeared into the basement and emerged a few hours later and his work was done. And the next day his column was in the newspaper with a picture. And he had been a sports fan as a child.

6:37And so being a journalist gave him access, not just to sports, but to the locker rooms and to the innermost thoughts of athletes and the people that he admired. And I rather rapidly had the same relationship to rock music. I was hanging out. You had that inquisitive. Well, also, you got to live the life. You got to hang around with rock stars and go to the same bars and drive around in their limousines. At a certain point, I did say the next time I get into a limousine, it's going to be mine. And sadly, that has never happened.

7:10Did I have favorites? Anything that stands out because it was a nightmare. Well, all of the above. I mean, I remember I wrote an article about when the publisher and founder of Women's Wear Daily, John Fairchild, used to terrorize the fashion business and and ban fashion designers from the pages of the trade newspaper. And I wrote an article called Women's Wear Daily and Feuds in Fashion, which caused me to be persona non grata among the staff of Women's Wear Daily. I gave a bad review to Christian Lacroix after his second collection, which caused me to be banished from the front row to the 20th row of his fashion shows.

7:51I was banned by Versace at one point. I was backstage the day that Women's Wear Daily attacked a designer named Azzedine Alaya, whom I had known from before my career in fashion because my wife was a client. I asked Azzedine about the Women's Wear Daily article, and he started screaming in French backstage at this fashion show. And the models are looking. Everyone is watching. And I'm begging, someone translate. I think I got maybe one in five sentences, but it was enough to give me a feature story in the New York Times. My last story for the Times before I went to New York Magazine was about a photographer's agent named Xavier Moreau, who represented, among others, the photographer Helmut Newton and was his best friend.

8:38and Morrow disappeared in the middle of the night and all of his photographer hair and makeup people's money vanished with him. I heard about this from someone in the field and I did an investigative article and it caused the first lawsuit against me when Morrow sued the New York Times and I. I leave the New York Times. I go to New York Magazine. It's my first week at New York Magazine and the receptionist comes to my desk shaking, quivering. There's a process server in the lobby for you. As it happened, I was on the phone with my lawyer at precisely that moment. And I said, what do I do? And he said, put the phone down, go out, accept service and say, thank you.

9:25And then come back and call me back. So I go out to the lobby. He hands me this envelope. I say, thank you. I come back. I picked up the phone. I called my lawyer and my lawyer said, congratulations. And I said, I'm being sued for a million dollars. Why are you congratulating me? And he said, you only lose your virginity once. At New York Magazine, I did a very famous cover story about a designer named Calvin Klein who pulled his advertising out of the magazine while I was still reporting it. He didn't even bother to wait to read it. That was one of the bestselling issues of that year. I wrote stories about Cindy Crawford that was a bestselling cover of New York.

10:03I wrote a cover story on John F. Kennedy Jr. that I think was the all-time best-selling reported cover story in New York Magazine.

10:17With the fashion world, frankly, my pal and I, we both wanted to date models. And we thought, oh, well, this will be a route to that. And in fact, both of us got married and didn't date models. But it turned out to be a fascinating world. And I covered the fashion beat as a fashion writer for the next 10 years. Okay, so how many years did it take you to get that job you wanted? Well, I started writing about fashion in 79, 80, I guess. We wrote the mystery novels, the Temple Kent books from 80 until 83. I started writing journalism on fashion, 83, 84. I was at the New York Times in 85, and I went to New York Magazine in 88.

11:03And I stayed at New York Magazine until 1994. But the story that leads to model. So Anna Wintour has gone from British Vogue to American Vogue and working for Condé Nast Publications. And Hearst, which published the competing Harper's Bazaar, hires Anna's former deputy, Elizabeth Tilbaris, to take over American Harper's Bazaar. And I wrote a story about that, which was called War of the Poses. And every time I had, I was a great admirer of a photographer named Richard Avedon. And every time I wrote a story in which a quote from Avedon might have been even tangentially appropriate, I would approach Avedon for an interview.

11:46And every single time he said no. On this one, suddenly he not only said yes, he was on the phone with me every single day. He said to me, I will never take back a quote, but I will call you and try to make them better and sharper. And Avedon effectively became the main voice in this story about Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. In that time, photographers and models could only work for one of those. Top photographers could work for one of those. or the other. Avedon had worked for Diana Vreeland at Bazaar in its glory years, and then went to Vogue with her when she switched from Bazaar to Vogue. And this was the whole, I told the whole historical story of this decades-long rivalry between the two magazines that had now reached its latest chapter in the War of the Poses between Liz and Anna.

12:38And Avedon was quoted throughout the piece. And I even gave him what's called the kicker, which is the last line in a 9 ,000 word magazine article. And I remember it to this day. He said, fashion magazines are the mother of invention and may the best mother win. And after the article came out, I get a phone call. Dick, as he called himself, wanted to have lunch with me. So now I've not only pierced the inner sanctum, but I'm being invited to lunch with the master. And I go to the studio, expecting to go to a restaurant and they said, he's waiting for you upstairs, which was his apartment. So I go up this staircase and there is Avedon standing by the stove cooking swordfish for me and him to have for lunch.

13:23And as was often the case with Avedon, there was an ulterior motive. He had just signed a big contract with Random House to do a series of books. And he wanted my advice on the book business, which I had precious little to offer him. But in the course of this lunch, where he was also pouring a very good white wine, I got the liquid courage to say to him that mutual friend of ours, a fashion editor named D.D. Ryan, Dorinda Dixon Ryan, had said to me the day before that I should turn Harper's Bazaar and Vogue into a book. and I got the courage to say to Dick, what do you think of that idea? And he said, no, no, no, no, no, no.

14:06No one cares if the legendary editor of Harper's Bazaar, Carmel Snow, drank at lunch. This is what he said. You should write a book about models. No one's ever done it. So slightly tipsy, I went from Avedon Studio to the nearest branch of the New York Public Library and I looked and indeed there was a memoir or three. There was a how to be a model book or two, But no one had written a book about the modeling industry. And I did a little research and I wrote a book proposal and I got a deal. And two years later, the book model emerged. And it was very fortunate because it emerged just at the moment when fashion went from being a cottage industry for a little tiny group of aficionados to being mass market entertainers.

15:07The model is the story of the fashion modeling business from its early beginnings when a former male model named John Robert Powers formed the first agency straight through to 1995. 1995, and it focuses on iconic models, but more on the business itself and the agents and the photographers. And then subsequently, a few years later, I wrote a sequel, which was basically turning the camera around. So instead of looking at the models, I turned the camera around and I looked at the photographers, but they are companion pieces, the two books. And that one was called Focus. The culture of the modeling business is a unique thing that has a narrative.

16:00And the culture of fashion photography is separately a unique thing. You know, the third part of that, the third branch or the third leg of the tripod would be magazines and advertisers. And again, it was a fascinating moment, just as 93, 94 with the supermodels was a great moment to write model. It was a fascinating moment to write focus because fashion photography was about to be decimated by the Internet, by the end of print magazines, by everyone is a photographer, by the iPhone. All of those forces were combined to decimate the field, which still exists but is a shadow of its former self now.

16:48You could look at it as the end of something or you could look at it as the beginning of something. And I looked at it as standing on the precipice and looking back. But the idea was to write about the real world in which these fantasy creatures live, not the fantasy world of the magazine page. Yeah. But, you know, what it's like to be a 14, 15, 16 year old girl and try and break into the industry, how you do it, what you have to deal with, how the business operated, how the business, you know, chewed up and spit out most of the cannon fodder who passed through. And how rare it was for the industry to create a superstar, which I describe as angels dancing on the head of a clothespin.

17:37So the book describes that world in excruciating detail. It does. It's incredible. And I think that's one of the things I wanted to ask you. What was that research process like? How did you get those people to talk to you? I took six months or a year off from my job. Remember that I had been a front row creature for eight, nine, ten years at that point. They all knew me. Everybody knew who I was, but I don't think that many of them had a clear picture of what I really did for a living. A few people did. For instance, Naomi Campbell, who refused to speak to me for the book. Linda Evangelista, who refused to speak to me for the book because I had written an article about Christy Turlington at the moment when that famous trio of models broke up.

18:30So Naomi and Linda knew exactly what I was capable of finding out. I, um. Oh, she's lovely. I haven't heard a bad word about Christy Turlington. There is not a bad word to say about Christy Turlington. So I, um, I made an agreement with my boss at New York Magazine that I would fly to Europe and do the collections and then take six months off. But I would be in Europe when I took my six months off. I booked interview appointments in Milan, Paris, and London, spent a few days in each city, and had enough people who knew me and trusted me who gave me a grounding in where the stories lay. So, you know, I knew that there was an agent in Milan who had annoyed another agent in Milan and that her agency had been firebombed.

19:21I knew that the owners and heads of the elite agency were both considered to be the hottest, fastest, sexiest agents on the face of the earth, but were also despised by their competitors. So, you know, there was a basic grounding. I knew what I needed. And I just tried to speak to everyone. I came along at the exact moment when the supermodels took over the world. And that was just a stroke of luck or a stroke of Avedon, perhaps. But, you know, I wrote the book at the moment when the world was riveted by these creatures. What I did was I, you know, I didn't just write about the shiny surface. I wrote about the wormy soil underneath it and what gave birth to all of this.

20:08And that's what the book is.

20:13The original models were often actors and actresses who needed money and they posed for illustrators. Then in the early days, you know, the business was run by men. But again, it was out of work actors and actresses. There was a point at which society girls had a vogue. And, you know, so they would come from Park Avenue. They would model for a year or two. Then they would find a man, get married and go away. And it really was Eileen Ford who professionalized the industry. But Eileen Ford had precursors. There was a woman named Natali Payne who was married to a photographer named Wingate Payne, who was the first person to employ Eileen Ford.

20:57And there was Dorian Lee, who was one of the great models of the 1940s and 1950s, who didn't have a great business sense, but started agencies and inspired Eileen Ford and then modeled for Eileen Ford, as did her sister, Susie Parker. And, you know, once you're in the Eileen Ford era, you're in the glory days of modeling. Yeah. How would you describe her as a person? You obviously met her a lot researching the book. I assume she spoke to you. Eileen was prim and proper and hard as nails and projected herself as a moral beacon and was incapable of seeing the places where her beacon dimmed, but was a innovator.

21:45And, you know, as a mother figure did promote seemlier values than many of the men in the industry who really were there because the agencies were date farms for them. You know, right from the beginning, there was an agent named Harry Conover who was sleeping with one of his top models. there was that element and there were always rich guys backing agencies who wanted to have access to the boards and the books, which is the board is the names of all the models and the books are the picture books. And, you know, there was it was absolutely true that rock stars would sit with the elite models book and go through it and point and go, I want her.

22:28and in more cases than you would imagine were actually able to then meet that girl. And, you know, also the job, remember, of 14-, 15-, and 16-year-olds is to be stupid and experimental and bold. And so there was a confluence of interest there that didn't end until really the Me Too era. And you could... Yeah, thank goodness, because it is shocking, isn't it, looking back? And you could say that the Me Too era started perhaps with the BBC expose on elite models. Yes. Which of course is banned. Which was done by a man named Donald McIntyre who became a friend of mine. There was a lawsuit and because of British law, the BBC has suppressed that episode.

23:17Some of the stars or the star villains of the piece were Xavier Moreau, the same man I had written about in the New York Times in my last story for them. and John Casablancas and Gérald Marie. Elite began with a group of very highly educated and sophisticated playboys. But there came a moment when Elite needed a more street person to be involved. And they recruited an agent from a smaller agency whose name was Gérald Marie. And Gérald Marie became really the poster child for bad behavior of modeling agents compared to John Cass... He made John Casablancus look not like an angel, but certainly not like a devil.

24:01And indeed, in 2000, when the BBC documentary came out, John, who had been suing me five years earlier, sat for an interview with me in order to distance himself from his then partner and soon-to-be ex-partner, Gérald Marie, and to say, you know, this is beyond the pale. So this was fascinating to have, you know, the dark gray sheep calling out the black sheep. And, you know, you can look at the Me Too movement as starting there when models called out agents for the first time. The odd thing is that perhaps it was a missed opportunity for me. I told all of these stories in Model, but they were not the single focus.

24:47And I didn't see the collision that was going to happen five years down the road when young women said, enough, stop. It ends here. And that process, of course, was ongoing for years. And then you get, you know, and it leads to Harvey Weinstein. But, you know, I would say that in a very real way, it begins with Gérald Marie and the BBC documentary.

25:18There were some things that I didn't include in the book for a wide variety of reasons, not necessarily because of libel fears. But there were agencies that really were fronts for prostitution. There were known agents, like big name. Big name agents where rich guys could buy themselves a sexual partner. There was an infamous royal in Southeast Asia who would ship models in by the plane load to populate his parties. Stories like that. But, you know, more shocking were the manipulation of vulnerable kids by adults. The special treatment of, and I think these were Cindy's words, this one you don't touch.

26:09because she's too valuable. And that was how Cindy felt when she first went to Milan, because she was already a star. She had been discovered by a courtly fashion photographer named Victor Skrebneski in Chicago. And she emerged on the world scene fully formed and clearly positioned to be a major cash cow. And so Cindy did describe it to me that way. The story that I always found fascinating was that Christy Turlington and Stephanie Seymour, as teenage girls, both arrived in Paris the same season, 15, 16 years old. Christie was a Ford model and came to Paris with her mother. Stephanie was an elite model and was having an affair with John Casablancas.

27:06And to me, those were the polar opposites. So, you know, I'm sure Eileen Ford certainly wasn't all sort of lightness and things. But she, I think, did seem to have an eye on it. And she did seem to look after her girls. And yet Christy was the one who told me about all the ways that the girls who lived in Eileen Ford's townhouse figured out how to escape and go out to nightclubs. But that's just young girls though, isn't it? Well, but you know, I mean, that's just young girls. How far does that forgiveness go? When Stephanie Seymour is having an affair with John Casablancus, is that just young girls who happen to be with 38, 39, 40 year old men?

27:52You know, I had an encounter with Gérald Marie before I wrote Model, actually, when I wrote the story I mentioned to you about Christy Turlington, in which I described in great detail the end of the friendship of Christy, Naomi, and Linda, who later became friends again. But the article came out the same week that the Paris fashion shows were starting in that season, whatever year it was, 1990, something like that. I was sitting in the front row of the Comme des Garcons show, and Veronica Webb came down the runway, and she stopped in front of me, and she went, mouthing the words, you are in so much trouble.

28:32And then she walks down the runway. So, you know, very curious. I go backstage after the show. What? And Veronica tells me, Christy is not speaking to Stephen Mizell, Linda or Naomi. Everybody's furious. They've had a copy of my article faxed to them. I find Christy, who was standing with her boyfriend of the time, who was the scion of the Wilson's House of Suede fortune in Los Angeles. A night or two later, I was at a cocktail party for Vogue, thrown by Anna Wintour, you know, drinking a champagne, having some hors d 'oeuvres. When Gérald Marie comes up to me spitting mad and with his finger in my face says, Paris is my town.

29:16And if you ever write another word about me or my wife, Linda Evangelista, you will never take another step here. But with the finger slashing and spit flying. And I was standing at the time with the designer, Romeo Gili, and he kind of looks at me and goes, what was that? And I decide, OK, I think I'm going to leave this cocktail party now. I grab a glass of champagne, chug it, and I walk out. And at the doorway, I'm met by Anna Winter, who had already heard what happened. And her parting words to me were, I hear you had a moment.

29:51And by the way, I've been back to Paris innumerable times. And you're fine. Clearly, yeah.

30:00Looking back 30 years later, what do you think the legacy of the book? I'm very proud that it's still in print. I mean, just the other day, someone put up on Instagram a picture of a model backstage reading a dog-eared copy of Model. And I thought, you know, how amazing that 30 years later, it's not only still in print, but it's still a touchstone. And it just makes me very proud. I remember when I wrote the second or third update to Model. Each time a new edition came out, it would be republished with a new cover, and they would ask me to write another chapter. I do recall that when Elite Models was driven out of business by a series of lawsuits long after the events described in Model, and there was an auction for the name Elite and for the agency.

30:51And in one of the updates, I did mention a guy who was a bidder in that auction named Jeffrey Epstein. And when the Epstein scandal breaks, years later... I get told off on this podcast for saying wow too much, but I'm about to say wow. Years later, the Epstein story breaks and people are calling me and saying, you know, did you know him? And in fact, he failed to buy Elite and then partnered with Jean-Luc Brunel, who had left his agency in Paris, basically sent into exile by his female partner. and had gone to Miami where he opened a new modeling agency backed by Jeffrey Epstein. And I'm asked about this guy.

31:41And I said, no, you know, I never was aware of him. I didn't know about him. And then someone pointed out to me that I had actually mentioned him in one of the update chapters as, you know, just another rich guy with a taste for young girls and the money to indulge. And I hadn't even remembered mentioning him.

32:04Who would you credit for making the supermodels? It was a swirl of things. The supermodels came along at a moment when fashion was in an existential crisis. After the market drop of the late 80s, the fashion market was shaken. And it was just at the same time that the world's attention began to focus on fashion. I remember interviewing Karl Lagerfeld in Paris right at that point. and going to him because I couldn't figure out what the narrative of the season was. And Carl was basically facing the exact same dilemma. And he came up with this wonderful phrase, the fashion of no fashion. So there was this crisis because there was no unified message.

32:50There was no fashion. And yet there was all this attention being paid. So a small group of designers, a couple of photographers, Stephen Meisel, Peter Lindbergh, To a lesser extent, Patrick de Marchelier. The magazines in this case, I think, were at the end. They were the caboose on the train. But they realized that there was this handful of girls who could be marketed as superstars, who were willing to play along, who indeed reveled in it. And it was lightning striking. It was a mix of factors beginning with the fact that there was all this attention being paid to fashion and there was nothing to pay attention to.

33:33So kaboom, up come Linda and Christy and Naomi and Cindy and Yasmeen and the rest of them. And suddenly here is a new focus for attention. And it really just happened. But there were very canny people who paved the way, including, you know, five, seven, nine of the models. And then, you know, you get Anna Wintour putting six of them on the cover of Vogue, wearing Gap shirts and Levi jeans, and you have an officially certified phenomenon. And then they just took off. Well, they're still there. I mean, even now in their dotage, they're selling documentaries to Apple that began as a incisive look at the modeling business.

34:22And because the models were involved, turned into hagiography. Yet, when that documentary came out, as empty of calories as it was, people still feasted on it.

34:40Can you tell us about the fashion industry in London as you know it? You know, around the time of John Robert Powers, there was a tall woman named Lucy Clayton who started the first modeling agency in London. But London became very, very, very important in the early to mid 60s when the pop scene happened and suddenly you had Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. And I believe that Trimpton was actually a Lucy Clayton model, whereas Twiggy operated outside of the system with her own manager slash boyfriend. But the pop London chapter is a very fun one. And there were great personalities. And, you know, sadly, that kind of pioneer personality who starts something, they tend to be comets.

35:31They flame out. Then the modeling industry in London, just like everywhere else, became a matter of big brands and affiliations and big business. And although London was always more loving hands at home than Paris or Milan, which were much more professionalized, London also became, you know, a cog in the wheel of an industry rather than the kind of raffish, idiosyncratic little business that it had been previously. Sure, yeah. Yeah, because I think Models One was one of the first. You had Joseph Fonseca in April. And Josie and April were extraordinary sources for me on the rise of elite and the war between John Casablancus and Eileen Ford.

36:21Because they were, you know, London was creatively very important, but business-wise a backwater. You know, great models would come out of London, but they would leave and go elsewhere. They did stay in London because London was a very small scene and it was not the height of fashion. You know, fashion was Paris and Milan. And then for a long time, fashion was New York. And then New York imported England. You know, back to that moment when the editors of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue were both British women, which was odd considering the fact that America has all this homegrown editorial talent. And yet, you know, and that remained true right through Glenda Evans, who was another Brit who was competing with the permanent monument to Anna Wintour.

37:20You've written extensively about the worlds of wealth, real estate, fashion and power. What draws you back to these subjects? I wrote a book called 740 Park about 15 years ago. That was about what was then the most expensive and richest apartment building in New York City as a kind of embodiment of the upper strata in New York. and a documentarian named Alex Gibney made it into a documentary. And when he was trying to talk me into selling him the rights, he said to me, I'm just like you. I'm more interested in the perps than the vics, which is cop talk. I am fascinated by the perpetrators of wealth and by the people who control the culture and by the powerful and by the wealthy and the fabulous and you know my personal interest as a writer is more in that gratin if you will than in what is underneath it and I find it a fat I find them hugely symbolic endlessly fascinating and a rich rich source of narrative which is after all what I'm in the business of doing is just narrative.

38:42Who would you say are some of the most fascinating or surprising people that you've sort of come across and interviewed? Where do you go? Do you start with Alice Cooper or with John Casablancas? I've just finished a book about an island in the Caribbean called St. Bart's. And, you know, there there are fascinating people to write about as well. It's you don't stop a parade to say, no, I only want to see the Donald Duck float. I'm privileged and endlessly amused by the parade more than any particular individual in it. More interesting to me would be the people who have eluded me over the years, you know, Like Avedon eluded me for so many years.

39:33And then really, in many ways, Avedon was an absolutely vital turning point for me. Because getting that interview with him led me to this career as a book writer that up until then I would not have had. I think that one way of describing what I do is I look at a fabulous watch, beautiful, expensive, you know, Audemars Piguet or Rolex. Most people are content to look at the dial. I want to turn it over, take the back off and see how it works. and in worlds of wealth and image, whether it's behind every fortune, there's a crime or behind every picture, beautiful picture, there's a dark story or even if it's a light story, there's always the flip side.

40:26There's always the, how did it get here? And it goes back to that, I'm less interested in the dress than who wore it, who made it and where it went. That's what I've always written about and it continues to fascinate me to this day.

40:44So over the course of your career, you've investigated some of the most powerful and image-driven industries in the world. What has all that taught you about influence, ambition and human nature? Never generalise. That's lesson number one. You can't draw a conclusion from one incident, one story, one person, and apply it to everyone else in the same circumstances. Power does corrupt. Images lie. Wealth isn't everything, but it's something. I hesitate to draw general conclusions or general morals because of that, because you're constantly surprised. The thing that you think is going to get you in trouble is the thing that does quite the opposite.

41:36The person that you think you're going to hate is going to turn out to be someone who amuses the hell out of you. The person who you think you're going to be amused by turns out to be an utter shit. Always be willing to be surprised. That would be my conclusion.

41:54How do you think AI is going to affect the industry? It's a tool like any other tool and AI can't do what I do. AI can't write a book that is going to make millions of people want to read it. And if it ever gets to that point, I think it will devalue the art and the pleasures of reading. I think that there's a huge challenge. I also think that print has become a luxury product and that the publishing business has not yet caught up to that. It's a very elite audience that wants to read now, elite in any number of ways. And the business model needs to change in order to monetize that and make it practical to continue to publish because writers have to live.

42:47They need money to report and to eat and to shelter themselves. And publishers need money to publish and to support staffs and to market books and magazines. And the products need to be more expensive. And then, you know, you turn around and you look at the mass market of books and you find people like Colleen Hoover who churn out these genre books. And, you know, that is completely opposite what I'm talking about. And, you know, if that's all we're left with, that would be a damn shame.

43:30What do you think it takes to be a great investigative journalist? And what advice would you give to someone young who wants to get into the industry? I think you just need a sort of monomania and a desire to know and a desire to find things out. And to get into the industry now, I think that there's still a market. You know, I'm too old to start a blog or a Substack. I mean, I suppose I'm not too old. Look, Tina Brown has a Substack. She's only a year or two different from me. You know, to do it now, you need to develop a personal brand. You need a spine of steel. You probably need a really good lawyer.

44:15You know, when Xavier Moreau sued me in the New York Times, it was the New York Times that defended me. If you're writing for Substack, I don't know that Substack is going to send some of the best lawyers in the world out to defend you if you go after a Donald Trump or an Elon. I mean, look at the world. You know, you go after a Donald Trump or an Elon Musk in this day and age and they will come at you with endless resources and grind you to dust, even if you're right. And, you know, it's not very good to be right, but dust. So it's a very difficult environment at the moment. And so I think the number one job requirement is courage.

44:55Well, thank you. Thank you, Michael. Absolutely, my pleasure. It's been a privilege speaking to you and a pleasure. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Michael as much as I did. His work has shaped how so many of us understand the business of modelling, revealing both its glamour and its grit. Reading Model changed the way I saw the industry I've spent my life in. And speaking to Michael reminded me exactly why I started this podcast, to share the real stories behind the headlines and to celebrate the people who have helped shape our world. Thank you for listening.