BRINKLEY, CHRISTIE 1953-

Supermodel

1980s Ideal

Athletic, blond, blue-eyed, and classically stylish, Christie Brinkley embodied not only the all-American look of the 1980s but also the fantasy life of many 1980s women. Brinkley had it all: successful career, wealthy husband, and beautiful child. As a supermodel, her life was well publicized: her swimsuit covers and $5-6 million a year salary, her marriage in 1983 to pop musician Billy Joel, and the birth of their daughter, Alexa Ray, in 1985. She became the envy of many professional women, who admired her ability to juggle family and career. Her repeated Sports Illustrated covers made her the object of many men's affections, as well. By the end of the decade Brinkley's wide smile and blue eyes had appeared on more than two hundred magazine covers. She held contracts with Noxell and with the Simplicity sewing catalogue, and she had acted in a movie (National Lampoon s Vacation, 1983) and a music video (husband Joel's pop hit "Uptown Girl," 1983—a song he had written for her). Her classic good looks and "regular life" as spouse and mother made her an accessible celebrity and, therefore, one whom people watched for style.

Life

As the daughter of a television producer, Brinkley was primed for a life of luxury and spotlights. She grew up in Malibu, California, but dreamed of living the life of a poor artist in France. In 1972, at age eighteen, she moved to Paris and enrolled in art school. After marrying and working as an illustrator for three years—living the bohemian life of which she had dreamed—she was spotted on the street by an American photographer. She was soon off to Morocco for her first modeling assignment, which she accepted only because she was broke. Despite her hesitancy to join the modeling profession, she would become the only model to have three consecutive Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition covers and would make millions of dollars a year. Until their separation in November 1993, Joel and Brinkley lived on Long Island; they also had an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. In April 1994 she survived a helicopter crash while on a skiing trip in Colorado with real-estate developer Ricky Taubman; she and Joel were divorced in August of that year, and in December she married Taubman. They separated seven weeks after the birth of their son, Jack Paris.

Clothes

When Brinkley was pregnant with Alexa Ray in 1985, she was featured in the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar to demonstrate how women could be stylish and attractive in maternity clothes. She became a trendsetter for the growing number of "thirtysomething" women who had begun to have babies in the midst of a busy career. In 1985 Glamour featured her in clothes she had helped design and that had her name on the labels. Wearing an oversized pale blue blazer with a T-shirt, khakis, and Perry Ellis loafers, or a miniskirt with loosely cut jacket, she was the picture of American style in the 1980s—comfortable but sexy in menswear-inspired classics. Another outfit—a big shirt worn loosely over cropped pants, with a bandanna tied in her hair—echoed street fashion.

Supermodels

In the 1980s supermodels, once only faces and bodies in magazine advertisements, became personalities in their own right. With their glamorous clothes, perfect bodies, jet-set lifestyles, and $25,000-aday salaries, they had joined movie stars as celebrities. Designers used them to sell clothes, but in the 1980s the models branched out into music videos, television commercials, and movies. From Lauren Hutton, the successful 1970s gap-toothed model, to Linda Evangelista and Cindy Crawford of the late 1980s, a supermodel could set a trend with a new haircut or even a facial mole. In the 1980s, as a result of the exercise fad and the push for feminine clothes, a more "voluptuous" female shape came into fashion, replacing the ultrathin "Twiggy" models of the previous two decades. By 1989 Brinkley's ail-American face was increasingly being replaced in fashion magazines by more ethnically diverse models—the trend of the 1990s.

Sources:

"Christie Brinkley Designs Clothes for You," Glamour, 83 (February 1985): 184-187;

Sherry Suib Cohen, "Billion Dollar Beauties," Ladies' Home Journal, 105 (August 1988): 136, 158;

Gabe Doppelt, ed., "Talking Fashion," Vogue, 181 (August 1991): 309-312;

Bruce Newman, "Rich and Famous," Sports Illustrated, 70 (February 1989): 167-169;

"Pretty and Pregnant," Harper's Bazaar, no. 3287 (October 1985): 235, 288.

family leave social policy permitting workers to take a specified amount of time off from the job to attend to pressing family needs. The U.S. Family and Medical Leave Act (1993) attempts to balance family and work obligations. This law, which covers companies with 50 or more workers and employees with at least a year of service, mandates up to 12 weeks of leave per year for various family medical emergencies and for the birth or adoption of a child. It also stipulates that the employers must continue to provide health care benefits and that returning workers must be given their old job or an equivalent position. Many states also have family leave laws, and in many European countries and Japan, longer periods of paid leave are common.