Svengali of supermodels he revered and reviled

With a Pygmalion-style vision of the potency that beautiful young models can project, John Casablancas found fame - also infamy - as the creator of the supermodel.

Founder of the Elite model agency, the playboy businessman made millions from understanding that he operated in the highly profitable market of selling sexual fantasies. As it happened, they were also his own.

Casablancas, who has died aged 70, believed beauty alone could elevate a young woman to dizzying heights of celebrity and fortune. As a result, he worked only with the most exquisite.

"I only had stars, so I could bill customers more as they couldn't bargain me down on price - we gave the girls huge amounts of money, as well as names and personalities . . . suddenly they became a dream for the larger public - they became supermodels," he recalled.

Responsible for the careers of Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer and Heidi Klum to name but a few, Casablancas became synonymous with the glamour, excess and egos that the late 20th century spawned. He engineered a lucrative transition that took models beyond catwalks and into music videos, television presenting and other mainstream media roles where their profiles - and fees - could further soar.

As Michael Gross, author of Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women, puts it: "He was a true product of his time, took advantage of his position and lived life with no rules. He made breaking them de rigueur for the industry."

It was a zeitgeist that reached its height around 1990 when Ms Evangelista, referring to the glamazon tribe of which she was part, quipped to Vogue: "We don't wake up for less than $10,000 a day."

The remark defined the decade for the fashion world. Yet as years passed and scandals festered, Casablancas came to loathe many of superstars he had created. "One of my biggest regrets is that I created the supermodel - they can be impossible. Impossible," he said in 2000. Many were "spoilt troublemakers" and none ever thanked him for getting her to the top.

He singled out several former clients for particular scorn, calling Ms Campbell "odious" and Ms Klum a "German sausage without talent".

With none of them quick to pay tribute in the days following his death, little love appears to have been lost by the end between the supermodel Svengali and the charges who once so adored him.

Born in New York on December 12 1942, Casablancas was the youngest son of a Spanish textile machinery tycoon and a former Balenciaga model. After a privileged upbringing - attending Switzerland's exclusive Le Rosey boarding school and a number of universities - by his late 20s he had not found his footing. But in Paris he met his second wife Jeanette Christjansen, a former Miss Denmark. Hearing her complain about her agency, he entered the business in 1972.

In New York, to which he later moved Elite Model Management, he proved a provocative competitor to established rivals such as Wilhelmina Cooper and Eileen Ford. Mother Hen figures who extolled the virtues of curfews, chaperones and standardised pay, the two found themselves at war with Casablancas, who with fat cheques both poached their top girls and took them to wild parties at Studio 54.

Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, a celebrated fashion stylist, remembers a man who "was one of a kind, full of fun and energy and passion. One can't underestimate what he did to change the status quo for models - he really was worshipped by so many of them."

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Casablancas worshipped them too - a hamartia that proved his undoing. A high-profile affair with the model Stephanie Seymour, when she was 16 and he 41, tarnished his reputation. In 2000, following a lawsuit accusing the company of price-fixing and a damaging BBC documentary, he quit.

"There is a very dark side to the modelling world - ultimately it has always peddled flesh," says Mr Gross. "Even if they respected his creative and commercial acumen, John's rivals relished his undoing and exit, particularly as they felt that he had brought it on himself."

When he left, Elite had 500 models on four continents, whose bookings brought in more than $100m a year. Casablancas relocated to Miami with Aline Wermelinger, his third wife, whom he had married in 1993 after spotting the aspiring model when she was 16 and he 51. She and their three children survive him, as do his two other children, one of whom is Julian Casablancas, frontman of rock band The Strokes.

In his last years, Casablancas launched modelling schools, a talent scouting group and a "cybermodel agency" to generate computer-animated women for websites. The greatest attribute of this virtual super-beauty, he wryly remarked, was that she would never complain.

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