Life must have been great back in the nineties: Claudia Schiffer and Cindy Crawford are hugging each other, both wearing cropped T-shirts and wild hair.

She was recorded by Bruce Weber in 1992. Amber Valletta stands in a tight red bikini on the beach in Rio, dances, laughs and is applauded by a group of young men.

The picture is from 1997 by Mario Testino.

And Elle Macpherson is naked.

Patrick Demarchelier photographed her in 1992.

From the catwalk to the shoot to the party

Jennifer Wiebking

Editor in the "Life" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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Life not only looks great in these pictures, it also sounds like this: “We went straight from the catwalk to the shoot in Versace's Palazzo and from there to the party together.” This is what it says next to a group picture from 1994 in this exhibition. Ten women, including five supermodels, can be seen in shimmering evening dresses. One of them remembers: Claudia Schiffer.

In some pictures she is shown alone, throwing her head forward, pouting. But Claudia Schiffer is not just one of the many models in this exhibition in the Düsseldorf Art Palace. She is also the curator. It's her debut. It should be a personal look, from a woman who rarely shares private matters. Claudia Schiffer, 51 years old, was a child in her seventies, a teenager in her eighties, and became a supermodel in her nineties. She has set out to do this decade. It is fitting that she does this here, in Düsseldorf. She grew up less than 50 kilometers away, in Rheinberg, and was discovered in the Düsseldorf discotheque “Checker's”. Now in this city she shows what followed, how she, with some other women, shaped an era with an image of beauty that continues to this day.

Not that far away at all

That was thirty years ago, and the nineties are, at least on the one hand, very close: the vast majority of people today no longer dress like they did in the sixties, seventies or eighties.

But from the look of the nineties, the so-called minimalism, mainly consisting of jeans and a white T-shirt, maybe a pair of gold creoles for women, to the everyday look of the 21st century, consisting of jeans and T-shirt, maybe gold jewelry, it is not far.

Pop is still playing on the radio as a matter of course.

The dramas around Britney Spears are still an issue today.

It is significant that Schiffer designed himself and the other protagonists of the time in this exhibition instead of being designed, as was customary for models for a long time. The supermodels ended up approaching their careers like women entrepreneurs. "Historically, this is a remarkable achievement that we may take for granted from our current perspective," says Felix Krämer, General Director of the Kunstpalast, about the time of these women. Their lifetime achievement should not be underestimated because their core competence was not quantum physics, but their appearance. Beauty is easy to disparage, especially by men.