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As Casablancas had warned them at the outset of the competition, in a scene recorded by TV cameras: “You are going to be judged, constantly judged.” (In 19, the Elite contest was filmed for a 60-minute glossy television special, featuring interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, and later screened on Fox – an early foray into reality TV.) Casablancas was a powerful figure in the industry, and to many of the new crop of would-be supermodels, this seemed an opportunity too good to miss. For them, the stakes were high, and the pressure to impress the judges great. Many were away from their families for the first time. Some had come to New York with parents or chaperones in tow others were alone. While Elite’s official brochure stated that contestants were aged between 14 and 24, all of those the Guardian has spoken to, competing in both years, were aged between 14 and 19. “This wasn’t being judged or part of the competition – it was for their entertainment.” “I knew in my gut it wasn’t right,” she recalls. She says an organiser told her that if she refused, she would be excluded from the competition.
Photograph: Nina Berman/NOORĪnother contestant, who was 15 at the time, also remembers being asked to walk for Trump, Casablancas and other men on the boat in September 1992. I didn’t dance – I blew a kiss at them, spun around and walked away.”Ĭontestants wait to board the Spirit of New York yacht, September 1991. And she said, ‘No, you look great, take off your blazer and go and do it.’ So I walked down the stairs. “I said to her, ‘I don’t see why me going down the stairs and dancing in front of those two has anything to do with me becoming a model. “A woman at the agency was pushing me,” she recalls. Lee, an introverted teenager who loved to draw but hated school, was in New York for the first time. She recalls how the contestants were encouraged to parade downstairs, one by one, and dance for Trump, Casablancas and others. One of the girls on the boat was Shawna Lee, then a 14-year-old from a small town outside Toronto.
On a similarly golden evening in early September that year, another group of contestants boarded the Spirit of New York, chartered for another Elite cruise. In 1992, Trump hosted the competition again. In 1991, he was a headline sponsor, throwing open the Plaza, his lavish, chateau-style hotel overlooking Central Park, transforming it into the main venue and accommodating the young models. Trump was closely involved in Casablancas’s competition. At stake was a life-changing prize: a $150,000 contract with the world’s then leading modelling agency, Elite Model Management, run by John Casablancas. They had travelled from around the world to compete in Elite’s Look of the Year competition, an annual event that had been running since 1983 and was already credited with launching the careers of Cindy Crawford, Helena Christensen and Stephanie Seymour. The party aboard the Spirit of New York was one of several events that Donald Trump, then 45, attended with a group of 58 aspiring young models that September.
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