Of the five models appeared on the cover of 1990’s Vogue, four of them became household names. The Guardian asks: why not the fifth?
Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Cindy Crawford are all one-name famous, and are even enjoying a “supermodel revival.” What of Tatjana Patitz? She’s certainly had a successful career, and now models for Uniqlo and a few other small companies. But it’s a good indication of the vagaries of the modeling agency that one model should make it to household name status while another, as beautiful, as charismatic, as distinctive, should not.
Nowadays, Patitz lives on a Malibu ranch with her young son and a veritable menagerie. Her passion, she says, is the conservation work she does with wild mustangs. And maybe her path is best explained by her words, “”There were glamorous moments, but it was exhausting…The low points were having to travel so much and being exhausted. I always thought that [fashion and modelling] wasn’t who I was; it was what I did. It didn’t define me. Living out here and coming back to this place was like a sigh of relief in a sense.”
The Forgotten Supermodel [Guardian]