![]() ![]() “It still wasn’t acceptable, but yeah, as far as he was concerned, this was the life.” But it was a funny thing for him to fixate on, given the whole story,” she says. He moved from New York to Rio that year, by which time he’d married his third wife, a 17-year-old.ĭid Casablancas, who died in 2013, react badly to his portrayal in New York? “He demanded an apology,” Prince says, recalling that he was upset at a reference to his “ogling” a model’s breasts. I’m sure he crossed lines right and left.” Seymour described their relationship quite warmly in the story, and stayed with the agency thereafter in 2017, she still spoke well of him, telling the Post, “He was my first love, my first boyfriend, my first everything.” Casablancas remained at Elite until 2000, leaving after a BBC exposé about drug use and exploitative behavior at modeling agencies tarnished the company’s reputation. But he opened his world to me he made models accessible to me. “I was hugely pregnant - I don’t remember which month I was in - and I wonder if I seemed nonthreatening. “There was definitely stuff that made me really uncomfortable.” Didn’t he have handlers around him, or public-relations people who tried to cut him off when he talked like this? “No,” Prince says. “He was wide open - he was a very confident guy,” Prince remembers. Talking this way, let alone behaving this way, in 2018 would almost surely get his agency closed down, if only because Seymour seems to have been underage for the entire run of their involvement. And that mixture was and is so explosive … This was something like a forbidden fruit for both of us.” “And the way she developed - there’s a quality that developed about her that is this incredible sensuality that a woman-child has, a true woman-child … her voice is a child’s, her attitudes, the way she holds her feet and her hands are those of a child, at the same time with an incredible sensuality to it. “She is a girl of extremes,” he told Prince. And his description of looking at Seymour is downright chilling. By the time of Prince’s story, he had begun and ended a two-year extramarital affair with her. (He was 41.) Over the next year, he brought Seymour to Acapulco for the final round of that contest, then to New York. He’d actually noticed her mother first - “absolutely ravishing,” he says - and then homed in on her daughter, who was 15 years old at the time. The centerpiece of the story is his involvement with Stephanie Seymour, whom he’d discovered via a contest at a shopping center in San Diego. An observer calls him “one of the creepiest people I have ever met.” “I prefer a model that parties a little too much to a model that doesn’t party enough,” he says. ‘I explained to her how turned off I was by her,’ he says.” He holds a wet-T-shirt contest on the dance floor at Xenon. He uses a strategy that he later suggests is sure-fire. And also: “One afternoon, Casablancas calls Jeanna Cie, a seventeen-year-old model and pop singer, into his office to discuss her weight. “My rule of life is that I want to have a good time,” he told Prince. Casablancas spoke and behaved in ways that were already - and certainly are now, by the standards of our #MeToo moment - far, far past the point of appropriateness. It makes for timely reading, side-by-side with “Can Fashion Ever Be an Ethical Business?” in this week’s issue, about the abuses models face in the fashion industry. ![]() The speaker was John Casablancas, founder of Elite Model Management, and the quote comes from Dinah Prince’s profile of him, a cover story that ran in New York almost exactly 30 years ago. The photographer asked her to pose on a rock in her bikini … ‘She’s got a great little body,’ he told his models.” He said Cecile had been solicited by a photographer last summer on a beach in Ibiza. “As he joined the discussion about family life, Casablancas talked about his seventeen-year-old daughter, Cecile.
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