Pepperdine

Aquilon grew up in Southern California the way a lot of future models did and didn’t — athletic, outdoorsy, entirely unconcerned with the camera. He captained the water polo team at Pepperdine University, a sport that builds a particular kind of physique: broad through the shoulders, conditioned rather than sculpted, functional in a way that gym-built muscle rarely is. It was the kind of body Bruce Weber had been looking for without quite knowing how to describe it — not a bodybuilder’s symmetry, not a runway model’s leanness, but an athlete’s economy. Every photograph Weber took of Aquilon over the following decade carries that economy. Nothing in the frame is posed for effect. It just happens to be effective.

Weber found him the way Weber found almost everyone in this era — not through an agency submission or a casting call, but by noticing. Weber’s gift, the one that would define the aesthetic of an entire decade of American menswear, was an eye for a specific kind of unselfconscious physicality: men who looked like they’d be exactly the same with or without a camera in the room. Aquilon had it. The Nina Blanchard Agency in Los Angeles signed him not long after, and the SoHo Weekly News portfolio ran before most of the industry had any idea who he was.

The Cover

In May 1979, Aquilon made the cover of GQ. It is difficult, from this distance, to reconstruct exactly how unusual that was. GQ covers in this era were not yet a battleground for male model recognition — they were closer to a menswear catalog with better production values, and the men who appeared on them were typically actors, athletes, or anonymous house models whose names nobody outside the agency knew or cared to learn. Aquilon’s cover was different because it wasn’t selling a suit. It was selling him, on essentially the same terms a women’s magazine cover sold a face. The industry didn’t have a name for what that meant yet. It would spend the next decade catching up.

What followed was not a single signature campaign in the way Hintnaus would later have his Times Square billboard or Flinn would have his eleven consecutive years at Hugo Boss. Aquilon’s career was wider than that and, in its way, more foundational — Calvin Klein, Polo Ralph Lauren, Pirelli, Abercrombie & Fitch, Revlon, Gianni Versace. He shot for GQ, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Elle, Life, Interview, and Rolling Stone, moving across categories that hadn’t previously overlapped for a male face. Tim Blanks, writing later in VMAN, called him the advance guard of the Weber revolution — not a participant in a movement but the leading edge of one, the first proof that the approach worked before anyone else had signed on to try it. The New York Times, assessing the early Weber photographs years afterward, credited them with prompting what amounted to a thousand academic reconsiderations of contemporary masculinity. That is an unusual sentence to write about underwear photographs. It is also accurate.

What He Built

It is worth being precise about what “first” means here, because the claim gets made loosely about a lot of people in this industry and it is rarely fully earned. Aquilon was not the first attractive man to be photographed for a magazine. He was not the first athlete to model. What he was first to do — and what makes every chapter that follows this one possible — was anchor a mass-market campaign on the same erotic terms the industry had always reserved exclusively for women, at a moment when doing so was a genuine commercial risk rather than an established playbook. Hintnaus had Calvin Klein behind him in 1982, an enormous budget and a defined cultural moment ready to receive the image. Aquilon had neither. He had Bruce Weber, a downtown paper nobody outside New York read, and a category that did not yet exist to receive what they were making.

Bruce Weber returned to him decades later, photographing him for L’Uomo Vogue in October 2006 — nearly thirty years after the SoHo Weekly News portfolio, two photographers, in a sense, revisiting the start of something they had built together without either of them fully realizing it at the time. The image that ran was quieter than the 1978 work. It didn’t need to announce anything. The announcing had already happened.

After

Aquilon’s modeling career ran roughly a decade, ending well before the industry he helped invent reached its commercial peak in the 1990s. He did not chase the second act that several of the men in this book would eventually find — no fragrance launch, no real estate practice, no second career built loudly in public. He went back to school. He is currently Director of Academic and Institutional Technology at Westmont College in Santa Barbara, a job description that shares almost no vocabulary with anything in the preceding paragraphs. He has four children. He showed up on time, by every account, for thirty years of a life that didn’t require the mythology the industry had briefly built around him.

That absence of mythology is, in its own way, the most fitting ending available to him. He didn’t need it while he was working, either. The pictures did that on their own.

An Athlete First

Hintnaus was not discovered as a blank physical type the way some of the men in this book were. He arrived in front of Weber’s camera already a serious athlete, with a résumé that had nothing to do with fashion. Born in Brazil to Czech immigrant parents who had settled there before relocating the family to the United States in 1960, Hintnaus grew up pole vaulting, and he was good at it in a way that very few people in any sport ever are. He won the California state championship in 1976. He qualified for the 1980 U.S. Olympic Trials and cleared 5.60 meters — a height that would have sent him to Moscow had the American boycott of the 1980 Games not intervened. He competed for Brazil at the Olympics instead, and in 1985 he set the South American pole vault record at 5.76 meters, a mark that stood for twenty-two years.

That athletic credibility matters to the story, because it is part of what Weber was looking for across this entire era. The photographer’s eye, again and again in the early 1980s, gravitated toward men whose bodies had been built by something other than vanity — competition, training, function. Hintnaus’s body was a pole vaulter’s body: explosive, lean, built around a very specific kind of controlled power. It photographed like nothing the menswear industry had used before.

Santorini

Calvin Klein Underwear did not exist as a meaningful commercial category before 1982. Designer underwear for men, as a thing a man might consciously choose and pay a premium for, had to be invented, and Weber and Calvin Klein invented it together with this single image. They shot Hintnaus against a whitewashed chimney on Santorini — low camera angle, white briefs, the hard white Aegean light flattening every shadow into pure form. The image was less a fashion photograph than a piece of classical sculpture rendered in print, and that was entirely intentional. Weber was working from the same visual vocabulary as Greek statuary, deliberately, and the choice paid off in a way that even Calvin Klein could not have fully predicted.

In August 1982, that photograph went up as a billboard in Times Square — seven stories tall, a near-naked man looming over Broadway at a scale no commercial image of a male body had previously attempted in American advertising. It stopped traffic, literally, according to contemporaneous accounts. Bloomingdale’s sold sixty-five thousand dollars of Calvin Klein briefs in the two weeks that followed — a figure that sounds modest by today’s standards and was, in 1982, a category-defining number. American Photographer magazine later named it one of the Ten Pictures That Changed America, a list that otherwise consists of photojournalism and historical documents, not advertising. The Hintnaus billboard belongs on it anyway.

What It Built

Every men’s underwear campaign that followed for the next four decades exists in conversation with this image, whether the brand acknowledges it or not. The billboard scale, the classical posing, the choice of an athlete’s body over a bodybuilder’s, the decision to sell desire rather than fabric — all of it traces back to Santorini in 1982. The multi-billion-dollar luxury men’s underwear category that exists today, every fragrance campaign that has ever used a male body as its central image, every billboard that has put a man in minimal clothing above a city street since — all of it is downstream of this one frame.

And yet Hintnaus does not appear on the 2012 L’Uomo Vogue list. He does not appear on the 2014 Vogue list either. It is, by any reasonable accounting, the single greatest editorial oversight in the documented history of this industry — not a marginal call, not a defensible omission, but an absence that borders on contradiction, since so much of what both lists were attempting to honor would not exist without the image he is missing from.

After

Hintnaus once said, with a kind of resigned humor, that he had worked his entire life to be the best pole vaulter in the world and ended up better known for putting on a pair of briefs. The line lands harder the longer you sit with it. He had genuinely earned a place in athletic history before Weber ever found him, and the industry’s gravity flattened that into a footnote beneath the photograph.

He lives in Hawaii now, where the athlete the camera nearly erased has had the longer career. He has coached pole vaulters at the high school level for over a decade, and in December 2024 he joined the University of Hawaii at Manoa track and field staff as an assistant pole vault coach — still teaching the discipline that built the body the whole industry eventually borrowed.

Cornell, By Way of the Ocean

What separates Hulse from the simpler version of the discovery myth is the resume underneath the physique. He attended Cornell University, where he studied Asian Studies and, in one of the era’s stranger biographical footnotes, modeled nude for art classes before he ever modeled commercially — a degree of comfort in front of an unfamiliar camera that would serve him well later. He went on to postgraduate study in clinical psychology at West Chester University. He held black belts in both Aikido and Jujitsu. None of this is typical preparation for a modeling career, and that is precisely the point: Hulse arrived at Weber’s lens as a fully formed person with an entire intellectual and athletic life that had nothing to do with the industry, which is part of what made the resulting photographs feel less like advertising and more like documentation of an actual human being.

The Look That Defined a Decade

The Guardian, years later, described him as the chiseled, muscular, heavily oiled protagonist of high-end fashion advertising — a fair if slightly reductive summary of a body of work that ran across Calvin Klein Underwear, Polo Ralph Lauren, and Levi’s, three of the most significant menswear accounts of the decade. His GQ cover. His campaigns. He moved through the same rarefied circuit as Janice Dickinson, Andie MacDowell, Paulina Porizkova, Elle Macpherson, and Cindy Crawford — a roster of women who defined 1980s fashion at the absolute top of the industry, with Hulse as one of the very few male faces working at the same commercial tier alongside them.

What distinguishes his career from several others in this book is sheer duration. Most male modeling careers from this era, even the most commercially significant ones, ran a decade or less before the faces aged out or the industry moved on to its next discovery. Hulse kept working. He is now generally considered among the top ten male models of all time, a ranking that owes as much to longevity as to any single campaign — there was no one Hintnaus billboard, no one Flinn decade at a single brand. There was instead a sustained, multi-decade presence across the category’s most important accounts, which is its own kind of achievement and arguably a harder one to sustain.

Still in the Water

He lives in Southern California today, where he continues to work as a professional photographer — turning the camera around, in a sense, after thirty-plus years on the other side of it — and remains an accomplished surfer. He is one of the longest continuously active models in the industry’s documented history, a beach kid from New Jersey who built a career out of looking exactly like what he actually was.

No System, No Algorithm

Flinn was not built by an agency development program. He was not discovered as raw material and shaped over years into a marketable product, the way modeling careers are sometimes constructed today. He was represented by Wilhelmina Models in New York — one of the legendary agencies of the era — but by every account, what Wilhelmina was selling was already complete when it arrived. A classic, chiseled American aesthetic that balanced rugged athleticism against high-fashion sophistication in a proportion almost nobody else of his generation achieved. He walked in with it. There was no algorithm to credit, no digital discovery story, no viral moment. Just a face the camera understood immediately and an industry that recognized what it was looking at.

The Hugo Boss Decade

The 1980s menswear industry was undergoing a genuine transformation — a shift toward power suiting, casual luxury, and a newly athletic vision of masculinity that hadn’t fully existed in commercial fashion before. Flinn sat at the exact center of that shift. Working with photographer Bob Krieger across all eleven years, his face became inseparable from Hugo Boss’s identity: the sharp tailoring, the oversized wool overcoats, the corporate sportswear that defined an aspirational version of male success for an entire decade. His image ran across multi-page spreads in GQ and Esquire and loomed over American and European cities on billboards that, for most of the people who saw them, simply were Hugo Boss — there was no separating the brand from the face fronting it.

It’s worth remembering what this career was built on, mechanically. There was no social media, no influencer marketing, no algorithmic targeting. A modeling career in this era survived entirely on raw photogenic presence and the kind of physical charisma that either translates through a still camera or doesn’t. Flinn’s did, consistently, for over a decade, which is the simplest and most complete explanation available for why his portfolio now functions as a kind of definitive archive of print advertising’s golden era — a record of exactly what the industry looked like when a single face, photographed well, could carry an entire brand’s identity without any other infrastructure behind it.

The Silence

And then, at the height of it, he left. Not gradually — completely. Flinn has maintained no public presence since exiting the industry, a degree of disappearance that is genuinely rare among men who reached his level of visibility. No interviews, no nostalgia tours, no late-career returns to the industry that made him famous. He went into business instead, co-founding Boxfli, a retail shipping company based in Newport Beach, California, with his wife. The man who had defined the aspirational look of an entire era built something else entirely — and did it, by every available account, the exact same way he had done the modeling: quietly, without seeking the attention his previous career had handed him by default.

That silence is part of what makes him the right name to open this book on. The eleven years at Hugo Boss are the loudest part of the record. The three and a half decades of saying nothing about it afterward are, in their own way, just as much a part of who he turned out to be.

Villa Tejas

Weber later described the Obsession shoot as unorthodox from the start. The location — an estate in Montecito, California — came from a surfer’s offhand suggestion, and the property was borrowed without its owners present, the kind of improvisational, low-overhead production decision that defined Weber’s working method even on campaigns with enormous budgets behind them. Arango, a young former college athlete Weber had recently met, was cast alongside dancer Nathalie Gabrielli for what became one of the most recognizable fragrance images of the decade: a nude couple on a swing, shot in black and white, the physical weight of the composition landing somewhere between sculpture and unguarded desire. Weber would later describe the intent behind it as desire with affection — a phrase that is, in two words, the entire difference between this image and the more clinical eroticism that fragrance advertising often settled for in the decades that followed.

Point Conception

Weber didn’t stop at the commercial assignment. He continued photographing Arango along the California coast in deep blacks and whites, low angles, posing him closer to Greek statuary than to a fashion catalog — the same classical instinct that had driven the Hintnaus billboard seven years earlier, applied here to a more intimate, art-photography register. The resulting body of work, known as the Point Conception series, was eventually exhibited and sold through gallery representation as fine art photography, not catalog imagery. In 2017, a print from the Obsession campaign sold at Phillips auction house for $112,875 — the highest price any single Bruce Weber photograph has ever achieved at auction. The man at the center of the photograph that broke that record was Ric Arango.

Before the Camera

Arango’s path to that moment ran through football, not modeling. Born Rick Arango, he played at the University of Miami as a Hurricane before Weber ever found him — another instance, in keeping with the pattern this entire era runs on, of an athlete’s body translating into a kind of presence the camera could not manufacture on its own.

After

Weber, in a 2017 interview conducted around the time of the Phillips auction sale, confirmed that Arango now works in emergency services on Miami Beach — a detail offered almost in passing, the way you’d mention an old friend’s current job, except the friend in question had once been at the center of the highest-grossing fragrance campaign of his decade. The industry largely forgot him. The auction record, and the record kept here, do not.

No Connections, No Category

Ward was born in Lebanon, Pennsylvania in 1964, of Portuguese, Scottish, Irish, English, and Swedish heritage — a genetic mix that produced a face the industry, by his own account and by the account of nearly everyone who worked with him early on, simply did not know how to categorize. He arrived in New York with no industry connections and signed with Major Model Management, where his combination of an athletic build, visible tattoos, and an uncommonly complex bone structure put him in front of photographers who had no existing box to file him into.

Calvin Klein Underwear. Dolce & Gabbana. Givenchy. The campaign list reads like a standard high-fashion résumé until you remember what he actually looked like running through it — tattooed arms visible in luxury advertising at a moment when that was genuinely, structurally unusual, not a stylistic choice but a real departure from what the category had previously considered sellable.

Beyond the Campaigns

Ward’s reach extended well past traditional fashion advertising. He appeared in two of Madonna’s most significant videos, Cherish and Like a Prayer, and in George Michael’s Freedom ’90 — the same film that gave John Pearson, later in this book, his own permanent place in the cultural record, with Ward occupying a different kind of presence in the same frame. In 1996 he starred in Rick Castro’s film Hustler White, reaching a cultural audience that none of his modeling campaigns, however prestigious, could have touched on their own.

Herb Ritts, one of the defining photographers of the era, initially passed on him — a detail Ward has discussed candidly in later interviews — and then spent years afterward photographing him repeatedly, once he understood what the camera was actually finding in that face. An editor at Italian Vogue is reported to have called Ward’s agent at one point specifically to object to his look. The industry came around anyway. It generally does, this book argues more than once, once it runs out of arguments against what is plainly working.

Still Working

Ward is a father of three daughters and continues to model, based in Los Angeles. AnOther Man profiled him in 2018 alongside his daughters, documenting a face that has now been working, in one form or another, for over four decades. Of every man whose career this book records, Ward may have walked into the most rooms with the least natural permission to be there, and made the room reconsider its own rules every time.

Princeton, By Way of England

Born in Syracuse, New York in 1962, Richards was a scholar-athlete in the fullest sense — he studied abroad on scholarship at Haileybury, the English public school, before graduating from Princeton University in 1985 with a degree in economics, having played varsity football throughout. He signed with Ford Models and was in front of Bruce Weber’s camera within three weeks of arriving in the industry, a turnaround that signals exactly how immediately the partnership clicked.

Three Hundred Days a Year

What followed was a volume of work that very few careers in this book can match. Richards was booked roughly three hundred days a year. Over fifteen years, he completed more than two hundred major advertisements and hundreds of additional commercial campaigns, moving through the same circuit as Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, and Christy Turlington at the absolute height of the supermodel era. The Italian magazine Mondo Uomo gave him a fifty-eight-page spread in 1992 — an editorial commitment that has essentially no modern equivalent. Weber photographed him. So did Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, and Steven Meisel — four of the most significant photographers of the twentieth century, all independently choosing to put Richards in front of their cameras. His campaign list runs through Versace, Valentino, Ralph Lauren, Burberry, Cartier, Dunhill, Donna Karan, and Balenciaga.

What Ran Underneath

Hidden from nearly everyone who worked alongside him during those fifteen years was a decade-long entanglement with a New York group called Eternal Values — an organization that, by Richards’s own later account, consumed a significant portion of his earnings and gradually eroded his sense of reality before he extracted himself in 1999. The full story became the subject of a 2026 HBO documentary series, Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult, which traces how a career built on total public visibility coexisted with a private life almost nobody around him understood.

He survived it. He relocated to Los Angeles, built a production company, wrote and starred in films, and now works as a speaker on cult recovery — using the specifics of what happened to him to help other people recognize the same patterns earlier than he did.

The Record, In Full

The modeling career, considered entirely on its own terms, was the most commercially dominant of its decade by almost any measure available — volume, photographer pedigree, brand tier, duration. The cult entanglement happened at the same time, to the same man, and very nearly cost him everything the career had built. Both things are true. Both belong in the record, in full, rather than in the sanitized version that an industry retrospective might prefer.

A Denim Shop in Hull

Pearson was working in a denim shop in Hull, Yorkshire, when a photographer stopped him on the street at eighteen and asked to take his picture — a beginning with almost nothing in common with the Manhattan agency system that built most of the careers in this book. He tried London, then Tokyo. The big agencies didn’t bite. In 1986, at twenty-one, he flew to New York on his own initiative, and within three days he was working for Bloomingdale’s with photographer Bob Frame — the same photographer behind Cindy Crawford’s first professional shoot. Days after that, he met Steven Meisel and shot an international magazine cover with Uma Thurman. The speed of that turnaround, from working-class denim shop to international magazine cover in a matter of days, is one of the more compressed origin stories in this book.

Three Decades

What followed was a career that ran for decades at the very top of a profession not generally known for rewarding longevity. Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, Valentino, Burberry, Levi’s, Gap — over a hundred commercials across a span most male models never approach. The Sunday Times named him the World’s First Male Supermodel, a title that puts him in direct conversation with Jeff Aquilon’s case earlier in this book — a reminder that this particular argument, about who actually built the category first, has been made more than once, by more than one publication, about more than one man, which says less about any single claim and more about how genuinely unsettled the early history of this industry still is. Interview Magazine named him an Industry Legend. AnOther Man went further still, naming him the most Iconic Male Model of All Time.

Mr Feelgood

Pearson is now co-founder of Mr Feelgood, a men’s wellness platform addressing mental health, culture, society, and enterprise — built, by every account, with the same working-class Hull directness he carried into New York in 1986 and never lost across thirty-five years in front of the camera. He is a father of three. The documented record of this industry, across nearly its entire modern history, runs through him from one end to the other almost more continuously than it runs through anyone else in this book.

Tehran to a London Boarding School

Born in Tehran in 1967 to an English mother and an Iranian father, Alborzian was sent to a boarding school in the United Kingdom in 1978, as the Iranian Revolution made his home city unsafe for his family to remain in. He grew up in England and later dropped out of university to move to London, where a scout spotted him on the street at nineteen — one more entry in this book’s recurring pattern of careers that began on a sidewalk rather than in an agency office. Within weeks he was on the Jean Paul Gaultier runway in Paris. Dior and Yves Saint Laurent followed before he landed a three-season contract with Guess Jeans in 1988, the campaign that gave him real global visibility for the first time.

Madonna, George Michael, and Twelve Years at the Top

Madonna handpicked him as her love interest for the Express Yourself video in 1989, and he appeared again in George Michael’s 1997 video alongside Kate Moss — two of the most visible crossovers into mainstream pop culture that any model of his generation achieved. His campaign roster across the following twelve years ran through Versace, Chanel, Gucci, Valentino, Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Tom Ford, Ralph Lauren, and Louis Vuitton — essentially the complete list of the era’s most significant luxury houses, in sequence, over more than a decade.

South Africa

In 1998, Alborzian traveled to South Africa with Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, and Kate Moss to visit Nelson Mandela. Something shifted on that trip, by his own later account — not a dramatic break, but the beginning of a reconsideration that played out over the following months. He left the industry. He traveled to India and studied Ayurveda and yoga under serious teachers for years, eventually authoring four books on holistic wellness and building a client roster that came to include Ellen DeGeneres.

Yogi Cameron

He goes by Yogi Cameron now — a name he carries with the same quiet authority he brought to every frame he appeared in during his twelve years at the top of the fashion industry. Very few careers built at his level walk away from it voluntarily, and fewer still build a second career afterward with this much depth and staying power. It is the right note to end Part One on: even among the men who built the floor this entire industry would eventually stand on, at least one of them looked at what he’d built and chose, deliberately, to walk somewhere else.

Vanity Fair, 1991

His breakthrough came in 1991, when Bruce Weber cast him in a 116-page Calvin Klein Jeans campaign for Vanity Fair — the shower scene with Carré Otis that stopped newsstands and reset the commercial standard for male fashion advertising in a single issue. A hundred and sixteen pages is not a campaign in the conventional sense. It is closer to a magazine takeover, and the scale of the commitment told the entire industry exactly how seriously Calvin Klein was betting on this particular face.

People magazine named him one of the Fifty Most Beautiful People in the World in May 1992. He went on to shoot the Versace campaign with Stephanie Seymour, photographed by Richard Avedon — work Schenkenberg has since described as the finest images of his entire career. He modeled for Valentino, Donna Karan, Giorgio Armani, Gianfranco Ferré, Joop, and Iceberg, alongside the Versace and Calvin Klein work that made him famous. He was photographed for Harper’s Bazaar with Kate Moss on a New York subway in 1992, one of the defining editorial images of the decade, and he became the first man to appear on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar at all.

Six-Four and Impossible to Miss

Part of what made Schenkenberg’s case different from the careers in Part One is scale, literally. At six-foot-four, with his signature long hair, he was physically impossible to overlook in a room, and the global media response to him in the early 1990s genuinely defined what a male sex symbol was supposed to look like for the entire decade. Calvin Klein Jeans, Versace, Iceberg — the campaigns alone tell only part of the story. The other part is a level of in-person presence that, by the testimony of nearly everyone who has worked alongside him since, has rarely been matched by anyone of his generation.

New Rules

In 1997 he published a book documenting his career, Marcus Schenkenberg: New Rules — an unusual move for a model still very much in the middle of his working life, and one that signaled how much cultural weight his name had accumulated by that point. He speaks five languages, splits his time between New York, Los Angeles, and Stockholm, and remains represented by Ford Models and Soul Artist Management. He has never required a platform, an algorithm, or a cultural moment beyond whatever the camera found when he simply stepped in front of it — which, across three decades now, has continued to be more than enough.

An Accident in Amsterdam

Vanderloo came to modeling by accident, in the most literal sense available to any career in this book. Born in the Netherlands in 1968 and raised in Kenya from age three, he was studying history at the University of Amsterdam in 1992 when he accompanied a model girlfriend to a photoshoot, and the photographer put them both in front of the camera. He had no particular interest in pursuing it. Within months he had signed with Wilhelmina and was on runways in Paris, Milan, and New York. Within four months of signing, he was an international sensation — a compression of timeline that even by this book’s standards is unusually fast.

Obsession, Then Hugo Boss

In 1994, he moved to New York to front Calvin Klein’s Obsession campaign — the shot with Christy Turlington that defined fragrance advertising for the entire decade. From 1995, Hugo Boss made him the face of both their couture and ready-to-wear lines, locking in the simultaneous brand dominance no other male model has ever replicated. At the height of the 1990s he was walking over fifty shows per fashion week, a volume that places him among the busiest working models of either gender during that period.

VH1 named him Male Model of the Year in 1995. He became the first male model to appear on the cover of Marie Claire in 1996. By 2012, models.com ranked him fourth on their Top Icons Men list. In one of the stranger footnotes available to any career in this book, his likeness was chosen as the default male Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect video game trilogy — an unusual selection for a character built around authority, and, on reflection, exactly the right one.

Still Running

He speaks five languages, keeps homes in New York, Paris, Amsterdam, and Ibiza, and continues to work. His son, Mark Vanderloo Jr., is now modeling as well. The career that began as an accident in Amsterdam has never fully stopped, and the institutional authority that put him at two competing houses simultaneously has never meaningfully diminished.

Hugo Boss, and Everyone After

His agency told him to take the Hugo Boss campaign when it came. He did. Hugo became an icon, and so, by extension, did Schreyer. From there, the campaign roster expanded to Versace, Armani, Guess, Calvin Klein, Gucci, and Dolce & Gabbana — essentially every major house operating at the top of the menswear market during his working years. Mario Testino found him early in London. Herb Ritts photographed him. So did Bruce Weber and Juergen Teller. Alasdair McLellan shot him for Louis Vuitton alongside Kim Jones in 2011, work Schreyer has cited as among the best campaigns of his career.

He remains the only male model in history to appear on the cover of French Vogue — a distinction that, on its own, would justify inclusion in any serious accounting of this industry’s defining faces. Four decades in, he is still working, still carrying the same authority the industry built itself around when his career began.

Painting, Now

He lives in a small medieval town near Zurich, Switzerland, where he is represented by Metro Models Zurich and Select London. He trained at an art school before modeling and has returned to painting on canvas, extending that practice into a line of hand-painted garments that fuse fashion with fine art — the same instinct for quality that carried the modeling career, redirected somewhere new. He continues to shoot editorials. No algorithm required. No platform required. Just the face, and what it has continued to do, decade after decade, whenever a camera finds it.

Harlem, 1993

Born in New York in 1970 of Jamaican and Chinese Panamanian heritage, Beckford was spotted in Harlem in 1993 and signed almost immediately as the face of the Polo Ralph Lauren empire — not one campaign, not one season, but the face of the brand throughout the height of its global cultural dominance. VH1 named him Man of the Year in 1995. He appeared on the covers of international editions of GQ, Details, and Vogue Hommes multiple times across the decade.

The significance of the Ralph Lauren relationship is easy to flatten into a simple diversity narrative, and it deserves more precision than that. Ralph Lauren in the early 1990s represented one of the most conservative, tradition-bound aesthetics in American fashion — a brand built almost entirely on an imagined version of WASP heritage. Hiring Beckford as its singular face required the brand to make a public statement about what that heritage actually looked like, simply by the act of the hire. They made it, repeatedly, for years.

Beyond the Runway

Beckford co-hosted Bravo’s Make Me a Supermodel in 2008 and has maintained a continuous public presence across television, social media, and occasional modeling work ever since. He remains one of the most recognizable male faces the American fashion industry has ever produced — a crossover into mainstream culture that, unlike some of the careers elsewhere in this book, never diluted the modeling career underneath it. If anything, it amplified it.

Connecticut to Manhattan

Bergin arrived in New York from Connecticut with no modeling background and signed with Wilhelmina on the strength of what he brought into the room. Calvin Klein moved quickly. By the mid-1990s his face and body were on billboards across the city, running in campaigns through every major men’s and fashion title in the market. The underwear and jeans campaigns running in parallel represented a commercial investment from Klein’s house that functioned less like a standard talent acquisition and more like complete institutional ownership of a single face — a strategy the brand has rarely repeated since at this scale.

Backstage, 1997

One of the more quietly significant images connected to Bergin’s career is a candid: photographed backstage at the Bill Blass New York show in 1997 alongside Brett Salisbury — two of the most recognizable commercial male faces of the era, captured in an unguarded moment before the lights came up, the kind of image that rarely survives from a period when most documentation of these men was deliberately staged.

His Valentino work extended the career into European high fashion while the Calvin Klein campaigns kept his visibility running at street level in every major American city simultaneously. He later transitioned into acting, appearing in Baywatch and other television work, broadening a profile that had already reached saturation within the fashion industry itself.

Studio City

Bergin is now a top-ranked Los Angeles real estate professional, consistently recognized among the city’s top one percent of agents, with more than fifteen years of experience in the market and a practice based in Studio City. The same total-market visibility that Calvin Klein once built around his face, he has since rebuilt around a different kind of asset entirely.

From the Huddle to Milan

Salisbury’s path into modeling ran through college football, not an agency program — a former quarterback whose route into the industry had nothing in common with the runway-discovery stories that built most of this book’s earlier chapters. He signed with Modelplan Milan and with Riccardo Gay Model Management, an agency of eighty-two men that included Marcus Schenkenberg, Joel West, and Andrea Boccaletti. He became number eighty-two on that roster — the newest name on a list already stacked with some of the most significant faces of the decade.

Photographer Maurizio Montani shot him in Milan in September 1995, the image that launched his international career. Two years later, Richard Avedon photographed him in Los Angeles as the global face of Axios Man by Nexxus — one of the most significant commercial male grooming campaigns in the world that year, and a credit that places Salisbury in the company of very few models who worked directly with Avedon during this period.

Made in Italy

Salisbury was part of the elite eight-man group known within the industry as Made in Italy — the most sought-after commercial male faces working simultaneously out of Milan at the peak of the city’s influence over global menswear advertising. Membership in that group placed him alongside Marcus Schenkenberg, profiled earlier in this part, at the exact center of the decade’s commercial engine.

A former college quarterback. Finland’s Sexiest Male, via Paparazzi Models Helsinki. Ranked fifteenth on L’Uomo Vogue’s Top 25 Male Models Ever in the magazine’s original 2012 list. The combination of a serious athletic career and a modeling career of this volume and tier has no real parallel elsewhere in the documented history of the industry — most of the men in this book who came from athletic backgrounds modeled for a decade or more. Salisbury did the equivalent volume of work in under four years, then walked away from it entirely.

What Came After

He has since built an independent creative house, House of Salisbury, spanning fragrance, music, publishing, and cultural archiving. His fragrance, MORPH, launched in May 2026 after a development period that began decades earlier. His music project, SLOAN, is distributed globally. The relentlessness that produced five hundred jobs in four years did not end when the modeling career did. It simply found new territory to run in.

Discovered Twice

Lundqvist was found in 1994 by Weber and model agent Sean Patterson, working in tandem — Weber’s eye doing what it had done for over a decade by that point, locating a specific kind of presence the rest of the industry hadn’t yet noticed. He was on a Versace campaign with Helena Christensen almost immediately. His appearance on MTV’s House of Style placed him in front of an audience that most of the men in Part One of this book never had access to — not because their careers were smaller, but because the platform itself didn’t exist yet when their decade was running.

He appeared in a 2005 issue of L’Uomo Vogue alongside Gabriel Aubry, Jason Shaw, and Mark Vanderloo, and as Fergie’s love interest in the music video for Clumsy, extending his visibility well past the runway and into the same kind of pop-culture crossover that several other men in this book achieved through music videos specifically.

Two Faces, One Decade

What makes Lundqvist’s chapter worth placing directly after Vanderloo’s is the friendship between them — a closeness during the apex of both their careers that produced two of the most institutionally validated faces the decade built, running parallel at the highest tier without ever meaningfully competing. His work at Versace, Lagerfeld, and Calvin Klein ran alongside Vanderloo’s work at Hugo Boss and DKNY for the better part of a decade, proof that the market in the 1990s was genuinely large enough to sustain two men at the absolute top simultaneously, rather than forcing a single winner the way the industry sometimes implies in retrospect.

Real Estate, Now

He remains represented by Ford Models and continues to work. In 2021 he joined Douglas Elliman as a luxury real estate broker in New York, leading sales for Maverick, an eighty-seven-unit health-focused condominium development in Chelsea that achieved over eighty percent sold-out by 2025 — a second career built, like several others in this book, on the same relationship-driven instincts that the modeling career had quietly been training all along.

A Dare

Born in Essex in 1980, Gandy was a marketing student who entered a modeling competition on a dare in 2001. He won. The industry that received him afterward was largely oriented toward lean, androgynous aesthetics, and his muscular, classically masculine physicality was, at first, not what the runway wanted. What it turned out to want — what the fragrance market in particular already understood, even if high fashion hadn’t caught up yet — was exactly what Gandy had to offer.

The Amalfi Coast

Dolce & Gabbana cast him as the face of Light Blue in 2006. Mariano Vivanco photographed him on the Amalfi Coast, and the image went global in a way fragrance campaigns rarely achieve, running for years and becoming the benchmark against which essentially every other men’s fragrance campaign of the period was measured. The subsequent Marks & Spencer campaign generated a reported one hundred million pounds in revenue for the brand — a figure that places Gandy’s commercial impact in a different category from almost anyone else in this book, measured purely in terms of documented revenue attribution.

Still the Benchmark

He remains one of the most active and visible faces in the industry, with ongoing brand collaborations, a substantial public platform, and a continuous presence on covers and in campaigns. He also advocates for men’s health and wellness causes in the United Kingdom, using the same visibility that built the modeling career to support causes that have nothing to do with fashion at all. Of every man whose career this book records, Gandy may be the most institutionally dominant commercial male model the modern era has produced — the culmination of everything the system spent five decades building toward.

Bilbao to Barcelona

Born in Bilbao, in the Basque Country, in 1984, Kortajarena was discovered at eighteen on the streets of Barcelona. He signed with The Lions in New York and with Select in London, and within a short period was working for Tom Ford, Karl Lagerfeld, Versace, Bulgari, Hugo Boss, Emporio Armani, and Jean Paul Gaultier — a roster that placed him at the top tier of European luxury almost immediately. Tom Ford’s choice of him over the entire available global male modeling market was a precise, considered decision rather than a casting accident, and it carried weight accordingly.

A Single Man

Kortajarena appeared in Tom Ford’s feature film A Single Man in 2009, alongside Colin Firth, in a role that required something beyond physical presence and, by the consensus of critics at the time, delivered it. Forbes ranked him the eighth most influential male model in 2009. Models.com placed him fourth overall in 2017 — sustained critical and commercial recognition across nearly a decade, rather than a single peak moment.

Greenpeace

He has used his platform with purpose, serving as a Climate Ambassador for Greenpeace Spain, bearing witness to the effects of climate change and calling on governments to take urgent action. He continues to model and act. The face Tom Ford chose above every other option available to him has, in the years since, found causes worthy of the attention it commands.

Vancouver to the Runway

Born in Vancouver in 1983, Mills began his career with runway work for Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent in 2003, and the market understood what it was looking at almost immediately. He became a fixture for Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Versace, Tom Ford, Saint Laurent, and Gucci — essentially the full roster of significant luxury houses operating at the top of menswear during his working years. Testino photographed him. Meisel photographed him. Both arrived independently at the same assessment of what he offered the camera.

Beyond Fashion

He appeared in Sex and the City 2 in 2010 and in CBS’s 2 Broke Girls in 2014. Taylor Swift cast him as her love interest in the music video for We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. None of those appearances defined his career on their own. The modeling work defined itself, on its own terms, well before any of the crossover attention arrived.

He continues to model and act, with a career still in full motion after more than two decades — not a comeback, not a legacy act, simply a continuation of the same work that began on a Gucci runway in 2003.

Chicago to Chanel

Born in Chicago in 1981, Kroenig arrived in New York with no industry background and signed with VNY Model Management. He moved quickly through Abercrombie & Fitch, Dolce & Gabbana, and Fendi before Lagerfeld found him and made a decision that lasted a decade. Lagerfeld photographed him personally for Chanel campaigns that ran globally — not a designer commissioning photographs from a hired photographer, but a man who understood the camera as an instrument of authority, choosing to point it at one face, repeatedly, across the final decade of his working life.

Hudson

Lagerfeld naming Hudson Kroenig his godfather formalized, in personal terms, what the professional relationship had already established. Hudson himself appeared in Chanel runway shows as a child — a continuation of the relationship across an entire generation, something genuinely without precedent elsewhere in this book or, by most accounts, elsewhere in the industry’s documented history.

Kroenig continues to model and remains a devoted family man. The partnership with Lagerfeld was the most singular creative bond in the history of the institution it was built around. The life it made possible afterward is its own kind of record — quieter than the campaigns, but no less a part of what the relationship actually meant.

A Face That Didn’t Fit the Template

Born in Denmark in 1983, Lauridsen entered an industry in the mid-2000s largely shaped by the androgynous, lean aesthetic that had dominated the early part of the decade. His face — angular, unconventional, marked by a scar that multiple agents across his early career cited specifically as a commercial disqualifier — did not fit that template. The market disagreed with the agents, decisively and at the highest possible level.

Gucci and Dior, Simultaneously

Gucci Pour Homme required a face with authority rather than conformity. Dior Homme required the same. Lauridsen was cast for both — two of the most coveted fragrance and fashion accounts in the world, held by the same man at the same time, which echoes the simultaneous-brand-dominance pattern established earlier in this book by Mark Vanderloo, applied here a decade later to a face the industry had initially rejected outright. He held the Models.com number-one ranking for two consecutive years, and his campaign and runway credits across Gucci, Dior, Jil Sander, and Hermès represent a career built directly against the assumptions of the people who were paid, professionally, to make exactly those assumptions.

Copenhagen

Based in Copenhagen, he continues editorial and commercial work and maintains an active presence in the industry. The agencies that passed on him in the early years are not documented anywhere in the public record. The campaigns are, comprehensively, and they are the part of the story that survived.

A Two-Decade Roster

Ballou built his career through the early and mid-2000s at the level of Versace, Roberto Cavalli, Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, Dolce & Gabbana, DKNY, Hugo Boss Sport, Moschino, Emporio Armani, Perry Ellis, and Samsonite — a campaign accumulation that reflects sustained demand across multiple categories over a period when the male modeling market was competitive at every tier, not a single breakthrough moment followed by a quiet decline. His first major breakthrough was a Polo Ralph Lauren campaign. Everything after built on that foundation for two decades.

Named Twice

He was named to L’Uomo Vogue’s original Top 25 Male Models Ever list in 2012, and he is confirmed here on the basis of a career that earned that placement without the assistance of any platform, any algorithm, or any cultural moment beyond the work itself. He was ranked among the Models.com Top Icons Men alongside Mathias Lauridsen, Tyson Beckford, and Mark Vanderloo — the closest thing the industry has to an all-time merit ranking at the commercial level, and a list that puts him in direct company with three other men profiled elsewhere in this book.

He remains represented by IMG Models and Wilhelmina and continues to work — still, by every available account, the face a house calls when it wants something the camera hasn’t found in anyone else yet.

The Discovery

It holds up. A talent scout found prom photographs a teenager had posted to social media, the agency flew him to New York, and the industry responded immediately — his hunter eyes and facial symmetry became the most commercially replicated look of the entire digital era. Forbes named him the highest-paid male model in history. Guinness World Records confirmed it. Those are not soft, reputational honors. They are specific, externally verified claims, and they survive scrutiny.

A Decade at the Top

What the discovery story leaves out is what happened afterward, which is the actual case for his inclusion here. O’Pry held the Models.com number-one ranking for an extended run that no male model of his generation approached. Calvin Klein, Armani, Versace, H&M, Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger — the campaign roster built across more than a decade represents genuine, sustained commercial dominance, not a single viral moment that the industry capitalized on once and then moved past.

He appeared in Taylor Swift’s We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together video, which at the time of its release was one of the most-viewed music videos in the world — a crossover several other men in this book also achieved, through different videos, at different points in the industry’s history. The origin story was digital. The career that followed was not a fluke sustained by algorithm alone; a decade at the top of a system that discards most people within two years is its own argument, made the only way that actually counts, which is by simply continuing to be true for ten years running.

Still Working

He remains actively represented by VNY and continues to work — the longest-running proof available that a career which began as a social-media discovery can still end up measured by the same standards as everyone who came before him in this book.

Found at Twenty

Born near Marseille in 1990, Giabiconi had no modeling background whatsoever when Lagerfeld found him at twenty. The relationship that followed was singular in the history of the industry: a designer of Lagerfeld’s stature does not attach himself to one face for that long unless the face is doing something no other face can do. Giabiconi was doing exactly that, consistently, for ten years.

Two Faces, One Decade

He held the Models.com global number-one ranking for two consecutive years. Chanel. Fendi. Dolce & Gabbana. The institutional weight of his campaign credits between 2008 and Lagerfeld’s death in 2019 represents the most concentrated luxury endorsement any male model of his generation received. Lagerfeld photographed him personally, repeatedly, for Chanel campaigns that ran globally — the same parallel as Lagerfeld’s relationship with Brad Kroenig, profiled earlier in this part, though different in aesthetic register. Both relationships were decisions by Lagerfeld to own a face entirely, for the duration of what turned out to be the final decade of his working life.

Music, and Still Working

Giabiconi also released music in France during his modeling years, building an audience entirely separate from the industry that made him famous — a parallel career several other men in this book pursued in different forms, music in his case rather than real estate or wellness. He remains active on social media with a substantial following and continues to model. Found in a helicopter factory, taken to the top of the industry by one of the greatest designers who ever lived, and held there for a decade. Very few origin-to-peak trajectories in this book travel that far, that fast, or stay there that long.

Charlotte, By Way of the Dance Floor

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Mason trained as a dancer before entering the modeling industry, and that training shows in a kind of physical control that very few faces in this book share — an athlete’s discipline applied to a craft that usually rewards stillness over motion. He signed with IMG Models and moved rapidly to Chanel, walking the runway as the first Black male model to do so for the house, a moment that, by every account from inside the industry at the time, carried weight well beyond a single show.

Louis Vuitton, Under Abloh

Louis Vuitton under Virgil Abloh extended the institutional validation into the most commercially significant luxury house in the world during that specific period — a stamp of relevance that connected Mason to one of the most consequential creative directors working in menswear at the time. Five consecutive Models.com Model of the Year titles represent a consensus across multiple years of the industry’s most rigorous competitive assessment. That record was not extended. It was built from nothing, by him, in real time.

The Modern Era’s Argument

Mason closes this book deliberately. His presence here is not a gesture toward relevance or an attempt to make an otherwise historical project feel current. It is a recognition that the modern era — digital discovery, social platforms, a faster and more crowded industry than any of the men in Parts One or Two ever competed inside of — produced at least one career that belongs in any serious historical record of this industry at its highest level, judged by exactly the same standards as everyone who came before him in these pages.

He continues to work at the highest level of the industry, actively booking campaigns and runway appearances. The record this book set out to correct and complete ends, appropriately, with a man still actively adding to it.