It all started with a black dress. A long, sexy black dress and a long, sexy black model who knew how to “work it.” Hips. Swivel. Hips. Swivel. Arch. Back. Thrust. Breasts. Slide. Hands. Spread. Lips. Repeat.
Sex sells and leave it to a teenage model from Los Angeles named Tyra (pronounced Tie-rah) to know it better than any working model today.
Last fall, when she flashed her cocky sensuality and, yes, that Anne Klein crocheted black dress to an audience of American fashion retailers and press, Tyra was a new face, a new body on the scene.
These days, less than one year later, Tyra is a surname-less Name.
Stirring the worlds of fashion and modeling from New York to Paris, Tyra has thrown all those stone-faced supermodels for a loop. She’s got something they don’t have-personality on demand.
Audiences have been known to cheer and chant her name when she takes to the runway, like a rock star in concert. She delivers-posing and posing again, dancing to the beat of the blaring music, swaying those hips and playing those clothes for all they’re worth.
Nancy Lueck, a spokeswoman for Anne Klein & Co., calls her a “showstopper” and says that black dress “booked extremely well” because of her.
New York fashion designer Todd Oldham calls her “magnetic. She’s undeniable. You can’t not notice her.”
Naomi Campbell calls her-well, who knows what she calls her. Although neither Tyra nor supermodel Campbell will publicly sling a bad word in the other’s direction, the word in the fashion press is: They aren’t friendly.
All of this commotion over a 19-year-old who describes herself as a “homegirl,” who doesn’t wear designer clothes, who drinks virgin pina coladas, whose favorite pastimes are television and telephone-and who wants to ditch the modeling biz in two years in spite of what she’s said before about staying with it until age 25.
`A typical teen?’
“Now, I’m, like, that’s SIX MORE YEARS-that’s ridiculous!” says Tyra, talking about an early retirement from the business that has rocketed her to fame and fortune and yet sounding very much like a typical, defiant teen.
“She a typical teen?” asks Charlotte Wagster, Tyra’s agent at IMG Models, the agency that’s been handling her since April. “I don’t know how far you can apply that word to her. She has the job she has. She travels all over the world. She has her own business-which is herself. She’s got a staff of people working for her-me, her mother, her publicist. That’s not a typical teen.”
Just back from a photo shoot in Budapest and off tomorrow for more of the same in Paris and Rome, Tyra is now at homebase-her compact, one-bedroom apartment in Downtown Manhattan. She moved here in April after tiring of all the flying back and forth from L.A., her real home. “Funky country” is how she describes her decorating theme at the apartment. (Flea market finds plus bleached oak sidetable and entertainment center plus off-white sofa plus collection of black art.)
She lives alone here three weeks out of the month. The other week she flies back to L.A., where she lives with her stepfather and mother, who gave up her career as a medical photographer to be Tyra’s full-time personal manager, business manager and financial manager.
Clad in a decidedly unglamorous black terry cloth robe, wearing minimal makeup and making no attempt to smooth her hair, tousled and still wet from a dip in the pool, Tyra fits in well with her unaffected surroundings. “You can tell this is my first apartment,” she laughs, fixing one of the artificial sunflowers she has Scotch-taped to the corners of her glass-topped cocktail table.
First turning down her stereo and then nestling into a corner of her sofa, Tyra kicks back on a hot Saturday afternoon for a couple of hours of conversation.
Wanting out
“I’ve been doing it (modeling) since I was 17, so I’ll probably give it about two more years and, hopefully, there’ll be a big movie and I’ll be able to get out,” says Tyra with no visible signs of remorse for having just squealed on herself.
She stops to note the one thing that would keep her in the business: A fat advertising contract. There’s been a Ralph Lauren ad, a Maybelline commercial and a Max Factor ad, but she hasn’t a contract with any of them.
Bemoaning the lack of creativity in modeling (“You really don’t have to use your brain too much”), Tyra has visions of a career in film or television. She wants to direct or produce or screenwrite, something which gives her “total (creative) control,” “where it’s all mine and I tell people what to do,” she says. “I tell them my vision.”
She sees acting as her entree into the business, and modeling as her entree onto the stage. The runway gives her a shot at live performance.
A chameleon
Todd Oldham’s runway has seen Tyra at her animated best, including a dancing, wild thing Tyra. “She turns it out for us,” says the designer, also known for his penchant for all things dramatic. “Our runways are very long-over 100 feet long. Something better happen to keep 1,000 people entertained. Tyra has everybody in her hand.”
“It’s acting,” explains Tyra, succinctly demystifying her charisma.
“Whatever I have on, I transform into that. Rather than just being Tyra and showing the clothes, I become whatever the clothes are.
“If I’m wearing the Anne Klein black crochet dress, I’m going to be slinky and sexy. If I have on a little cheerleader top, I’m going to be really bouncy and prancy and happy. And if I’m in a Japanese show, if I have on slips and Doc Martens, I’ll become a drab monk.”
An actress in waiting
Already, more than one movie type sees possibilities here-Tyra’s been sent a number of scripts, including that for the recently released “The Firm” and Robert DeNiro’s “A Bronx Tale.”
She read for the DeNiro film, but says it was a mistake, calling her performance “absolutely horrible ’cause I wasn’t feeling it.” The part “was pretty simple-a girl about my age.” But the girl, she continues, had no character, no personality.
“I can’t do that,” says Tyra. “I have to have a character. I have to become something. I just can’t be plain and boring.”
At 5 feet, 10 1/2 inches tall, 123 pounds, with smooth, bottle auburn hair, crescent-shaped green eyes, velvety skin, a chiseled face and a mega-watt smile, Tyra can never be plain.
Boring is another story.
On the runway or on the photo shoot, boring isn’t in Tyra’s agenda. But off-stage, off-set, Tyra, the homegirl, works very hard at achieving boring as a state of being.
“I work. And I go home,” she says. No hesitation, no regrets.
Television and telephone fill in the blanks.
Her favorite shows: “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Melrose Place,” “A Different World.” Her favorite actress and actor: Julia Roberts andDenzel Washington.
Her phonemates are her friends and family in L.A. She doesn’t know what her phone bills run these days-her mother pays the bills-but she’s sure they’re “atrocious,” although not as atrocious as $4,000 a month. She racked up those numbers when she lived in Paris.
Tyra readily admits she’s lonely in New York and has few friends here. But, she also admits that she’s even less interested in cultivating new relationships-especially among models (“Nothing in common,” she claims) or crew members.
Instead, she seems content on defining herself in terms of what she doesn’t do.
She doesn’t: Drink, smoke, do drugs, do the club scene, date men over 25, socialize with most models, experience the cultures of the faraway places she finds herself in as a working model.
Her “rebellion,” as she calls it, is simply not to participate. Her life is on hold, she says, held captive by her success in modeling, a career she doesn’t enjoy but a career that could be her ticket to the big or small screen. Thus, to rebel is to not experience it.
“I haven’t seen the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, the Louvre,” she says. “I haven’t seen anything. I don’t really care. I haven’t seen anything here (in New York) either.”
Travel has become an “everyday thing,” she says.
The fast track
As overnight sensations go, Tyra’s was quicker than most.
She started modeling in L.A. in the last three months of her senior year at Immaculate Heart High School. Her plans to study film and television at Loyola Marymount University in L.A. in the fall of 1991 were put on hold when a scout from a Paris modeling agency suggested she postpone college and move to Europe.
She did and the rest is recent history-a fashion magazine cover two weeks after arriving in Paris, 25 runway shows her first time out, more covers on major European magazines including German Harper’s Bazaar, German Cosmopolitan, Spanish Vogue, Spanish Elle and Amica. And then the New York shows in the fall of ’92, that Anne Klein dress and those now famous swiveling hips.
“It was a showstopper,” says Lueck at Anne Klein. “It’s kind of like being in a Broadway play and you have this one scene. If you can rise to the occasion, you can steal the show.”
Tyra may see it a little differently: Steal the show-yes. But then steal away.
“The more famous and well-known I get in modeling, the faster I can get on with the rest of my life,” says Tyra.
AT HOME WITH THE HOMEGIRL
A few fast facts on Tyra: Tyra is her real name, taken from the Mae West character, Tira, in the movie “I’m No Angel.” Banks is her real last name, and she really insists on not using it.
Age: 19.
Hometown/favorite town: Los Angeles. “If there were walls around L.A., I would have no problem. I would not try to climb them-I’d be just fine.”
Family: Mother and stepfather in Los Angeles. She lives with them one week a month. Father, stepmother and three step-siblings also in Los Angeles. Her brother, 25, is a fireman/paramedic in the Air Force and lives with his wife in Japan.
Favorite foods: “Baby-back barbecue ribs and coffee Haagen-Dazs ice cream, softened for 20 seconds in the microwave.”
Favorite designers: “I like Mark Eisen and Richard Tyler and the Gap. I don’t really wear the designer clothes. I don’t wear any of those clothes. I just like what they look like.”
Why don’t you wear designer clothes? “It’s just too expensive. I’d rather spend my money on something else. I’m into quantity not quality.”
Favorite models: “Iman and Cindy Crawford.” Iman, because “she has such respect for herself. She’s a queen.” Crawford because of her “smartness-to have so many things going and so many people want her. She created that.”
Best beauty secret: “None of the (skin-care) products I use cost over $5.” Makeup remover: Albolene. Face soap: Aveeno bar. Astringent: Sea Breeze.
Do you really enjoy working the runway as much as you seem to? “I love the runway. I love it so much I don’t want to get off the runway. Sometimes, I get to the end, I pose so long (that) the (other) girls, I see them rolling their eyes at me.”
Why do you say you having “nothing in common” with most New York models? “I think I’m just more of a homegirl. I go home all of the time. I don’t believe the hype. If I’m looking in the mirror-it’s to try to think of the next pose. It’s a business-I’m not adoring myself. I take it as more of a business than a game and I think a lot of models take it as a game.”
