What makes a supermodel? A preternatural beauty, of course, but there is more – a certain charisma, an unerring fashion instinct, a steely resilience, sex appeal. And a mere model becomes a ‘super’ when she becomes not only stratospherically famous, but also when she somehow encapsulates her era. The supermodel provides a snapshot of a moment in time because she is always at the epicentre of the fashionable cultural life of her time – and at its vanguard. Every decade has their supers, from impish, mini-skirted, swinging-‘60s icons Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy to quirky Cara Delevingne today.

But the phenomenon goes back further than Twiggy, to the very start of the 20th Century, when the world’s first ever supermodel rose to fame. Evelyn Nesbit, a willowy, copper-haired beauty from Philadelphia, was the most sought-after artists’ and fashion model in America’s Gilded Age. Her life was turbulent and eventful, and her fame peaked when she became embroiled in a murder, and what was then dubbed ‘the trial of the century’.

Nesbit embodied her era in more ways than one. The late 19th Century was a glamorous period of rapid economic growth in the US but it was also an era of considerable poverty, as many poor European immigrants poured in. Nesbit in her lifetime saw both sides. She came from a modest Scots-Irish background in Tarentum, Pennsylvania, and after her father died leaving debts, her mother struggled to support the family. It was also an age with one foot still in the starchy Victorian era and one just about to step into the permissive Roaring ‘20s. The young Evelyn was from a ‘respectable’ family, and modelled – fully dressed – for artists from the age of 14, as a way out of poverty for the whole family. When she came to New York in 1900, her rise was meteoric. But she was also stepping into a new, different world.

James Carroll Beckwith, whose main patron was John Jacob Astor, took her under his wing, introduced her to artists and illustrators, and Nesbit was soon the most in-demand model in New York. She was the inspiration for numerous art works, including sculptor George Grey Barnard’s famous piece Innocence (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Charles Dana Gibson’s Women: The Eternal Question (1905). She was a popular face too on the illustrated covers of many journals and magazines, among them Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, The Delineator and Ladies’ Home Journal, and her likeness was also to be found advertising everything from face creams to toothpastes.

In demand

Nesbitt’s soft-featured, youthful face soon became ubiquitous, to be seen on postcards, tobacco cards, calendars and chromolithographs. She often posed for illustrators in costume – a wood nymph, a gypsy, a Grecian goddess, a geisha girl – she was always clothed and the resulting images were not overtly sexual, though there was a pin-up suggestiveness about them that no doubt contributed to their popularity – and Nesbit’s celebrity.