THE RUNWAY GIRLS TAKE OFF

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

For most of the year, midtown Manhattan adheres to the fin-de-siecle urban ritual of a working lunch. But during Fashion Week, held in Bryant Park every spring and fall, the bow-tied and sensibly heeled easily forgo risotto on an expense account for Quarter Pounders on a crowded lawn. Dazzled by the chic, they perch themselves near the heavily guarded white tents where designers unveil their seasonal collections. The businessmen, of course, do not come because they are interested in Richard Tyler's position this year on velvet. They want to catch a glimpse of the shows' real centerpieces: the famously angular beauties for whom surnames now seem superfluous: Cindy and Claudia, Linda and Christy, Naomi and Kate.

But when next fall's lines debuted last week, noontime oglers were largely out of luck. Most of the supermodels were absent from the runways. They have, in a sense, grown too big for the fashion world that created them and turned them into internationally admired adventuresses. Instead of modeling clothes in New York City, Cindy Crawford was in Miami shooting her first movie, Fair Game, with Billy Baldwin. Vendela fans could have found the towering Swede in Los Angeles, where she had recently done a guest spot on Murphy Brown. Naomi Campbell, usually ubiquitous all through Fashion Week, appeared in just two shows. She had intended to saunter down the aisle for her friend, designer Todd Oldham, but the budding movie actress (she co-starred in this year's Miami Rhapsody) had to decline in order to rehearse for a new film, details of which she won't reveal.

Richer, busier and more celebrated than ever, supermodels do not need the meager $5,000 or so the New York shows offer them for an appearance. (The major European designers, by contrast, pay up to $25,000.) They have better-or at least more lucrative-things to do with their time. Supermodels today reap millions of dollars in advertising contracts; they lend their names to clothing lines, host TV shows, star in movies. From the gossip columns to the Oscar preshow promenade, they are stealing the limelight from Hollywood's film goddesses.

A controversial new book by Michael Gross, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women (William Morrow; $25), is notable not so much for its revelations of drug use and other wild behavior by supermodels in the past as for the amount of knowledge the book assumes we have about models-their rocker boyfriends, their rich contracts, their past traumas. "The media have blown up models massively,'' says fashion photographer Mario Sorrenti. "They have been made more special than they ever were."

Supermodels are no longer just pairs of wide-set eyes and endless limbs; they are becoming diversified corporations. "I am my own business," proclaims Campbell. "I used to fly to a country for a day and do another shoot somewhere else the next, but I don't do that as often as I used to. It takes a toll. I'm realizing that, now that I'm 24." Last Friday Campbell entered the presumably less stressful restaurant business. She and partners Claudia Schiffer and Elle MacPherson (who has landed a multipicture deal with Miramax) were on hand for the much-ballyhooed opening of their new Fashion Cafe at New York's Rockefeller Center. "It's our baby. We make all the decisions," asserts Schiffer, 24. "The difference between the girls today and models of the past is that we are not only interested in fashion; we are going in so many different directions at once. We work harder-at night and on weekends."

Also working hard to branch out is the waifish Amber Valetta, who just signed on as a correspondent with Fashion Week, a new TV show that premiered on the E! cable channel two weeks ago. It is one of four fashion-news shows that have sprung up in imitation of mtv's successful House of Style, starring Cindy Crawford. The paradigm for the supermodel-as-enterprise, Crawford is surely inspiring many of the professionally beautiful. Her various ventures-a TV show, exercise videos, contracts with Revlon, Pepsi and Kay Jewelers-earn her an estimated $6.5 million annually. According to a recent tally in Forbes magazine, she is one of 10 supermodels with annual incomes of $2 million or more.

Their ranks are sure to grow. As the old guard of Crawford, Evangelista, Turlington and others begins to age, a host of newer faces is ready to supplant them. Among the hottest is Bridget Hall, a 17-year-old Texan who already has a lucrative Ralph Lauren contract. Nearly as omnipresent is the platinum-haired, preternaturally statuesque German model Nadja Auermann, featured on the cover of this month's W. Fashion watchers in New York last week, meanwhile, could hardly miss Irina, a striking 21-year-old Siberian, who appeared on the runway for no fewer than 18 shows.

Supermodels owe their heightened visibility and success to a culture continually ravenous for new kinds of celebrities. Many observers argue that supermodels have topped movie stars on the fame hierarchy because they possess an ethereal allure missing since the '40s and '50s. "I couldn't ever picture Joan Crawford going to the supermarket to buy soap," notes Pauline Bernatchez, who runs the 24-year-old Parisian modeling agency Pauline's, "but I could easily envision Meryl Streep doing it with her children. Models seem more untouchable. People need glamour; they need to dream." Says designer Isaac Mizrahi: "When my mother was a little girl, she wanted to grow up and be Rita Hayworth or a ballerina. Now all the little girls want to be Linda Evangelista or Naomi Campbell. I don't think girls today want to grow up to be Jennifer Jason Leigh."

The supermodel craze has been further fueled by the explosion of media interest in the fashion world. Most newspapers now treat the semiannual fashion shows as celebrity events, and gossip columnists keep obsessively close track of how the leggy spend their evenings. "Style is covered on cnn and mtv," says the model and writer Veronica Webb. "It has been taken out of the rarefied environment of European runways and brought into living rooms in Atlanta. People don't even need to buy $5 fashion magazines anymore."

It was the mass marketing of fashion that first gave rise to the model as celebrated commodity. Once designers started licensing their names and manufacturing moderately priced "bridge" lines during the late 1970s and early '80s, clothes that conveyed status were no longer the province of the alite. Models like Brooke Shields started hawking jeans and became widely known personalities for doing so. There were famous models before Shields-from Suzy Parker to Twiggy to Lauren Hutton-but none until then had been featured in giant ads on bus shelters.

This mass marketing has changed the whole culture of modeling. Models of the 1930s, '40s and '50s, largely anonymous to the general public, traveled in aristocratic social circles. Whatever recognition they had came through their association with renowned photographers like Cecil Beaton and Man Ray. "Fashion has been taken down from its lofty standard," bemoans art historian Anne Hollander. Author Michael Gross notes, "[The '30s model] Hannah Lee Sherman was a debutante. She would never sit back and watch Johnny Depp rip up a hotel room [as girlfriend Kate Moss reportedly did]. The fashion world is no longer cultured."

As commercial entities, however, supermodels have never been more powerful. Their fame rubs off on the artists they favor. Photographer Sorrenti, who now regularly shoots for Harper's Bazaar and other magazines, landed the Obsession and Escape fragrance campaigns after his pictures of Kate Moss caught the eye of Calvin Klein. High-profile models also helped boost the career of highly regarded designer Anna Sui. "Linda and Naomi helped me a lot," she admits. "They got me a lot of other models. They had been wearing my clothes, and that's what gave me the confidence to go ahead and do my first show."

But not all designers are as enamored with supermodels. Geoffrey Beene, American fashion's patrician doyen, does not use them in his shows because he feels they eclipse the clothes. "Good design does not need expensive crutches," he asserts. "I prefer to view my clothes as visual and not performance art." Beene sees a shift in the attitude of supermodels. "I never felt that Twiggy saw herself as a superstar in the manner that some of the girls do today. The way it comes through in them is so evident and commercial and appalling. There was a mystery to Twiggy. There is no mystery to them."

Overexposure is a real danger, especially in an era when models who pose for the covers of fashion magazines are the subjects of celebrity profiles in the same publications only months later-and a Vogue story on Bridget Hall last summer could reveal the startling fact that she is a girl who enjoys canned chili. Supermodels might take a cue from the legions of male models, who remain largely anonymous. Quaint anachronisms, all they do is amble down runways. --With reporting by Georgia Harbison and Belinda Luscombe/ New York

With reporting by GEORGIA HARBISON AND BELINDA LUSCOMBE/NEW YORK