Evangelista, Linda

Linda Evangelista, (born May 10, 1965, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada), Canadian fashion model perhaps best known as a face of the cosmetics company Revlon and of the Versace fashion house.

Evangelista was born to working-class Italian immigrants. Her father was employed as a factory worker for the American automobile manufacturer General Motors Corporation. Having shown a strong interest in fashion, Evangelista was enrolled at age 12 in a local modeling school. She subsequently entered the 1978 Miss Teen Niagara beauty contest. Although she did not win, she gained the attention of a talent agent from Elite Model Management—one of the world’s top modeling agencies.

In pursuit of a professional modeling career, Evangelista relocated to New York City and in 1981 signed with Elite. The agency sent her to Paris in 1984, and she gained industry recognition when she appeared on the cover of the French edition of the leading fashion magazine Vogue (September 1987). In the same year, at age 22, she married Gerald Marie (divorced 1993), head of Elite’s Paris branch. In 1988 top photographer Peter Lindbergh persuaded Evangelista to cut her hair into a simple boyish crop—which stood in stark contrast to the long and glamorous styles then in vogue. Initially this move brought the cancellation of her performance in the season’s leading runway shows, but within months she was back on the covers—sporting her new hairstyle—and had sparked a global trend. Evangelista continued to dramatically alter her hair cut and colour to transform herself for the camera and was soon christened “the chameleon.” Noted for her resemblance to Italian actress Sophia Loren, Evangelista became the new face of Versace (1989) and Revlon (1990) and was named one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People” (1990).

Evangelista was subsequently featured with fellow models Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Tatjana Patitz, and Christy Turlington on the cover of British Vogue (January 1990). The grouping of several top models attracted significant attention, and they were chosen to appear together again—this time in pop singer George Michael’s “Freedom! ’90” music video. Fashion designer Gianni Versace in turn hired Evangelista, Campbell, Crawford, and Turlington to walk the runway together to the video at his 1991 couture show, which elicited a standing ovation from the audience. The event is believed by many industry professionals to have marked the official debut of the “supermodel”—a top fashion model who appears simultaneously on the covers of the world’s leading fashion magazines and is globally recognized by first name only. Evangelista appeared with other models in Michael’s “Too Funky” video the following year. During this time she also walked the runways of other top fashion houses, including Chanel and Hermès.

As the supermodel phenomenon began to rise, Evangelista was at the forefront of a small group of models—known in the industry as “the supers”—who became worldwide celebrities, increasingly dominating both the high-fashion runways and the global media. American singer RuPaul captured the phenomenon in the 1993 hit song aptly titled “Supermodel,” which mentioned the year’s top models—including Evangelista, Campbell, Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, Turlington, and Niki Taylor—by first name only. Evangelista, Campbell, and Turlington were regularly booked as a trio for some of the most-prized assignments and were soon known in their own right as “the holy trinity.” Evangelista became notorious for her often controversial remarks—perhaps most famously telling Vogue, “We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.”

Evangelista appeared in the fashion documentaries Unzipped (1995) and Catwalk (1996). In 1997 she received the industry’s Lifetime Achievement Award, presented jointly by Vogue and the American cable television network VH1.

The late 1990s marked the end of the supermodel era. Evangelista received a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame in Toronto (2003) and was featured in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition “The Model as Muse: Embodying Fashion” (2009), which showcased the models who epitomized fashion during the 20th century.

Evangelista continued to model for the globe’s top brands into the mid-2010s, when she abruptly stopped working. In 2021 she revealed that she had been left “brutally disfigured” by a cosmetic procedure.