Cindy Crawford: Transcending Expectations

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    Nov 22, 2012
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A supermodel is a person whose image gains international recognition through public exposure of youth, beauty and allure through fashion magazines and product representation. But what happens when the glamour fades? What happens when the model turns thirty? Or becomes pregnant? Or alters her body with so many surgeries and procedures make them unrecognizable? Every supermodel has an expiration date. Looks don’t hold on forever, and there is always someone younger and thinner to replace supermodels. A supermodel must be aggressive in self-marketing to transcend her image in order not to fade to obscurity.
Few have been successful in that regard than Cindy Crawford.

Cindy’s efforts to push past the glamour of modeling were nothing new. In the early 1990s supermodels hosted talk shows, authored their own gossip columns, and simply took the world by storm. Every detail of their lives were mined by fans thinking the adoption of their lifestyles might bring them closer to the ideal and youth and beauty the supermodels represented.
Cindy Crawford differs from the rest of her peers in the way she kept herself in the public’s mind. In 1989 Cindy starred in MTV’s House of Style, one of the earliest forerunners of today’s “reality show” genre. As one of the models that shared hosting duties, Cindy let camera crews in on a side the public didn’t know she had. She wasn’t Cindy Crawford the supermodel, she was a Cindy buying clothes at sears or wearing disguises so she could eat in a restaurant in peace. She was just Cindy. When she left the show in 1994, she took most of the audience with her. Without her charisma MTV began cutting the amount of ordered episodes. It fell from a weekly show to a yearly tribute until it’s cancellation in 2000.

Cindy is adept at finding creative ways to put her image to work in the financial world. In 2005 she made a controversial move in creating her own furniture line, “the Cindy Crawford Collection,” whose success spawned a second furniture line with industry giants Raymour & Flanigan. She even established a home goods business with J.C. Penney in 2009.

Today Cindy offers the secret of her enduring beauty with the creation of the Meaningful Beauty products with Dr. Jean-Louis Sebagh (known in the health maintenance industry as the “Youth Guru).” In effect she has given the everyday woman the means to look and feel like a supermodel.

The life of a supermodel looks easy. Beautiful woman walk down the walkway in scanty clothing, strike a pose and walk away. But staying in the spotlight requires mastery of smiles and poses and the eternal vigilance of keeping the ideal -- often unreachable -- body. Even if the supermodel goes everything perfectly, she still has an expiration date. When that time comes, many supermodels fall through the cracks of the public eye and naught to be seen again. Supermodels have to think smarter and fight harder to prove they are more than the perfect image they represent. Of those, Cindy Crawford stands as an imaginative and creative example of what a woman can do to transcend expectations.

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